Page 118 - 100 Ways to Motivate Yourself

We’ve all heard the stories of a diminutive mother who, seeing that her small

child was trapped, lifted a tremendously heavy object, such as a car, so the child
could be freed. When asked to repeat the superhuman feat later, of course the
woman couldn’t do it. Being a single father has put me in touch with the
dramatic connection between purpose and energy. If I am cooking something,
for example, and out of the corner of my eye I can see flames emerging from the
kitchen, it is amazing how fast I can move from the living room into the kitchen.
Crisis creates instant purpose, which creates instant energy. When our purpose is
great, so is our strength and energy.

“But, I don’t know what my purpose is,” a lot of people tell me, as if
someone forgot to tell them what it is. Those people may wait forever to be told
how to live and what to live for.

There can only be two reasons why you don’t know your purpose: 1) you

don’t talk to yourself; and 2) you don’t know where purpose comes from. You
think purpose comes from outside yourself instead of from within. Purposeful
people know how to go deep into their own spirit and talk to themselves about
why they exist, and what they want to do with the gift of life.

“Only human beings have come to a point where they no longer know why
they exist,” said the Lakota shaman Lame Deer. “They don’t use their brains and
they have forgotten the secret knowledge of their bodies, their senses, or their
dreams.”

Lame Deer is not optimistic about what the future holds for people who live
without purpose. “They don’t use the knowledge the spirit has put into every one
of them,” he says. “They are not even aware of this, and so they stumble along
blindly on the road to nowhere—a paved highway that they themselves bulldoze
and make smooth so that they can get faster to the big empty hole that they’ll
find at the end, waiting to swallow them up. It’s a quick, comfortable
superhighway, but I know where it leads. I’ve seen it. I’ve been there in my
vision and it makes me shudder to think about it.”

Purpose can be built, strengthened, and made more inspiring every day. We
are totally responsible for our own sense of purpose. We can go inside our own
spirit and create it, or not. The energy of our lives is wholly dependent on how

much purpose we’re willing to create.