Finding Your Why

Money, power, status, and intimacy - these are four of the carrots that life dangles in front of us as we run ourselves ragged trying to make them our own.  Through identifying what it is that we think we want and working towards our core motivations, we spend our days charging towards the finish line instead of skipping in circles.  The first step in achieving personal success is taking the time that we each deserve to discover what it is that we really want. What drives you to wake up in the morning and push yourself to the breaking point by the end of every day?  When you look at your life twenty, thirty, or forty years from now, what tangible milestones can you achieve that will make you feel as if you have overcome the potential failures and setbacks that separate the winners from the losers?  Once you know what you want, you can stop floundering in the sea of what-ifs and start devising a conscious roadmap to get to where you want to be.

While identifying the core motivations that drive each one of us is undoubtedly the starting point in living a life of intent, the problem with structuring our lives solely around our core motivations is that we will never have enough. Even if every day we are richer and more powerful than we were yesterday, there will always be more money out there that we can obtain and more aimless wanderers that we can turn into our followers. After we reach a certain benchmark, what used to be a source of healthy motivation morphs into a leech that starts eating away at us, consuming every part of our being.  Instead of charging towards the finish line, we get back on the carousel with all of the other lost wanderers who never knew what they wanted in the first place. 

If we work hard enough and sacrifice enough of our wellbeing to capture the carrots that life dangles in front of us, we may achieve a certain level of success and find ourselves in the midst of a lifestyle that seems too good to be true.  Too many people spend their whole lives devising a design plan that will help them to reach their goals, only to reach the finish line and find themselves more unfilled and unhappy than ever.  Even arguably worse than feeling unaccomplished and unsuccessful altogether is coming to the realization that what you thought you wanted all along never held the potential to make you truly happy in the first place. So while core motivators like money, power, status, and intimacy may prove to be efficient benchmarks of success – they are not a measure of personal utility after a certain point.

There is only one way to find the level of personal fulfillment that is deeper than the intangible green light – and that comes with searching deep within ourselves to find our inner why.  If there were no expectations weighing you down and you could wake up tomorrow and do anything, or be anyone – what would you do? Who would you be?  There is something deeper than the external motivators that tempt us, and that is the inner fire that burns within.  There is something greater that each of us feels destined to accomplish, a mark that we want to leave on the world.  Beyond uncovering our selfish motivations, we need to dig deep within our hearts and minds and find the one thing that makes us feel like we are on top of the world – not temporarily, but indefinitely.  While swimming in a bathtub of hundred dollar bills may make us feel drunk on champagne, the dollars are spent and the feeling fades.  And then what?  We make more money and buy more champagne, pulling us into an endless wheel of temporary satisfaction.  In order to bring meaning and fulfillment to our lives, we need to let our deeper why drive our day-to-day actions.  We need to let our inner passion run wild, and find the one thing that truly makes us feel alive.  While a certain level of money, power, status, and intimacy may give us the foundation to fulfill our greater why, it is not a change in flight class but rather a change in mindset that is going to make all the difference.

A few months back, I lost myself – I was living the life that I thought would take me one step closer to fulfilling my core motivations; but when I looked in the mirror, I couldn’t recognize myself anymore.  The more that I leaned over the sea of people and reached out for that green light that seemed within my reach, the more that I came to realize that the tangible accomplishments that I was en route to achieving were not going to make me happy. Instead, they were physically and mentally tearing me apart.  I reached a breaking point, and I knew that I needed to make a change.  As afraid as I was to sit on the expectations that constrained me and put the car in reverse, I knew that going forward in the same direction only meant that one day I would end up running in circles. 

I took a step back, and I spent the time that I needed to reconnect with my greater why. I asked myself the types of questions that I asked you above – out of everything that I have been exposed to in this world so far, what is the one thing that makes me feel the most fulfilled?  When am I genuinely happy living in the moment as opposed to sitting at my desk wishing the day away?  After weeks of reading books, talking to friends in different industries, and staring down at a blank page, I found a place within myself that brought me closer to my greater why.  I realized that while money, status, power, and intimacy are all a part of my roadmap for success, I am truly the happiest when I am mentoring young individuals.  I want to be a positive female role model to help young men and women to find their own sense of motivation, and to help them carve out their own paths to achieve the impossible.  I feel fulfilled when I am creating – when I find a way to build something out of nothing, and I can impact the lives of people around me as a result.

Finding your inner why does not mean that you should throw your core motivations overboard and live your life as a free-for-all.  It simply means that you need to align your core motivations with your deeper why.  For me, that means using the power that I am working to obtain to inspire the lives of those around me, and using the money that I am working to earn to solve problems and create things that can change the world.  Some people will search their entire lives in attempt to find that one thing that will truly make them happy; but a true life mission or deeper sense of purpose comes in different shapes and forms for different people.  The most important thing to acknowledge is that more often than not, your inner why is not going to fall into your lap.  You need to actively commit to living a life of fulfillment and go out and find it yourself.  For months, you may look in the mirror and see a monster, a person that is unrecognizable – but one day when you look in the mirror, you will see your reflection staring back at you.  And when you do, you will know that you are on your way to living not only a life of success, but a life of fulfillment – and once you get a glimpse of how that can change you, you will never look back.