Afterwards, I thought awhile about his story and whether there were some signs of a looming burnout at the time I worked with him. With hindsight, I think, yes, there were some signs I could have seen if I would have been more sensitive about this topic. Because he often joked: “I wish I would be a gardener”. With the wisdom of hindsight, I think it was an encrypted help message: “Hey, I’m unhappy with my job. Help me!”

Anyway, I can’t change the past, I can only learn from it. And for me the main learning is that I have to listen better, because there are people out there who think they are strong enough and for whom it is a sign of weakness to reach out for help…

Take care!

But what we can influence is the way we live our life each day. Do you do what’s important to you? Or do you waste your life doing meaningless things? Or do you postpone, for whatever reason, important things you should do now?

Whatever your answers are: Life is short, use it wisely.

So, how to deal with such a situation?

I think the most important step is to reduce the activity which makes you unhappy as soon as possible to avoid something worse like a breakdown or a burn out. Don’t stave it off, there is never an ideal time for such things!

The next step is to define what you want to do in the future. Should you still program? And if yes, how much? And what else could you do to earn money in the future? Difficult questions. Questions to which I don’t have answers yet…

From the answers to those (and probably other) questions you can then derive goals and a strategy to achieve them. The last step is to implement this strategy.

As you see, life comes with ups and downs. Nobody likes downs, but I think they are a good opportunity to learn. And the next up comes surely ;-)

My journey started with a feeling that something was wrong in my life. The cause for that feeling was that programming applications for someone else was no longer satisfying for me. And it wasn’t just a temporary feeling, it was a deeper feeling. So I had to get to the bottom of the problem. After some thinking and reading, I realized that I didn’t knew what my purpose in life was. And without that, it is rather difficult to define meaningful goals… So I had to find my life purpose.

First I tried the approach described by Steve Pavlina in his article “How to discover your life purpose in about 20 minutes”:

1. Take out a blank sheet of paper or open up a word processor where you can type (I prefer the latter because it is faster).
2. Write at the top, “What is my true purpose in life?”
3. Write an answer (any answer) that pops into your head. It doesn’t have to be a complete sentence. A short phrase is fine.
4. Repeat step 3 until you write the answer that makes you cry. This is your purpose.

Well, it didn’t work for me. The result of about 20 minutes was only one, very general, phrase: “to change the world”.

I think the problem was that I expected to have an answer after those 20 minutes. And this expectation blocked in fact my thinking. I thought more about “I have to find the question in 20 minutes” than about the primary question ;-)

So I modified the aforementioned approach to fit my needs. The main difference is that my approach makes use of the subconscious during a sleeping phase. The only thing you need for this approach is paper and a pen. I don’t recommend to use a computer because that may distract you from thinking.

1. About 1/4 hour before you go to bed, move to a quiet room, and ask yourself “What is my true purpose in life?”.
2. Write an answer (any answer) that pops into your head. It doesn’t have to be a complete sentence. A short phrase is fine.
3. Repeat step 2 until you are too tired and/or you have no more answers.
4. Sleep.
5. In the morning write any answer you got while sleeping.
6. Repeat steps 1 – 5 until you write the answer that causes a special feeling. This is your purpose.

I had to practice this approach about two weeks until I found the answer. Well, that is not quite correct: the answer found me. It popped into my head while preparing breakfast ;-)

The following is a log of my answers I noted during that process. It is thought as a real world example for the aforementioned approaches (I didn’t found any examples on the web).

- to change the world
- to help others becoming better
- to be critical
- to make the world a more beautiful place
- to make the world a better place
- to question existing things
- to motivate people to think
- to realize ideas
- to generate ideas
- to share ideas
- to create new things
- to be independent
- to learn
- to explore
- to connect people
- to experiment
- to leave existing paths
- to improve existing things
- to make things user-friendlier
- to make beautifully designed things
- to be wealthy
- to be courageous
- to think about things
- to discuss ideas
- to inspire people
- to fight for new things
- to be unconventional
- to spread ideas
- to work with open-minded people
- to be wise
- to observe
- to listen
- to evangelize
- to be a geek
- to be an introvert
- to be a mentor
- to engage for the introvert minority
- to build something new
- to motivate people to leave existing paths
- to fight against constraints
- to be curious
- to be a contrarian
- to have time for others
- to democratize companies
- to analyse
- to be a critical thinker
- to be lazy
- to think different
- to live consciously
- to support others
- to ask questions
- to see the world with different eyes
- to swim upstream

And that’s the final answer:

My purpose in life is to question and improve “things”, and to encourage and support people to do the same.

Of course, this is rather vague, but it is a guideline I can use to define the specific goals I want to pursue in the future. And if I look back, I see that I tried to live according to this purpose, even though I was not aware of it…

What does that mean? I think it means that your subconscious already knows your purpose. And with consciously knowing your purpose you can actively support your subconscious, and you probably will make better decisions.

Ok, that’s it for today. If you have already found your life purpose, congratulation! Otherwise, good luck in finding it!