440: Could Your Purpose Be This Simple?

[INTRODUCTION]

 

Hal Elrod: Welcome to the Achieve Your Goals Podcast. This is your host, Hal Elrod. The reason I'm laughing is this is like the seventh or eighth time I've recorded this introduction, and if only you knew what goes on here behind the scenes in my office and how many times, like I'm such a perfectionist. I always mess something up or at least in my mind and I go, “Gosh, dang it,” and then I get to rerecord it. And then usually when I record it, I missed something that I actually said earlier that I thought was important, and then I leave that out so I got to record it again. And you're thinking, I know what you're thinking, you're thinking, “Hal, script out your intro.” Okay. I get it and I sometimes kind of do but anyway. All right. Where are we at here? So, we're here for the podcast and today's purpose is called Could Your Purpose Be This Simple? We're talking about your life purpose. Now, I will tell you this. This introduction might be a little bit longer than normal because I've got a few different things to cover but today's episode is way shorter than normal, right?

 

So, we're going to meet in the middle and, overall, your listening experience will be shorter than it usually is. But today's episode was actually inspired by a passage that I recently came across somewhere. It was in writing somewhere because I typed it out online as a social media post and got just a ton of really encouraging feedback. It was really impactful for people. It was eye-opening, it was insightful, it was helpful. So, today I'm going to read that passage to you, and then we're going to explore the different ways to look at your purpose in life, the different purposes that you might choose. I'm going to lay them up like a buffet. I'll tell you my purpose in life, where it started, how it's evolved. I'm going to share with you what Eckhart Tolle, the author of The Power of Now, what he says about purpose. I'm going to share with you New York Times bestselling author, Matthew Kelly, what he says about purpose. And I'm going to talk about purpose in a way where it's like a buffet and you go, “Oh, there's many options I get to choose or I can create from scratch, a purpose that makes sense for me.” So, that is where we are going.

 

Before we dive into the episode, so three things I got to cover today. Of course, I'm going to thank our two sponsors that bring you this show every week, and then I got a big announcement. So, here we go. First and foremost is Organifi. They've been our sponsor for many years. And here's the thing. This is the Achieve Your Goals Podcast, right? Well, when we first make a goal like a health goal, we often think it'll be easy. We don't anticipate the challenges that are going to come along the way. We think we all have all this time to make salads and veggie snacks every morning. But if you're honest, about a week, maybe even a few days, most of us realize that we don't have time for all of that. We got work, family, chores around the house to get done. That's where Organifi Green Juice specifically, all their products, but especially their Green Juice, that's where it can come in. When you're bored with salads or the meal prep starts to feel like a chore or you're sick of cleaning the juicer, try this.

 

Drop a bright green scoop of Organifi Green Juice into a glass of water and stir. That's it. It is packed with 11 100% USDA-certified organic superfoods, rich in antioxidants, adaptogenic compounds, and micronutrients to guide you through any health or weight loss goal. And it mixes smooth. It tastes absolutely fresh, delicious, and it now comes in mint or apple crisp flavors. The apple crisp is the newest flavor. It tastes just like your favorite apple juice box from childhood with a few superfoods in it. But it's easy to remember every day or just when you're busy and need a quick health boost. So, check out the Green Juice and all of Organifi’s products at Organifi.com/Hal and use the code “HAL” at checkout for 20% off of your order.

 

Last but not least, our newest sponsor is CURED Nutrition. And CURED Nutrition I found complements Organifi. I am kind of using the best of both to create my perfect supplement recipe, if you will. And there are two specific products of CURED that I use the most, and there's a few others that I use depending on my needs. But here's the two I want to mention. Number one is Rise. Number two is CBN Oil. The first is to wake me up in the morning, enhance my cognitive function. The second is to put me to bed at night and so I sleep really well. So, if either of those benefits are important to you, rising with mental clarity, check out Rise, a nootropic formulated by CURED'S very own in-house clinical herbalist. It is containing blend of lion's mane, cordyceps, mushrooms, Rhodiola, ginseng, and broad spectrum CBD with no caffeine. And check out their CBN Oil if you want help with your sleep. That for me has been a game changer. I sleep like a baby. I wake up refreshed. Head over to CUREDNutrition.com/Hal and then use the code, same code, “HAL” at checkout for 20% off your entire order. I hope you find something that either Organifi.com/Hal or CUREDNutrition.com/Hal that you’ll love and then use that code “HAL” to get 20% off.

