How to Discover Your Life Purpose in About 20 Minutes

How do you discover your real purpose in life? I’m not talking about your job, your daily responsibilities, or even your long-term goals. I mean the real reason why you’re here at all — the very reason you exist.
Perhaps you’re a rather nihilistic person who doesn’t believe you have a purpose and that life has no meaning. Doesn’t matter. Not believing that you have a purpose won’t prevent you from discovering it, just as a lack of belief in gravity won’t prevent you from tripping. All that a lack of belief will do is make it take longer, so if you’re one of those people, just change the number 20 in the title of this blog entry to 40 (or 60 if you’re really stubborn). Most likely though if you don’t believe you have a purpose, then you probably won’t believe what I’m saying anyway, but even so, what’s the risk of investing an hour just in case?
Here’s a story about Bruce Lee which sets the stage for this little exercise. A master martial artist asked Bruce to teach him everything Bruce knew about martial arts. Bruce held up two cups, both filled with liquid. “The first cup,” said Bruce, “represents all of your knowledge about martial arts. The second cup represents all of my knowledge about martial arts. If you want to fill your cup with my knowledge, you must first empty your cup of your knowledge.”

How to Decide When to End a Long-term Relationship

August 15th, 2005 by Steve Pavlina

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Relationships are among of the most complex aspects of our lives, particularly long-term relationships such as marriage. Your relationships can elevate you to new heights or drag you down into the dumps.
But what if you’re somewhere in the middle?
What if your relationship is pretty good, like a 7 on a scale of 1 to 10? Should you stay, openly committing to that relationship for life? Or should you leave and look for something better, something that could become even better?
This is the dreadful state of ambivalence. You simply aren’t sure one way or the other. Maybe what you have is good enough and you’d be a fool to abandon it in search of a new relationship you may never find. Or maybe you’re seriously holding yourself back from finding a truly fulfilling relationship that would serve you well the rest of your life. Tough call.
Fortunately, there’s an excellent book that provides an intelligent process for overcoming relationship ambivalence. It’s called Too Good to Leave, Too Bad to Stay by Mira Kirshenbaum. I read this book many years ago, and it completely changed how I think about long-term relationships.
First, the book points out the wrong way to make this decision. The wrong way is to use a balance-scale approach, attempting to weigh the pros and cons of staying vs. leaving. Of course, that’s what everyone does. Weighing the pros and cons seems logical, but it doesn’t provide you with the right kind of information you need to make this decision. There will be pros and cons in every relationship, so how do you know if yours are fatal or tolerable or even wonderful? The cons tell you to leave, while the pros tell you to stay. Plus you’re required to predict future pros and cons, so how are you going to predict the future of your relationship? Who’s to say if your problems are temporary or permanent?
Kirshenbaum’s solution is to dump the balance-scale approach and use a diagnostic approach instead. Diagnose the true status of your relationship instead of trying to weigh it on a scale. This will provide you the information you need to make an intelligent decision and to know precisely why you’re making it. If you’re ambivalent, it means your relationship is sick. So discovering the precise nature of the disease seems an intelligent place to begin.
In order to perform a relationship diagnosis, the author offers a series of 36 yes/no questions to ask yourself. Each question is explained very thoroughly with several pages of text. In fact, the diagnostic procedure is essentially the whole book.
Each question is like passing your relationship through a filter. If you pass the filter, you proceed to the next question. If you don’t pass the filter, then the recommendation is that you end your relationship. In order to achieve the recommendation that you should stay together, you must pass through all 36 filters. If even one filter snags you, the recommendation is to leave.
This isn’t as brutal as it sounds though because most of these filters will be very easy for you to pass. My guess is that out of the 36 questions, less than a third will require much thought. Hopefully you can pass filters like, “Does your partner beat you?” and “Is your partner leaving the country for good without you?” without much trouble. If not, you don’t need a book to tell you your relationship is going downhill.
The author’s recommendations are based on observing the post-decision experiences of multiple couples who either stayed together or broke up after suffering from a state of ambivalence related to one of the 36 questions. The author then watched how those relationships turned out in the long run. Did the person making the stay-or-leave decision feel s/he made the correct choice years later? If the couple stayed together, did the relationship blossom into something great or decline into resentment? And if they broke up, did they find new happiness or experience everlasting regret over leaving?
I found this concept extremely valuable, like being able to turn the page of time to see what might happen. The recommendations are based on the author’s observations and her professional opinion, so I don’t recommend you take her advice blindly. However, I personally found all of her conclusions utterly sensible and didn’t find any surprises. I doubt you’ll be terribly surprised to read that a relationship with a drug user is virtually doomed to failure. But what about a relationship with someone you don’t respect? What about a long-distance relationship? Or a relationship with a workaholic who makes 10x your income? Would you like to know how such relationships tend to work out if the couple stays together vs. if they break up?
Kirshenbaum explains that where a break-up is recommended, it’s because most people who chose to stay together in that situation were unhappy, while most people who left were happier for it. So long-term happiness is the key criteria used, meaning the happiness of the individual making the stay-or-leave decision, not the (ex-)partner.
If you’re facing a “too good to leave, too bad to stay” dilemma, I highly recommend this book. You’ll breeze through most of the filters, but you’ll probably hit a few that snag you and really make you think. But I recommend this book not just for people who aren’t sure about the status of their relationship but also those with healthy relationships who want to make it even better. This book will help you diagnose the weak points of your relationship that could lead to break-up and allow you to consciously attend to them.
Here are some diagnostic points from the book you may find valuable (these are my summaries, not the author’s exact words):

1. If God or some divine being told you it was OK to leave your relationship, would you feel relieved that you could finally leave? If your religion is the only reason you’re still together, your relationship is already long dead. Drop the self-torturing beliefs and choose happiness. Living together physically but not in your heart isn’t going to fool any divine being anyway, nor is it likely to fool anyone else around you. Leave the hypocrisy behind, and take off.
2. Are you able to get your needs met in the relationship without too much difficulty? If it takes too much effort to get your needs met, then your relationship is doing you more harm than good. Leave.
3. Do you genuinely like your partner, and does your partner seem to genuinely like you? If you don’t mutually like each other, you don’t belong together.
4. Do you feel a unique sexual attraction to your partner? If there’s no spark, there’s no point in staying.
5. Does your partner exhibit any behavior that makes the relationship too difficult for you to stay in, and do you find your partner is either unwilling or incapable of changing? Results matter far more than intentions. If your partner behaves in a way that’s intolerable to you, then permanent change is a must, or you need to leave. Example: “Quit smoking for good in 30 days, or I’m gone.” Trying to tolerate the intolerable will only erode your self-esteem, and you’ll see yourself as stronger in the past than in the present.
6. Do you see yourself when you look in your partner’s eyes? A metaphor… if you don’t sense a strong compatibility with your partner, you’re better off with someone else.
7. Do you and your partner each respect each other as individuals? No mutual respect = time to leave.
8. Does your partner serve as an important resource for you in a way that you care about? If your partner does little to enhance your life and you wouldn’t lose anything important to you by leaving, then leave. You’ll break even by being on your own and gain tremendously by finding someone else who is a resource to you.
9. Does your relationship have the demonstrated capacity for forgiveness? If you can’t forgive each other’s transgressions, then resentment will gradually replace love. Leave.
10. Do you and your partner have fun together? A relationship that’s no fun is dead. Leave.
11. Do you and your partner have mutual goals and dreams for your future together? If you aren’t planning to spend your future together, something’s terribly wrong. Take off.

