Two secrets to discovering your life’s task

Are you on earth to add to the swelling population or are you part of something unique? How do you navigate through life fulfilled? Let’s find the answers to these questions.

I discovered something interesting recently about finding purpose, and to understand this you need to be sold on why discovering your purpose or life’s task is necessary: 

You possess a kind of inner force that seeks to guide you toward your life’s task–what you are meant to accomplish in the time that you have to live. In childhood, this force was clear to you. It directed you toward activities and subjects that fit your natural inclinations, that sparked a curiosity that was deep and primal. In the intervening years, the force tends to fade in and out as you listen to more to parents and peers, to daily anxieties that wear away at you. This can be the source of your unhappiness -- your lack of connection to who you are and what makes you unique -- Robert Greene in Mastery. 

In childhood, your calling was clear to you

It’s possible you can’t recall everything that happened in your childhood. In psychology, it’s called  Childhood Amnesia, an inability of adults to retrieve episodic memories of events and activities that happened before the ages of two, four and 10. But high parental involvement in a child’s life and an intense mother-child relationship has resulted in adults retrieving more early childhood memories. Because of this, observant parents are more likely to note what activities or subject that pique a child’s interest and guide them accordingly.

For instance, in the Defiant Ones, a four-part biographical series about hip-hop producer and business mogul Dr Dre and his Partner, Jimmy Iovine — Verna Young, Dr Dre’s mother, described how Dre, as a child, was fascinated by a speaker box whenever it played the sounds of music. She narrated how the speaker box sparked Dre’s interest in music and sound engineering and how she saved to get Dre his first-ever audio mixer as a birthday gift.  

The audio mixer and his interest in sounds and how it works launched Dre into a beautiful career in sound engineering, music production and helped him launch a company he co-founded with Lovine, Beats Electronics (a company he sold $3 billion to Apple in 2014). 

It took me two years of my adult life, months of testing what works for me and what doesn’t, to discover what I’m fascinated by (as a child and a young adult). It helped put my career and life choices into a proper perspective. 

Try this brief experiment: See if you could remember interests or subjects you loved as a child. Do they align with your current interests as an adult? Also, review your career and interests, why did you choose them? Do they spark a desire in you?

Quit what’s not working, stick to what works 

“Extraordinary benefits also accrue to the tiny majority with the guts to quit early and refocus their efforts on something new”— Seth Godin.

Seth Godin, a marketing expert, has a book on quitting: The Dip, a little book that teaches you when to quit (and when to stick). 

In the book, he explained how quitting the wrong career we’re attracted to for the wrong reasons — money, pressure (family or societal), attention, fame—to focus on something that sparks an intense desire in us. Robert Greene calls this the Rebellion Strategy: leave what doesn’t guarantee happiness for something that brings fulfilment. 

We spend the better part of our lives working, and it’s hard to separate personal life from work life.

Besides, our survival depends on work. It’s the passport to a better life. But in the search for survival, most of us have missed the opportunity to connect to our ultimate life task. We made career and life choices based on cognitive biases such as social proof, a phenomenon that allows people to copy the actions of others (herd mentality) or authority bias, when an authority figure in your life, a parent for instance, influences your decision. 

These cognitive biases among other factors have created a generation of unfulfilled young people depressed about their career or life choices. Young people are stuck in what Seth Godin calls cul-de-sacs or dead-end more than ever. 

You work 365 days a year frustrated because nothing gets better. The work doesn’t add any value to your life, but you still show up every day at work because of the salary or pressure (family or societal). 

To survive, adopt the rebellious strategy against the systems (authority bias: parent/mentor or social proof: the society) that pressured you into the cul-de-sac. Quit and find your life’s task. 

Retrace your step to: 

1. What sparked an interest in you as a child or fascinates you as a young adult. That’s your life’s task. In his book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, Mark Manson noted that finding something intriguing in your life is the most productive use of your time and energy.  

2. You might have discovered your life’s task, but you left because of pressure (social proof or authority bias) or fear. Return to it— and if the task excites you—work to be the best at it. 

That’s it for today's newsletter. Kindly let me know what you think about this newsletter in the comment section. Please share this newsletter with your under-30 friends too. See you next week Thursday on another edition of “Thursday Transcript”

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Read the Seth Godin book I referenced earlier. It’s a small book. 70 pages-ish. Get it here for free

I’m listening to Beyonce’s “Find your way back”