 

And then last but not least, I'm excited to share this with you. You may have seen the email announcement about this. You may not have. So, in case you haven't, we have been working on the Miracle Morning app ever since it launched. When it launched in January 2022, it was designed to be a simple habit tracker with videos from the community, videos for me, mostly designed to help you stay on track and be accountable for your Miracle Morning. That was the primary focus. However, since day one, we had a vision of this being the ultimate app, the ultimate app to track and facilitate every aspect of your Miracle Morning. So, for the last six months, we've been listening to your feedback, making major updates, and adding new features which are now available in the app. And, this is big, after a lot of consideration, we wanted to make sure this is accessible for as many people as possible. So, the app with all the new features is now free for everyone. And if you already have the app, you can just update it. The new features will all be downloaded. If you don't have the app, of course, you can get in the App Store or the Google Play Store.

 

But here's what I want to say. To all of our community members who invested $5 for the first version of the app because now it's free, I want to say thank you. Thank you so much for believing in the app and helping us get it to this point. I cannot express how grateful and humbled I am that you believed in me, you believed in the app, to be willing to pay for it and get it off the ground. And I sincerely hope the value you've gotten so far and the value that you get from the new features far exceeds the $5 that you invested in it. And I really want you to know that all that money, literally, 100% of every dollar that you've invested in the app and everyone's invested in the app has been reinvested into developing all these new features for you and the community. Literally, the app has not made a dollar. In fact, I think we've spent $20,000 over what's come in from the initial app.

 

Certainly, the point is thank you for being a part of making this app possible and I really hope, especially with the new features, that it is a game changer. It's helpful for you to have a great Miracle Morning. In the new features, there's a journal. You can create your own journal every day, both a prompted version and a create your own from scratch. There is an affirmations creator again prompted where I guide you through creating affirmations and then also an option to write your own completely from scratch. I also added my 50-plus favorite affirmations, my own personal affirmations into the app so you can use those at any time. Also, we added the Miracle Morning Level 10 affirmations that were from the bonuses in the book, and this was one of the biggest features that was requested. There is now a timer for the SAVERS for each one. So, you can set 2 minutes or 5 minutes for silence, 5 minutes for affirmations, 10 minutes of visualization. Like, whatever you want to do, you can customize your timer and you can hide the timer, and then when it goes off, it pops up and it actually gives you an option if you want to add 1 minute or 3 minutes or five more minutes. So, it's a really unique feature.

 

All these features, by the way, we want to continue to get your feedback so that we can make this app, meet our vision of it being the ultimate app to facilitate every aspect of your Miracle Morning and work on a bunch of new features, right? These are just the ones that we launched. There's a bunch of new features that we are continuing to roll out over in the coming months and beyond. So, thank you again for being a member of the Miracle Morning community, for supporting the app. And, yeah, I'm so excited. The feedback from the new features has been phenomenal. So, excited for you to try those. I think that covers the announcements. I know I mentioned it's longer than normal intro. Thank you for hanging in there with me. And now let's dive in to talk about your life purpose and answer the question, could your purpose be this simple?

 

[EPISODE]

 

Hal Elrod: Hey, goal achievers and members of the Miracle Morning community. My friends, how are you? Let's talk about purpose today. Let's talk about your purpose in life. And could your purpose be this simple? Today's episode was inspired by a passage that I found and I posted on social media, and it got a lot of great feedback. You got a lot of people really just thanking me for sharing it and saying it really touched them, it really impacted them. And so, I wanted to share it with you. It's funny, last week, I shared a social media post that I put up that got a lot of critical feedback. People didn't like it, but this week we're sharing the opposite. So, what is your purpose in life? Could it be this simple? We did an episode, by the way, on purpose, Episode 285. So, you can always find that at HalElrod.com/285. It was called What Is The Purpose Of Life? (Hint: It’s Simpler Than You Think). Now, considering the similarity in titles, today's episode is titled “Could Your Purpose Be This Simple?” at least tentatively. I sometimes change that but that's what I'm thinking it's going to be titled now.

 

So, it sounds like they're very similar episodes but I went back and I read the transcript from that Episode 285. And to sum it up for you, the essence was that our purpose in life is to experience love as talked about back in the Bible and by saints and scholars throughout the ages, right? At the fundamental level, we all just want to experience love and we want to feel loved. We want to experience love. In fact, I'm reading that book, Living Untethered, right now. I'm almost done with it but it's beautiful. Toward the end of the book, you really get into this topic, the idea that he says everyone wants to experience love but most of us are searching for it. We're searching for it in things outside of ourselves, right? Like, if you're lonely you think, “I want to find a special person who will love me,” and he talks about kind of enlightenment, elevating consciousness, if you will. It's getting to this place where love is something that you generate inside of you, and it's not dependent on anyone or anything else. And that's really aligned with the themes of what we've talked about for the last couple of years, right? That you create your own experience rather than being dependent on something outside of you to be fulfilled.