These questions drive home the point that a relationship should enhance your life, not drain it. At the very least, you should be happier in the relationship than outside it. Even if a break-up leads to a messy divorce with complex custody arrangements, Kirshenbaum points out that in many situations, that can still lead to long-term happiness whereas staying in a defunct relationship almost surely prevents it.
Some of the diagnostic points might seem overly harsh in terms of recommending leaving in situations you might find salvageable. A relationship, however, requires the effort and commitment of both partners. One person can’t carry it alone. Even though you might come through with a miraculous save (such as by turning around an abusive relationship), such attempts are usually doomed to failure, and even where they succeed, they may take such a tremendous toll that you ultimately feel they weren’t worth the effort. You could be much happier in a new relationship (or living alone) instead of investing so much time trying to save a relationship that’s dragging you down. You’ll do a lot more good giving yourself to someone who’s more receptive to what you have to offer and who genuinely appreciates you for it. If you’re spending your relationship fighting resistance more than sharing love, you’re probably better off letting it go and embracing a relationship that will provide greater mutual rewards for less work.
You may find it revealing to apply these diagnostic questions to a broader set of human relationships, such as your relationships with your boss and co-workers. Perhaps you can skip the sexual attraction one… but mutual respect, fun, shared goals, tolerable behavior, getting your needs met, etc. all apply perfectly well to career-oriented relationships. For example, if your boss avoids you when you try to discuss your future with the company, I’d say that’s a very bad sign for one of you.
Don’t confuse the question of whether or not you should leave your current relationship with how you might find a new relationship. If it’s clear that your current relationship should end, then end it. Once you’re on your own again, then you can (re)develop the skills needed to attract a new partner. It’s unlikely you’ll be in a place to assess your chances of entering a new relationship while you’re still in one. For one, everyone around you will perceive you as unavailable while you’re still in a relationship, so you won’t be able to get a clear sense of where you stand until you’re free of that.
A proper diagnosis may also convince you that your relationship is indeed too good to leave. That situation may last your entire life, or it may change at some point. You can’t control all the variables. But at least you’ll have a method for deciding if you can commit to your relationship in the present moment or if you should be making plans to end it.
In any relationship, choose at the very least to achieve your own happiness.

