1. In pursuit of your purpose
2. In search of your purpose
3. In limbo, going with the flow

But wait? What's Purpose?

Purpose is one's reason for being.

If you're confused a more quantifiable definition of purpose is what I call a lighthouse.

Formal Definition: A lighthouse is a beacon that guides every maritime pilot to a destination.

In life, it's a set of things you need to understand about yourself in order to live a maximized and intentional life.

1. Your Why
   1. What drives you to take every step despite all these factors in life preventing you from progressing?
2. Your Vision
   1. Using all your senses, what does an ideal state of life look like for you?
3. Your Mission
   1. If you were a superhero grounded in reality, bounded by the laws of this world, what superpowers will you harness to save the world from a villain?
      1. Superpowers - Knowledge , Skills, and Experience
      2. World - The domain to which you want to add value to
      3. Villain - The problem within your chosen world that you want to solve
4. Your Core Values
   1. What kind of person do you aspire to become?

Your purpose is defined solely by you and not by anyone else. It must be a vision true to your core, molded by your hands, and not a vision shaped by the pressures of your peers.

In Pursuit of Your Purpose

Pursuing your purpose means you've done enough self-work to know who you are and what you desire to achieve in life.

This is a moment of liberation because making a decision is simply a question: Am I going closer to or further away from my envisioned purpose?

Suddenly, quantifying progress in life gets easy like OKRs and KPIs in corporate performance measurement.

Like cooking a new dish, you don't exactly know how it'll turn out, but you can do your best to deliver the best result: a fulfilled purpose.

You may miss it for a few or many more cooking tries, but you can always gather more ingredients to try again.

In Search of Your Purpose

If you don't know what you want, it's totally fine! As long as you're in the process of finding out.

The process of finding your purpose is usually one of two ways: Seeking and Eliminating.

Although one can argue that they're fundamentally the same, they're actually very different in terms of what frame of mind you would have in finding your purpose.

Seeking means you are finding your purpose by looking for that perfect "fit", but this pursuit of perfection breeds a fear of pursuing the wrong thing.

Eliminating on the other hand also means you're finding your purpose, but you do it by looking for the things that don't quite "fit" to eliminate enough of them until you can determine what you are drawn to doing.

Instead of breeding fear when Seeking, Eliminating incentivizes a pursuit of discomfort and allows for a more open and wide effort to find your purpose.

In Limbo, Going with the Flow

If you aren't in the pursuit of your purpose or in constant search of your purpose, you will perpetually be at the mercy of your current reality.

Living a life driven by the whims and woes of life.

A state where you've become so oblivious to your pattern of living that life is nothing but a mindless passage of time.

Like a gear in a car fulfilling its purpose with absolute diligence, but never driving the car's direction.

Conclusion

Among all three, "In Limbo, Going with the Flow" is the poorest use of time you could ever do.

If you knew that you only had an average life span of 60 - 70 years, would you spend any moment of it living in limbo?

So if you want to make sure you're making good use of time either be in constant pursuit of your purpose or in search of your purpose.

Unlike "Going with the Flow", either of which is an intentional and wonderful use of our finite resource — time.