When you look back on your past and connect the dots to realize how you are meant to serve the world, the results are incredible.  I am going to share with you how this recently worked for one of my blog readers.  A few posts ago Alex Mill answered my three questions in the comments on how he uses his time.  Here were his answers:

1.  What three things do you spend the majority of your time on during an average week day?
Creating (blog posts, visual art, other writing) Learning (reading about career advice, podcasts on selling art, etc.) and the rest gets broken up into yoga/cooking/spiritual practice (meditating and exercises.)
2.  What three things do you currently spend the majority of your time doing during a typical weekend?
The weekends are no different for me than weekdays.
3.  When you are alone in your car driving (probably to or from work), what three things do you most often think about?
How I will generate income, where I should focus more of my energy, and practicing opening up to inspiration.

I studied his answers and read over his blog (http://kindnessville.com).  From an outsider's point of view, it seemed clear that Alex was uniquely qualified to write and illustrate children's books about mindfulness.  All it took was someone to point out this simple observation and Alex was ready to start creating children's books like this world has never seen before.  Now that Alex is completely aware of his current purpose, he'll create a fantastic line of books (kind of like how Dr. Suess did, or how Steve Jobs created Apple).  It's like being "on fire" in the Nintendo NBA jambs video game.  He's focused on what he loves and ready to accomplish great things.

If you have kids, Alex's books can help you figure out your own purpose.  Since children don't need help with mindfulness, the books Alex creates will be written to help teach the adults reading them to their children (while still entertaining and reinforcing what the children already intuitively know).  Alex is driven to help adults become more authentic in their daily lives through mindfulness.

If you have kids, I suggest you to go http://kindnessville.com and get on Alex's email list.  If you already take time to read your kids stories, why not learn more about yourself in the process?

Let's take a look at Alex's story so you can see why he is uniquely qualified to write and illustrate children's books on mindfulness.  While reading his story, try to see if you can find the underlining meaning to your own life story.  In comes Alex:

"...my world was rocked after I read the first few paragraphs from my teacher's book years ago.  I was in a new age bookstore (that I didn't want to be in) with my girlfriend at the time.  I saw a book and was intrigued by the cover.  I started reading and couldn't put it down....   

...What she was saying in the book spoke to my experience EXACTLY.  Word for word.  There was an inner resonance in her words that broke through the defences I carried around with me.  The void that she was able to touch I would describe as this:


Outwardly I had everything that should make me happy: 
 

• the beautiful, kind, loving girlfriend
• the good paying job that
  allowed me time to work on my artwork
• a spacious apartment in a
  beautiful part of Philadelphia
• all the possessions I ever
  wante
• friends that cared about me and supported me

But none of this = happiness.  I felt separate from everything and everyone like there was an invisible wall between me and everything else.  Everything felt superficial and no one, including myself, seemed genuine.  I saw all of us as masks holding up "what we liked" "what we did" "what we thought" as though this WAS us.  It felt like a sad, lonely world in which I didn't understand what the point of living was.  What my (future) teacher was saying in the book shed light on how this was normal -- what the cause of it was -- and how to choose something else.

I bought that book I was reading at the behest of my girlfriend.  And I proceeded to purchase every other book my (future) teacher wrote. That was my habit and it made me smile to recognize it as such - since that was part of what I was learning from her books.)  Nothing would have made a difference for me had I not taken one small action from all I was learning in her books -- I bought a meditation cushion and began a practice of meditation. 

I can tell you that the rest paved the way to the monastery.  I noticed that the introspective work was creating more peace as well as more turmoil -- but "good turmoil."  I was looking at things that were hidden and was unwilling to look at previously.  I was also more daring and adventurous in my life than ever before with radical changes that directed me out of the blue.  At one point I sold all my belongings and traveled cross country with my girlfriend -- destination California. The plan was that I wanted to check out the monastery.  Well, it turned out that half-way into our trip I decided I wanted to spend a month there.  So my girlfriend dropped me off at the bus station in San Diego and I had hours of long travel toward Northern California where I began my monastic career.  I never left.  I had week long visits to see my family yearly and a couple visits to my girlfriend, but other than that I stayed in the monastery permanently."  - Exit Alex

Think about the reality of this story.  Can you see yourself being so moved by mindfulness that you would leave everything in your life to study it permanently for many years?  Alex did, and he did it because that was his purpose at that time in his life.  More importantly, he knew it to be his purpose, and as a result he is now in a possition to bless the world with his mindfulness cartoon books. 