How to Get Up Right Away When Your Alarm Goes Off

April 25th, 2006 by Steve Pavlina

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When your alarm wakes you up in the morning, is it hard for you to get up right away?  Do you find yourself hitting the snooze button and going right back to sleep?
That used to be part of my daily awakening ritual too.  When my alarm would blare its infernal noise, I’d turn the damned thing off right away.  Then under the cloak of that early morning brain fog, I’d slowly ponder whether or not I should actually get up:
It’s nice and warm under the covers.  If I get up, it’s going to be cold.  That won’t be too pleasant.
Oh, I really should get up now.  C’mon legs… move.  Go, legs, go.  Hmmm… that isn’t how I move my legs, is it?  They don’t seem to be listening to me.
I should go to the gym.  Yeah.  Hmmm… I don’t really feel like working out right now though.  I haven’t even had breakfast.  Maybe I should have a muffin first.  Banana nut.  Now that’s a good muffin.
Maybe I’m trying to get myself up too early.  I’m still sleepy, aren’t I?  Maybe getting up with an alarm is unnatural.  Won’t I function better with more sleep?
I don’t have to get up right this minute, do I?  Surely I can relax another five minutes or so.  The world isn’t going to end if I don’t get up right now.
I’ll bet my wife is toasty warm right now.  She told me she hates it when I try to snuggle her at 6am, but so what…  she loves me enough to forgive me, right?  I know… I’ll start massaging her back and shoulders first.  She can’t resist a good massage, even so early in the morning.  Then I’ll transition to a head scratching.  Yeah, that’ll do it.  And then slide right into the spoon position.  Won’t that be a pleasant way to start the day?
[ Scootch... scootch... Zzzzzzzz ]
Two hours later…
Me:  What time is it?  I don’t even remember the alarm going off.  That was a good snuggle though.  Oh well, guess I’ll have to skip exercise today.
Wife:  Why do you keep setting your alarm if you aren’t going to get up when it goes off?
Me:  Oh, did you think that was my wake-up alarm?  It’s actually my snuggle alarm.
OK, so I wasn’t really intending for it to be a snuggle alarm.  I had intended to get up when it went off, but my foggy brain kept negotiating me right back to sleep.
Fast forward to present day…
My alarm goes off sometime between 4:00 and 5:00am… never later than 5:00am, even on weekends and holidays.  I turn off the alarm within a few seconds.  My lungs inflate with a deep breath of air, and I stretch my limbs out in all directions for about two seconds.  Soon my feet hit the floor, and I find myself getting dressed while my wife snoozes on.  I go downstairs to grab a piece of fruit, pop into my home office to catch up on some emails, and then it’s off to the gym at 5:15.
But this time there’s no voice inside my head debating what I should do.  It’s not even a positive voice this time — it’s just not there.  The whole thing happens on autopilot, even before I feel fully awake mentally.  I can’t say it requires any self-discipline to do this every morning because it’s a totally conditioned response.  It’s like my conscious mind is just along for the ride while my subconscious controls my body.  When my alarm goes off each morning, I respond just like Pavlov’s dogs.  It would actually be harder for menot to get up when my alarm goes off.
So how do you go from scenario one to scenario two?
First, let’s consider the way most people tackle this problem — what I consider the wrong way.
The wrong way is to try using your conscious willpower to get yourself out of bed each morning.  That might work every once in a while, but let’s face it — you’re not always going to be thinking straight the moment your alarm goes off.  You may experience what I call the fog of brain.  The decisions you make in that state won’t necessarily be the ones you’d make when you’re fully conscious and alert.  You can’t really trust yourself… nor should you.
If you use this approach, you’re likely to fall into a trap.  You decide to get up at a certain time in advance, but then you undo that decision when the alarm goes off.  At 10pm you decide it would be a good idea to get up at 5am.  But at 5am you decide it would be a better idea to get up at 8am.  But let’s face it — you know the 10pm decision is the one you really want implemented… if only you could get your 5am self to go along with it.
Now some people, upon encountering this conundrum, will conclude that they simply need more discipline.  And that’s actually somewhat true, but not in the way you’d expect.  If you want to get up at 5am, you don’t need more discipline at 5am.  You don’t need better self-talk.  You don’t need two or three alarm clocks scattered around the room.  And you don’t need an advanced alarm that includes technology from NASA’s astronaut toilets.
You actually need more discipline when you’re fully awake and conscious:  the discipline to know that you can’t trust yourself to make intelligent, conscious decisions the moment you first wake up.  You need the discipline to accept that you’re not going to make the right call at 5am.  Your 5am coach is no good, so you need to fire him.
What’s the real solution then?  The solution is to delegate the problem.  Turn the whole thing over to your subconscious mind.  Cut your conscious mind out of the loop.
Now how do you do this?  The same way you learned any other repeatable skill.  You practice until it becomes rote.  Eventually your subconscious will take over and run the script on autopilot.
This is going to sound really stupid, but it works.  Practice getting up as soon as your alarm goes off.  That’s right — practice.  But don’t do it in the morning.  Do it during the day when you’re wide awake.
Go to your bedroom, and set the room conditions to match your desired wake-up time as best you can.  Darken the room, or practice in the evening just after sunset so it’s already dark.  If you sleep in pajamas, put on your pajamas.  If you brush your teeth before bed, then brush your teeth.  If you take off your glasses or contacts when you sleep, then take those off too.
