Find and Follow Your Personal Purpose in Life

An excerpt from Go to Work and Take Your Faith Too!
by Ross West

A friend's grandparents lived and worked in Arizona during the early decades of the 1900s, just as Arizona was achieving statehood. They chose and followed a pattern for their lives that many would consider unusual. They would move to a small town and set up their business. Along with their business, however, they would establish a church and nurture it until its resources were sufficient to support a pastor of its own. The couple then would move to the next town and start the process all over again. A purpose, a mission, dominated their lives, and it included how they approached their daily work.

A purpose dominates your life and your approach to your daily work, too. That purpose determines what you value, how you act, how you relate to coworkers, and any number of other attitudes and actions. How clear is that purpose to you? How consciously have you chosen it? Is it as satisfying and all-encompassing as you would like it to be?

Many people, including people of faith, merely drift into their purpose for living or settle too soon for a purpose that is fragmented, incomplete, or otherwise fails to be worthy of their best efforts. They do this rather than choosing consciously a focused, comprehensive, fulfilling purpose for their lives, including their lives at work. Such failure to choose and focus one's purpose causes much of the frustration and dissatisfaction with their work lives that many people feel.

Recognize the Importance of the Right Purpose
A cartoon portrays two weary mountain climbers reaching the peak of their mountain. Their brief sense of elation turns quickly to disappointment as they look around them, though. They become distressed when they see on all sides of them peaks significantly higher and thus more inviting than the one they had labored so hard to climb.

Choosing the right mountain comes high on the list of things to do to get ready for mountain-climbing. Similarly, choosing the right purpose comes at the top of the list of things to do in living faith in daily work. Why is choosing the right purpose so important? If we are not climbing the right mountain, then every step, whether hard-earned or easy, just takes us farther away from our destiny, not toward it. In the same way, if we have not identified the right purpose for our lives and sought to follow it, every action at work will take us further away from that purpose.

It's hard to pick up any business magazine or business book these days and not find the words "total quality management" or the acronym TQM somewhere in it. Total quality management refers to the practice of business management that looks for better ways of doing things at work so as to maximize productivity. Rightly used, total quality management produces excellent results for all concerned-employees, employers, and customers. Really, total quality management is just the practice of good management.

Any TQM effort begins here: Determine the mission or purpose of the organization. All the rest of the principles of total quality management have to do with aligning the processes and personnel of the business with that mission or purpose. Having the right purpose is the starting point. This is the case with our personal and work lives, too. The starting point is choosing and following the right purpose.

Such a conscious commitment to the right purpose, a truly fulfilling purpose, serves us well when we make the easy choices in our work life; it's indispensable when we must make the hard choices that often come. To avoid drifting through our work life or succumbing to temptations to be less than our best, we need a clear sense of what is truly sacred to us. Knowing what is most valuable to us will help us to understand better when to risk the less valuable, including our jobs themselves, in order to hold on to the things most dear.

Moreover, without a settled sense of purpose, we are adrift, with no firm direction for life sufficient to enable us to deal effectively with the inevitable changes and challenges that occur at work. We need a settled conviction about who we are, what we value, and what our goals are. Choosing the right purpose deserves careful attention.