What is your purpose?  What do you uniquely have to give the world?  If you're unsure, please read my last few posts (maybe for the second time) and see what pops out at you.  Learning who you are is the most important work you will ever do, so stick with it and become a rockstar like Alex Mill.

The key to starting a wildly successful business is to start your business doing what you care most about.  The tricky part is knowing yourself well enough to know what drives you.  Read my last post to find out what actions you are subconsiously driven to.  In this post we'll disect these actions to determine your (and my) highest value.

My subconcious efforts focus on finding a way to quit my current day job and replace it with a side business.  Understanding why my subconcious focus is on this goal is the key to knowing my highest value, which will lead me to the topic I should start my business around.

If you don't yet know what your subconcious efforts focus on, please click here to read and respond to my last post.  If you take the time to comment on that post, I'll take the time to do everything in my power to help you identify what your subconcious efforts focus on. 

All values come from voids.  So a good way to help identify your values is to look at your past voids.  Can you think of anything that happened to you in the past that would lead your subconcious mind to focus on what it currently is focused on? 

If nothing pops out at you right away, start writing a list of big challanges you faced throughout your life. 



For me, one of my biggest challenges was my first job out of college. I worked as a project engineer for a general contractor, building ground up commercial buildings. This contractor was great at turning and burning it's employees. I had 70 hour work weeks every week. The work load was more than any single human could ever manage in a normal work week.



Since I valued both being good at my job and the freedom to have my own life outside of work, I was stuck in a lose-lose situation. It was a horrible situation to be in. Luckily after 6 months of job hunting I found a similar job with a general contractor with much more reasonable expectations... but the damage had already been done.



I'll never forget how horrible it was to feel like a slave, having to bust my ass every day from the time I woke up until I went to bed, just to keep my job. It's a void I will always be inspired to fill. I want to help people who are stuck in a similar hell. I want to show them the real way (there are plenty of gimmicks out there that don't work) to start a success business on the side so they can give their crappy job the big middle finger.


I did move on to find a job with much more reasonable expectations and similar pay, but this void was so big in my life that it just won't go away. I'm deeply driven to help others in the same situation take control and get out.  I was lucky enough to find a better job, but that doesn't work out for everyone. The only permanent solution is to empower others to find their unique values and harness them to give their unique gift to the world through their own business.... but that's my thing.  What's yours?



What challenge created the void your subconscious actions are driving you to fill?  Share your list of the biggest challenges you have faced, along with the actions your subconscious drives you to take.   Share as much of your information as possible, and I'll do everything I can to try and help you connect the dots.  Let's try to identify the link between one of your challenges and the subconscious actions you are constantly driven towards!

Deep down inside, everyone has a unique set of values that dictate what they do on a daily basis.  Your values subconciously drive your actions, and your actions help fullfill your life's purpose.  If it wasn't for your concious decisions, you would already spend all of your time fullfilling your life's purpose. 

Unfortunately, most people make their concious decisions around what they think they "should" do.  In other words, they spend their time and concious efforts according to other people's values.  The most common reason most of us make our decisions around what we "should" do is WE DON'T KNOW WHAT WE INTERNALLY VALUE.  In this post, I'm going to help you fix that.

Not living according to your own values results in unhappiness, depression, frustration, and eventualy a mid life crises.  Simply living in alignment with your values leads to happiness, fullfillment, and a rewarding vocational carear (most likely financialy lucrative). 

After you become conciously aware of your values, the sky is the limit.  Let's pick up where we left off in last week's post with these three questions:

1.  What three things do you spend the majority of your time on during an average week day?

2.  What three things do you currently spend the majority of your time doing during a typical weekend?

3.  When you are alone in your car driving (probably to or from work), what three things do you most often think about?

If you didn't comment last week with your top three answers to these questions, please comment this week.  If you take the time to sincerely answer these questions, I'll take the time to read through and reach out to you via email in a sincere attempt to help you identify your core values.

The answers to these questions help to reveal what your subconcious self steers you toward when your concious decisions are not interferring.  You already naturaly do what you love to do.   Your task is to simply identify what it is. 

If you think it is your life's purpose to become a life coach, but you never find yourself serving others as a coach, there is a good chance coaching IS NOT your life's purpose.  If you think your life's purpose is to start your own business and earn passive income, but you havn't made substantial steps towards starting a business or earning passive income, there is a good chance owning a business and earning passive income is not your life's purpose.  If you think your life's purpose is to travel around the world, but you've never traveled, there is a good chance traveling around the world is not your life's purpose.

If the examples above are all true for you, it DOESN'T mean coaching, starting a buiness, and traveling will not play an important role in your future.  It just means these activities are not your core purpose.  They may still play a role in helping you fullfill your values, but they will be vehicles to help you get where you are going, not the destination itself.

Here are my answers to the above three questions:

1.  What three things do you spend the majority of your time on during an average week day?
Working on the side business I am trying to start at the time.
Organizing my construction site (my day job is a superintendent).
Listening to audio books and podcasts about starting new businesses (while driving to and from work).
2.  What three things do you currently spend the majority of your time doing during a typical weekend?
Spend time with my wife and kids doing whatever they want to do.
Manage my rental properties by keeping up on the accounting, collecting rent, or managing maintenance items.
Read a book related to self development.
3.  When you are alone in your car driving (probably to or from work), what three things do you most often think about?
Different possibilities for profitable side businesses.
Ideas to help out friends and family with their businesses.
I play out different economic senarious in my head and analyze how they will effect different investments and business types.

If you read through my answers you will see a common thread.  My subconcious efforts focus on finding a way to quit my current day job and replace it with a side business.  Post your answers below and I'll help you identify what your subconcious efforts focus on.

After we understand what our subconcious efforts focus on, we can start to disect why, which will lead us to our highest core value.  I'll disect my own highest value and show you how to disect yours in next week's post.

If you are uninspired by your job and want more out of life, I feel your pain. At one time I was in a job that was so bad it felt like indentured slavery! I had to work 70 hour weeks to just barely get my work done.   I've moved on to a much more tolerable day job, but deep down inside I know there is still a much more meaningful way to spend my time and energy. This post is all about how I am making it happen and how you can do the same.

By the time you finish reading and responding to this post, you'll be light years closer to quiting your job than you are right now, so lets get to it.

Most people focus on how they don't like their current situation.  All this will do is bring them more of their current situation.   Most people wake up every Monday morning and dread the week to come.  They count down the days of the week through Wednesday hump day until Friday afternoon finaly hits and their sacred weekend begins!

You'll always get more of what you think about, good or bad.  In other words, the universe will give you what is on your mind.  If you don't believe in the law of attraction, and you would rather think of it in more concrete tems, consider the following; You'll only bring about what you plan about, and you'll only plan about what you think about, therefore, you'll only bring about what you think about. 

If you spend your time thinking about what you DON'T want, you're not using your time productively to think of creative ideas to get what you DO want.  You need to spend time thinking about what you want to acheive so you can come up with a plan and start to take productive action towards acheivement.

The concept is inherently obvious and insanely simple to understand, but unforetunately most of us don't know ourselves well enough to know what we want.  So instead we spend our time and thoughts complaining about our current situation, resulting in perpetuating more of the same.

If you want to replace the time you currently spend at your uninspiring job, you first need to find a way to productively contribute to society while doing what you love.  The problem for most people is they don't know themselves well enough to know what they love.  If you don't know what you love, you can't even begin to build a business around it.  So instead you become frustrated and feel stuck in your current job. 

So let's start working on the first problem you need to tackle: Figuring out what you love.  It's the first step in leading an inspired life, and unforetunately most people skip it.  It's a simple task, but it's far from easy.  Getting to know yourself is hard work. So while the following task may sound simple, understand you will have to go through it several times over several days to get the honest results you need.

In the comments below, write down your top 3 answers to the following 3 questions:

1.  What three things do you spend the majority of your time on during an average week day?

2.  What three things do you currently spend the majority of your time doing during a typical weekend?

3.  When you are alone in your car driving (probably to or from work), what three things do you most often think about?

Take your time and try to think of real examples where you have spent your time doing or thinking about the things in your response.  I'll explain the importance to your answers and continue with the process in next week's post.  We'll continue to explore how you can start a business doing what you really love.

Note - If you take the time to think through the three questions above and leave your responses in the comments, I will take the time to read through your responses and help you one on one through email to identify what you love.