Set your alarm for a few minutes ahead.  Lie down in bed just like you would if you were sleeping, and close your eyes.  Get into your favorite sleep position.  Imagine it’s early in the morning… a few minutes before your desired wake-up time.  Pretend you’re actually asleep.  Visualize a dream location, or just zone out as best you can.
Now when your alarm goes off, turn it off as fast as you can.  Then take a deep breath to fully inflate your lungs, and stretch your limbs out in all directions for a couple seconds… like you’re stretching during a yawn.  Then sit up, plant your feet on the floor, and stand up.  Smile a big smile.  Then proceed to do the very next action you’d like to do upon waking.  For me it’s getting dressed.
Now shake yourself off, restore the pre-waking conditions, return to bed, reset your alarm, and repeat.  Do this over and over and over until it becomes so automatic that you run through the whole ritual without thinking about it.  If you have to subvocalize any of the steps (i.e. if you hear a mental voice coaching you on what to do), you’re not there yet.
Feel free to devote several sessions over a period of days to this practice.  Think of it like doing sets and reps at the gym.  Do one or two sets per day at different times… and perhaps 3-10 reps each time.
Yes, it will take some time to do this, but that time is nothing compared to how much time you’ll save in the long run.  A few hours of practice today can save you hundreds of hours each year.
With enough practice — I can’t give you an accurate estimate of how long it will take because it will be different for everyone – you’ll condition a new physiological response to the sound of your alarm.  When your alarm goes off, you’ll get up automatically without even thinking about it.  The more you run the pattern, the stronger it will become.  Eventually it will be uncomfortable notto get up when your alarm goes off.  It will feel like putting on your pants with the opposite leg first.
You can also practice mentally if you’re good at visualizing.  Mental practice is faster, but I think it’s best to run through the whole thing physically.  There are subtle details you might miss if you only rehearse mentally, and you want your subconscious to capture the real flavor of the experience.  So if you do use mental practice, at least do it physically the first few times.
The more you practice your wake-up ritual, the deeper you’ll ingrain this habit into your subconscious.  Alarm goes off -> get up immediately.  Alarm goes off -> get up immediately.  Alarm goes off -> get up immediately.
Once this becomes a daily habit, you won’t have to do anymore daytime practice.  This type of habit is self-reinforcing.  You only have to go through the conditioning period once.  Then you’re basically set for life until you decide to change it.  Even if you fall out of the habit for some reason (like an extended vacation in a different time zone), you’ll be able to return to it more easily.  Think of it like muscle memory.  Once you’ve grooved in the pattern, it will still be there even if you let some weeds grow over it.
Any behavior pattern you experience when your alarm goes off will become self-reinforcing if you repeat it enough times.  Chances are that you already have a well-established wake-up ritual, but it may not be the one you want.  The more you repeat your existing pattern, the more you condition it into your subconscious.  Every time you fail to get up when your alarm goes off, that becomes ever more your default physiological response.  If you want to change that behavior, you’ll need to undertake a conscious reconditioning program such as the one I described above.
Beating yourself up about your bad wake-up habits will not work — in fact, you’ll just condition these mental beatings as part of the very routine you’re trying to change.  Not only will you not get up when your alarm goes off, but you’ll also automatically beat yourself up about it.  How lame is that?  Do you really want to keep running that dumb pattern for the rest of your life?  That’s exactly what will happen if you don’t condition a more empowering pattern.  For good or ill, your habits will make or break you.
Once you establish your desired wake-up ritual, I recommend you stick with it every single day – 7 days a week, 365 days a year.  And for the first 30 days, set your alarm for the same time every day.  Once the habit is established, then you can vary your wake-up times or occasionally go without the alarm if you want to sleep in, but until then it’s best to keep the pattern very tight.  That way it will become your default behavior, and you’ll be able to stray from time to time without serious risk of deconditioning it.
I’m confident that once you establish this habit, you’ll absolutely love it.  I consider this to be one my most productive habits.  It saves me hundreds of hours a year, and it keeps paying dividends day after day.  I also found this habit extremely valuable during my polyphasic sleep experiment.
Think about it — if you oversleep just 30 minutes a day, that’s 180+ hours a year.  And if you’re at 60 minutes a day, that’s 365 hours a year, the equivalent of nine 40-hour weeks.  That’s a lot of time!  Now I don’t know about you, but I can think of more creative things to do with that time than lying in bed longer than I need to.
I encourage you to give this method a try.  I know it seems silly to practice getting out of bed, but hey, what if it works?  What if you knew with total certainty that if you set your alarm for a certain time, you would absolutely get up at that time no matter what?  There’s no reason you can’t create that for yourself over the next few days.  Practice makes permanent.
And if you want some tips on establishing the habit of getting up early, I encourage you to read these two articles: