How To Stop Living For Others And Reclaim Your Life’s Purpose
Whenever I had been told, “you should be thankful for what you have,” I would get a strong urge to smack that person across the face.
In their eyes, I had crossed off every item on the how-to-live-a-successful-life checklist. I had a luxury apartment, a nice car, a highly-paid and prestigious job, and my social life was as good as it got. I had all the markings of a successful woman.
But I felt broken on the inside.
People were telling me that I should be happy, but I wasn’t. It made me feel as if something was wrong with me. My job and my social life were sucking away too much my time. It felt like I was being pulled in a million different directions and I didn’t know what I was supposed to do next.
I realized that I was living my life for others, not for myself. What they saw as a success, didn’t make me happy or fulfilled.
So I left it all behind and set out on a quest for personal success and fulfillment.
Redefining success and making my own rules
I don’t know if absolute success exists, but I do believe that we can find personal fulfillment and happiness by following our heart.
That’s why I jumped on a flight to Japan after quitting my job. I wanted to see the sights, soak in the culture, and converse with the people. There was no external motivation; I felt like I just had to do it.
There were challenges along the way, but the freedom to do what I wanted, without having to live up to the expectations of other people showed me that I could live a life that was happy and fulfilling. I went to bed each night feeling that I had filled up my soul with the right things. That, more than anything else, helped me redefine success for myself.
I’m sure you’ve seen/heard/read about how you should “follow your heart”, and you should. But this well-meaning advice fails to mention one thing — don’t do it with the expectation of success or external reward.
Can you be successful (by all external measures) while following your heart? Possibly. But if you doing it and hoping that it leads to something bigger, you’re only setting yourself up for disappointment and heartbreak.
In my experience, happiness and fulfillment come from pursuing the things I love. And that’s how I have redefined success for myself. For example, one of the things I love is learning languages and can’t remember any extended period of time where I haven’t been learning at least one language. I have never worked as a translator, nor did my work require me to learn it. I did it because I wanted to because it made me happy. I have achieved conversational level skill in 4 languages so far, and I am tackling German right now.
It was never my intention to mix my love for languages with my work, but I’m happy to say that I recently started working for a company whose purpose is to help people learn new languages. Through them, I get to share my love of languages with other people.
All these years of following my heart have resulted in this opportunity presenting itself to me. But I was happy and fulfilled even before it came along. I was a success by my personal definition, and I didn’t need anyone’s approval. I lived life on my own terms, made my own rules, and that attracted external success to me.
How to attain personal success by following your heart
I won’t presume to tell you “here are X number of steps to follow your heart.” You know better than anyone else what makes you happy. However, personal failures and watching other people make the same mistakes have taught me some things about the follow-your-heart journey.
#1 – Put it on your to-do list
I’m a big fan of to-do lists, and everything that’s important or meaningful to me goes on my daily to-do list. This includes food, break times, and of course, language learning.
You may not be a fan of to-do lists and scheduling time for your hobby or personal project may seem counter-intuitive. But trust me, if you don’t schedule time for it daily and hold yourself to the schedule, there will always be something more urgent that will pull away your attention and energy.
The biggest mistake people make is thinking they will get to it someday. Do you really want to postpone your happiness, instead of actively seeking it out every day?
#2 – Make sure the activities energize you
Even though I love languages, I do not like learning through videos that don’t have subtitles. They suck away my energy and result in very little learning. On the other hand, I love reading my favorite books in a foreign language. I even picked up the Harry Potter books in Portuguese to build up my vocabulary. I was familiar with the story, so reading it in a foreign language had the double benefit of being enjoyable as well as building up my Portuguese vocabulary.
I‘ve written about how the secret to being super-productive and getting more done is to make sure you manage your energy levels. It’s the same principle at work here. By learning languages through an activity that energizes me, I make sure that I enjoy what I’m doing. Instead of feeling like an obligation, I look forward to the scheduled hour for language learning.
#3 – Create a support system
I have seen people (and myself) start a personal project with great enthusiasm and energy but fail to keep the momentum going. You may not realize it, but passion projects neither have deadlines nor do they have any stakes. The slightest sign of trouble or friction can bring it all to a screeching halt.
I’ve seen family emergencies, the extra pressure at work, and even travel (something I’m intimately familiar with) completely derail personal projects. We tend to forget that these personal projects are the means through which we achieve happiness and fulfillment. Just because it’s not at the top of our priority list doesn’t mean it’s any less important.
That is why all of us need a support system to sustain the momentum and keep going through the tough times. There are different ways to create a support system, and you will have to try them out to see which one works best for you. Here are the ones I have found to be most helpful:
- Writing about goals and struggles in a journal
- Joining a mastermind group of people who have similar interests and values
- Asking a friend to check in regularly
- Hiring a coach for motivation and guidance
When it comes to language learning specifically, I have found the Add1challenge to be extremely helpful. The idea is that you work together with a community to reach a common goal of conversational fluency within 90 days. You also schedule a weekly Skype call to talk to one or more other language learners and tutors face-to-face. Knowing that I have to show up and talk to another person makes it real for me. I know that showing up without preparation would let the other person down and that motivates me to keep up with the learning every day.
Whatever your personal project is, you’ve got to find a way to support and motivate yourself to keep going. It is one of the best things you can do to attain personal success.
Stop living for others and start living for yourself
It was not easy when I left my old life behind to pursue happiness and my personal definition of success. I’m sure some people felt hurt and disappointed. It wasn’t practical or responsible of me, but I just had to. If I had stayed, I would have ended up as a train wreck.
It might come across as selfish, but ask yourself this — if you aren’t happy and fulfilled, how will you be able to bring happiness and fulfillment into the lives of the people you love and care about?
I’m not saying you have to do what I did and leave everything behind. But if you feel like you’re living a life that others expect you to live and you don’t have a sense of personal success, you owe it to yourself to start following your heart.
Start a personal project that brings you happiness and fulfillment, and redefine success for yourself. It doesn’t have to be a grand, world-changing thing. It can be as simple as reading a personal development book for 15 minutes every day. It could be meditating for 5 minutes daily to calm your mind. It might be hard to begin and form new habits, but once you have momentum on your side, personal projects take on a life of their own.
Personal projects are a hidden font of happiness that don’t depend on other people’s expectations of you. Starting and following through on it will help you live a happier, more fulfilled life.
So what is it that your heart desires?
Give it just 5 minutes a day and watch the magic unfold.
Recommended articles: