Answer 5 questions to find your life purpose
Adam Leipzig is a Yale graduate, who upon attending his 25th college reunion found that 80% of his classmates were unhappy. When Leipzig looked at the 20% of his classmates that were actually happy with their life, he found that they were happy because they had answered five questions about themselves and pursued that as their careers.
The five questions were:
Who are you?
What do you like to do?
Who do you do it for?
What do those people want and need from you?
How do they change as a result of what you do?
He determined that these five questions allowed people to discover their purpose in life and therefore find happiness in their life.
Leipzig explained that after answering these five questions, someone can be able to define their life by the last question alone. Such as a children’s book author’s purpose is to help children have good dreams, or a hair stylist’s purpose is to make people look and feel their best. This purpose helps to show what makes someone genuinely tick.
Leipzig’s questions made me think about my life’s purpose and my answers to those questions.
My answers in a sentence are: I like to complete research to help media viewers consume better media so that they can be more positively influenced by it and go on to positively influence society.
According to Leipzig, my purpose is to help people positively influence society. I would agree with this determination and it’s a sentence that makes me feel excited to continue my work even if sometimes it can feel like a chore. Answering these questions helped reignite my passion for my career.
These questions helped me to think about what I wanted to do. While I had already pretty much decided on my goal in life, answering these questions helped me to think about if I would be happy on the career path that I had decided.
These questions are really easy to answer and break down what people should do with their life to feel like they have a purpose. Spend five minutes thinking about your answers to these questions to determine if you will be part of the 20% of Leipzig’s class that was happy with their life or the 80% that felt like they had wasted part of their life.
Written by: Bryn Garick
Sources: TEDTalks. (2013). How to know your life purpose in 5 minutes. TEDTalks. Retrieved June 24, 2022, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVsXO9brK7M.