PLANNING YOUR LIFE AND PURPOSE
FROM SCOTT ALLAN'S EMPOWER YOUR LIFE BOOK
Available: The book "Empower Your Life" is on Kindle for a low price.
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An excellent book, as it helps pave the way to actually do some planning and thinking about life. It does so by very good questions that elicit good thinking.
From it you should be able to create an excellent view of your future life in terms of designing it.
I would recommend that you use Google Docs (free) to set up a document with an automatic table of contents. (Google docs has excellent and clear help and is easy to use. See selected notes I have made: Notes On How To Use Google Drive And Docs.)
This is a book not just for reading, but for DOING! To really do it justice you should, after reading it over rapidly, devote at least a 1/2 hour daily to doing the great exercises, lists, and worksheets. If you really do a good job, this might be something right around a 60 day project, but what you will end up with will be invaluable.
I have put together a temporary template, with live links in the table of contents, for you to use to "form your plan": My "Empower Your Life" Plan.
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A FEW NOTES
A few notes about ways of viewing some of the concepts in this book that reflect current thinking in similar books:
Note that I would disagree with the idea that you are "brought into this world with a unique call to action." No, no such thing occurs. We instead, through our growth and learning (on purpose or haphazardly) we develop things that are "meaningful" to us, which can then be mined to determine what is your "call to action."
I think that it is imperative that you first "build a self" that you want to form the center of your world, one from which you then derive meaning. If you lock in on (though it's ok to set an initial view of what means something to you now) what you currently give meaning to, it could be based on an undeveloped self. In other words, at age 7, life is about candy, toys, and playing. And then we go thoughtlessly through various other levels of change, but we must look at whether we are actually forming the person who would be effective in the world - alot of it is from seeing who has succeeded in life and then teasing out "who they are". Allan has some good questions to help you formulate that.
Purpose-driven?
Although we do have a drive mechanism that motivates us to go get what we want, I see us not as being "purpose driven" but purpose drawn. It is not behind us whipping the horses to get going, but it is what is ahead of us, such that we can tap into doing things that have meaning to us and which therefore contribute to our ultimate purpose of happiness and fulfillment. Our "purpose" is not driving our lives, but it is a part of what we can use, in balance, to create the life we truly love as we build it and the wonderfulness accumulates...
