When asked the question what is your purpose in life, the majority of people simply do not have an answer.

Successful people know that there is a world of difference between doing something on purpose and doing something for a purpose. The people that do things for a purpose do them better, with more passion, with more intensity, with more focus and with more success.

Determining our purpose in life begins with a thorough and complete goal-setting process. The goal setting process begins by determining our core values in life. Our core values are those things that we believe in with every fiber of who we are. These are beliefs that are not negotiable, they are the rock solid principles on which we build our life.

Those core values guide every decision and judgment we make, when we know our core values, tough decisions are made much easier. The decision either fits into one of our core values or not. In essence once we determine our core values our decisions are already made, we only need to apply those values to any question that comes up.

Once our core values are determined we can begin to set goals in our life, short range goals of perhaps only a day two up to as much as 30 days, midrange goals of 30 days to a year and long-range goals of up to 5 to 10 years.

Each of those goals should lead us to our purpose in life, once everything we do, or perhaps nearly everything we do, leads us towards our purpose in life our stress levels go down, our enthusiasm levels go up our excitement and enjoyment levels go way up.

It’s only when we’re working towards our goals and purpose in life that we are truly productive, anything else is just busy. It’s almost impossible to be happy when we’re busy but when we’ll working towards our goals for a purpose we can be happy no matter how much we have to do.

So here’s your question for the week: Do you know your purpose in life? If not, don’t just make one up, we don’t decide our purpose in life, we discover it. Discover yours and absolutely everything you do, you’ll do better!

An aside: I should write an entire blog on goal setting but here’s a couple of points: if it’s not written down it’s not a goal. If you don’t have a specific plan to achieve the goal, you won’t. Less than 5% of people have a formalized goal setting process in place! (that’s why I need to write about it)