How To Find Your Purpose As A Man

Everything in this blog post was learned from an educational video from a YouTuber named Hamza about how purpose works. However, I do add on some points of my own in this blog post that extend on Hamza's argument and can provide extra insight on this topic. The video will be linked here, and I highly recommend you watch it: 

How ‘purpose’ works by Hamza:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZUQgMpFxIM

 

What Does Purpose Mean?

In Hamza's video, he defined purpose as "the thing that you are currently obsessed about if we took away all distractions, all stimulation; everything." For example, this could be your obsession for the gym and your fitness goals or your obsession for a business that you want to grow and make successful. A bad example, but still technically a purpose, is if you are addicted to video games and are super honed in on getting that 99 Cooking on Old School Runescape. Not the best example, but one made just to get my point across.

Whatever it is, it's the subject that all of your energy and thoughts are focused on if we strip away all distractions and stimulation. These distractions can range from video games, social gatherings like parties, drug addictions, porn addiction, etc. Basically, all the bad habits that pull you back and make your life worse every time you engage in them. To really focus on our purpose, we need to cut out those bad habits in order to focus on our real purpose. However, in the next section, I will explain how purpose works.

 

How Does Purpose Work? (Purpose Layers)

Deep down, we all have a core purpose that we want to fulfill. However, this purpose is a true mystery and nobody really knows what their true purpose is. Perhaps it could be the primitive desire to reproduce and expand our species across the Universe. Whatever it is, most people don't know what it is unless they go through intense spiritual and mental training through intense periods of meditation and thinking.

Although we may not know our true and core purpose, we have secondary purposes that we can definitely define. These are called purpose layers. These purpose layers are secondary purposes aside from your core purpose and are essentially other purposes that we want to fulfill at the moment. You can think of them as your current goals. Examples of purpose layers could be your journey to losing 100 lbs, reaching 100,000 subscribers on YouTube, or earning $10,000 a month. 

Whatever it is, and assuming that it is a good goal that can fuel your existence, we want to focus on one single purpose layer and use as much of our thoughts and energy on it as possible. To facilitate this process, we need to cut out the bad habits and instant gratifications.

But in the case that we fulfill our current purpose layer, we peel that purpose layer back and move onto the next purpose layer as if we were peeling a banana skin to reach the fruit inside. The fruit is metaphorically your true purpose and you reach it by peeling back each purpose layer. This concept will be more discussed on a later section, but we must now discuss how we can discover our purpose layer in the case that we don't know what it is. 

 

But How Do We Find Our Purpose?

If you are a man and are living and breathing, then you have a purpose. Basically, no matter who you are, you have a purpose no matter how much you think that you don't have one. In the case that you don't know what your purpose is, I believe that your purpose is somewhere deep down in your subconscious, and it is your job to bring it out. However, it is extremely difficult to do that in our modern world of distractions and stimulation in an overstimulated world with flashy lights, social media, pinging sound effects, and overindulgence in instant gratification.

To bring your purpose out of your subconscious, you must force yourself to cut off all distractions and instant gratifications. Just a forewarning, though, it will be extremely difficult and something that you most likely haven't done before, but it will be extremely worth it. 

 

The Method To Bring Out Our Purpose

To bring out your purpose layers from your subconscious, first put your phone or electronic or any source of instant gratification in another room. Once you are alone in a room with nothing to distract you, pull out a pen and paper and let your brain think. Your brain will start randomly throwing thoughts about anything, and your job is to write onto the paper the first things that come up in your mind. Eventually you will get to a point where you peeled back all the BS in your mind, allowing you to get to your purpose layer in your mind. Write it down. Now you have your purpose layer.

 

Keep in mind, this process will take several hours if you are especially doomed and have been plagued with instant gratification for a long time, but trust me, it will be extremely worth it. But now that we have our purpose layer, we will discuss in the next section on how to fulfill that purpose layer.

Fully Align Your Life To Your Purpose Layer

For our now recovered purpose layer, we want to align 100% of our thoughts and energy and attention into it. That means cutting out absolutely all distractions and stimulation. 

In order to cut out distractions and stimulation, we need to make sacrifices. This means to stop indulging in the things that make us feel good, but make our lives worse. For the video-game addicted guy who wants to get their studies up and get that diploma and get that dream job, he needs to make a sacrifice to stop playing videos games so he can focus on his studies. For the fat guy trying to lose weight, their sacrifice needs to be quitting junk food and replacing it with a healthier diet filled with fruits, vegetables, meats, and nuts so that they can get a healthier body.

 

Despite your efforts to make sacrifices, you will fail many times. The quitters who never seen any success quit at the first failure that they run into. The successful keep pushing after they meet their first failure. 

Basically, to see success, you must keep trying to implement the healthy habits of eating cleaner and playing less video games so that you can become successful with your healthy body and fancy new job. But once you have stopped all of your bad habits, you can now reserve 100% of your brain and energy to your purpose, allowing for you to attain maximum satisfaction and fulfillment in your life. 

To actually start doing the work in cases where your purpose layer may require intense work, you must implement a concept called deep work, which indicates that you perform work in an intense flow state, allowing you to perform work at your maximum efficiency, but this topic will be discussed in another blog post another day. In any case, we will discuss what happens when you complete your purpose layer in the next section.

What Happens When You Complete Your Purpose Layer?

Let's imagine this scenario where you finally reach fulfill your purpose layer. For example, you could be a YouTuber that finally reached that 100,000 subscriber goal. It feels amazing! It feels great! You feel on top of the world! But only for a few minutes. Your back to normal again after those few minutes. What happened? You worked so hard for those months and years just to get a few minutes of a high? This is what happens to us as men when we achieve something and fulfill our current purpose layer. It feels good for a little bit, but then we are back to normal. 

It is super anti-climatic and boring, but it is just how things are. As soon as we complete our current purpose layer, it's onto the next one. For you that just got 100,000 subscribers, your brain is already onto the next purpose layer of reaching 250,000 subscribers. This is the process that happens when you are a healthy and ambitious man.

But what if your brain automatically doesn't click to the next purpose layer? For people that have completed all of their purpose layers, these people are likely to pass away because they don't have anything to live for. Previously, I discussed that you would discover your true purpose after peeling back all purpose layers, but it seems most people pass away, so I suppose that the true purpose is not extremely significant and our purpose layers are what actually keep us going. 

In any case, people that completed all of their purpose layers are most likely to be old people, so don't worry too much if you're not that old yet. Besides that, I will discuss in the next sub-section of this section of what happens when you don't work on your purpose layer whether you know of it or not.

Lack Of Purpose Leads To Depression

What happens when you don't work on your purpose layer? Well, you will get depressed and find no reason to live. Working on our purpose layers fuels our existence, so it should make sense that when people do instant gratifications like video games and drugs instead of working on their purpose layer, then they feel depressed and find no reason to live.

These same men who don't work on their purpose layer go and search for anti-depressants to fix their depression. What is some pill that temporarily increases your serotonin levels going to do for you long term? If anything, it will only make your mind even more screwed up as now you have to rely on a pill to get you happy. 

What really works instead is to go and focus on your purpose layer. Although working on your purpose layer is a lot more difficult than hopping on League of Legends and playing some ranked matches, doing the hard things results in improving your life. In fact, this is a concept called delayed gratification where you do something right now that may feel unpleasant, but you get the feeling of gratification after you performed the hard task.

I can guarantee that doing the hard work for your purpose layer is a far greater satisfaction and reason for existence in your life than indulging in instant gratifications that make you feel good now, but feel worse afterwards. I swear that doing hard work is the cure to depression.

Either way, the next section will extend on the previous sub-section and will discuss what you will have to do when you change purpose layers.

 

 

You Will Have To Change Everything 

To extend on the topic of what to do after you a complete a purpose layer, let's say that your purpose layer changes abruptly one day. However, this new purpose layer is completely different from your previous purpose layer. I detail an example from Hamza's video of what happens when you find this new purpose layer.

In Hamza's case, his original purpose layer was to grow his YouTube channel, but after doing YouTube for a while, he decided to go off into the mountains and train as a martial artist to get to his optimal athletic potential. Hamza was ready to change everything at a moment's notice. He fired his entire editing crew and was ready to move on from YouTube and become a martial artist. But this was not the end of it. He then abruptly decided to go back to his YouTube channel and decided on making long guides to change your life. Doing YouTube again, he decided to move back home with his parents and commit everything to these guides. 

Although these changes weren't as abrupt as one second to another and were done over months and months of journaling, he decided to change his purpose layers from one moment to another and changed everything about his life to maximize the efficiency of his new purpose layers. Applying this scenario to ourselves, we need to be willing to change everything upon a moment's notice. This includes moving to a new location or cutting communications with people. In the case for cutting relationships, though, you want to end your relationships with people on good terms, otherwise those bad endings will come back to get you later. To refer on how to better your relationships with people, I recommend the book "How to win friends and influence people" by Dale Carnegie.

 

Summary

• Purpose is defined by the thing that we are currently obsessed over if we took away all distractions. 
• We have multiple purpose layers that act as secondary purposes. Our goal is to peel them all back to reach the fruit, which is the core purpose.
  
• When we complete our current purpose layer, the feeling of accomplishment lasts for a few moments, but then we are onto the next purpose layer.
• When people completed all of their purpose layers, they pass away.
• When people don't work on their purpose layers, they get depressed and find no reason to live.
• When we move to a purpose layer that is completely different from our previous purpose layer, we must be completely willing to change everything in order to fulfill our lives.

Now go out there and fulfill your purpose.