 

So, that episode that I recorded, Episode 285: What Is The Purpose Of Life? (Hint: It’s Simpler Than You Think) was really about that. It was about, “Look, we just want to experience love.” So, that talked about how do you do that. How do you simplify your purpose to be what you really deeply, what your heart, what your soul desires, and then how do you live in alignment with that purpose? Well, today it's going to be a little bit different. We're going to explore different types of purpose. And the way that today's going to kind of the general idea is that it's a buffet. You get to choose your purpose, right? Choose your own adventure. You get to choose your purpose. And I recently had a gal comment, actually, I think she commented on this post and she said, “I read in the Miracle Morning about your…” meaning my view on purpose. And she said, "It was really enlightening. I always thought that I had to find my purpose in life.” And as we'll talk about today, I believe that you create your purpose in life and you can change as often as you want it to. It's not like you're finding this singular purpose that your entire life has to revolve around forever.

 

And this is just my perspective, of course. You know, some folks you might, for example, some people believe if you're religious that the purpose is to glorify God. So, there are definitely I'm not saying that this perspective I'm sharing today on purpose is the end all be all, of course, which nothing I ever share is. But I hope this is helpful for you regardless of your current view on purpose. So, let's dive in. I'm going to read this passage to you and then we'll talk about it. We'll talk about it. So, here's the passage.

 

“What is my purpose in life?” I asked the void. “What if I told you that you fulfilled it when you took an extra hour to talk to that kid about his life?” said the voice, “Or when you paid for that young couple in the restaurant or when you saved that dog in traffic or when you tied your father's shoes for him. You see, your problem is that you equate your purpose with goal-based achievement. The universe isn't interested in your achievements, just your heart. When you choose to act out of kindness, compassion, and love, you are already aligned with your true purpose. No need to look any further.” From unknown.

 

I don't know where that came from or who the person was. It was unknown when I found it. So, what are your thoughts? How does that make you feel? Essentially, if I were summing that up, I would say that perspective is saying that your purpose is really just being kind to others. And the way that I want to explore this today, that would be one purpose, one option for you to choose amongst arguably infinite options as to what your purpose in life is. And by the way, depending on your beliefs, you might conclude that the void, right, the opening of that passage was, “What is my purpose in life?” I asked the void. And then the following, the answer was, “What if I told you that you fulfilled it when you took an extra hour to talk to that kid about his life?” said the voice. Well, some folks pointed out in the comments that for them that would be God. So, the void and the voice for some people would be God. And by the way, when I say that, I would say that to what I connect to. You know, for me, I'm someone who is very spiritual. I pray every day. But we'll leave it for another episode.

 

I've been thinking about doing an episode where I talk about my view on spirituality and religion because it's definitely a little bit probably, I don't know, outside the box. I don't know if that's true or not but anyway, we're going to save that for another episode. So, regardless, this passage prompted me to revisit my purpose in life and today I'm inviting you to do the same. So, when it comes to choosing your purpose, here's the context that I want to really lay out for the episode is that our purpose is something that we choose. When you're younger, your purpose in life, right, and I say younger, let's say you're a child. Your purpose in life might just be to have fun. And there's nothing wrong with that. In fact, as an adult, your purpose in life might be to have fun and there's nothing wrong with that, right? Who am I or you to judge that, "No, that's not the right purpose in life?” If you're a kid, I think that most kids, their purpose which is usually it's unconscious, they're not deciding on their purpose in life but just to have fun. They just want to have a good time. And I'm sure you've seen it in writing or heard people talk about that we need to get back to that childlike sense of play and wonder. So, that's one option for your purpose, right, would be just to have fun, to enjoy your life. That's one option.

Now, according to Eckhart Tolle, the author of A New Earth, and his first book that I read The Power of Now, he explained that our primary purpose in life is to awaken, which he says it’s to connect to the dimension of life that is timeless and eternal. So, you might call that God or spirit or source or self, self in the spiritual sense, like the seat of self, the witness, pure consciousness connecting with that, that Eckhart Tolle says is timeless and eternal. So, some would define that as consciousness.

 

So, I’m reading that, I’m sharing that because that’s one wise person, Eckhart Tolle, that’s his view of purpose. Now, another purpose when I read the book, The Rhythm of Life by Matthew Kelly, that entire book revolves around Matthew’s view of purpose. And he says, “Your purpose is simply to become the best version of yourself.” So, Matthew’s then from his vantage point, your purpose in life, every choice you make, every action you take, everything you do should be or could be to become the best version of yourself.

 

And by the way, as I’ve read these authors, I’ve taken on these different purposes, kind of like going to a clothing store and trying on an outfit and seeing how it fits. You try it on, you walk around, you look in the mirror, you look at the back. You spend some time seeing if this feels right for me. If this feels right, this outfit, in this case, it’s this purpose. So, like I said, it’s a buffet. You can try on different purposes, see what fits with you.

 

And also, you could potentially incorporate all of them. When I say all of them since there are countless options, I don’t think you could incorporate a thousand purposes in your life very effectively, but you could have a handful because a purpose is really a guiding principle. Think of it that way. A purpose is really a guiding principle.

 

So, for example, Eckhart Tolle is saying that your purpose in life is to awaken, to connect to the dimension of life that is timeless and eternal. That could be a guiding principle that I’m always striving to connect to my spirit, to my consciousness, to God. That’s my purpose, a.k.a. my guiding principle. And then you could say, “Well, Matthew Kelly says your purpose is to simply become the best version of yourself.” You could go, “Yeah, yeah, I resonate with that, too.” That’s another one of my guiding principles that every choice I make and I would say that every choice I make, I’m asking myself, does this help me become the best version of myself?

 

And when I read Matthew Kelly’s book, The Rhythm of Life, this became part of my internal dialog, was kind of backtesting every choice I made against Matthew Kelly’s purpose that he proposed. When I was deciding between food, oh, man, I really want that cheeseburger. But boy, that organic salad, yeah, that’s probably better for me. And then I would ask, which choice would contribute to me becoming the best version of myself? Now, that’s relative, right?

 

So, I mean, one person could answer, the cheeseburger, of course. You need that protein. And then one person might answer, no, the organic vegetables, that’s going to nurture your cells. So, I don’t think there’s a right or wrong answer. And that’s why each person’s truth, each person’s purpose is unique to you. But I loved that purpose, becoming the best version of myself because it allowed me to, again, backtest every choice that I had ever made, every choice I was about to make against that guiding principle. Which choice helps me become the best version of myself?

 

And that goes back to what I learned, and this can be a purpose as well. One of my mentors, Brad Britton, who I know listens to the podcast sometimes. So, if you’re listening, Brad, I love you. Thanks for all the guidance you’ve given me in my life. But Brad taught me that the secret to success is to do the right thing, not the easy thing. Real simple, right? Every choice you make, you can either do the right thing, not the easy thing, but it becomes relative. How do you decide the right thing? And I would say, well, the right thing is what you need and it helps you become the best version of yourself. And the easy thing is usually what is the lesser choice. So, just different ways of saying a similar thing.

 

Now, I mentioned earlier, if you’re religious, you might identify with a purpose related to glorifying God, whether that means being Christ-like or actively spreading the word of God or following in Buddha’s footsteps, depending on which religion you believe in, the word of God may vary based on the book that you read, the Bible, the Koran, etc. For me, I read a book in 2005, I think. It’s crazy to think, 17 years ago, and I’ve mentioned this book before, it’s called Love is the Killer App. It’s by Tim Sanders, who was the former, I believe, COO of Yahoo!, either CFO or COO.

 

I got him on the podcast a long time ago. But Tim Sanders in his book Love is the Killer App, his book was really about basically getting back to love as our purpose and bringing it into the workplace. He said, people often, they don’t tell their colleagues that they love them. And he said, why not? Or their customers, that they love them. Why not? That was his, why not? And for me, personally, I mean, I tell you. I tell you that I love you every week. And I tell all of my friends. I just tell every human being in my life. I guess I don’t tell strangers if I’m fair, maybe I should. Maybe I should start that, I don’t know.

 

But anyway, the point is, I read Tim’s book, and he talked about adding value that you want to be known as someone who adds value for other people. And he gave four different ways to do that. One was sharing your knowledge with others, sharing things you knew that you learned that could help other people. One was sharing your heart or your love and being there for people and really caring for your customers, caring for your colleagues, your friends, caring for everyone. Just really loving people, like really genuinely loving people. One was sharing your network. So, he said you should always be when you’re talking to somebody thinking, who could this person help in my network or who in my network could help the person that’s in front of me, that I’m talking to, that’s sharing a problem? Who do I know that could solve that for them?

 

And it’s so funny, as I’m saying this, I’m looking at how I live my life. And so much of this, I realized that I still do this. Like, for example, sharing my network, it’s automatic. You can ask friends, like when I’m with people and they bring something up, I’ll think of, oh, oh, I know a person that you need to connect with that could help you. And I always pull up my cell phone, and immediately, I’m like, are you okay if I do a text intro right now? And they’re like, sure. And I always pull up my cell phone and I usually send a text intro or a note to self. I need to check with the other person.

 

But when I read that book and adopted all of these ideas into my life, I identified my purpose for the first time in my life. This was the first time that I articulated, consciously articulated, that I have a purpose in life now, and here’s what it is. And the purpose in life that I articulated was to selflessly add value to the lives of other people, selflessly add value to the lives of people.

 

Now, at first, it was add value to the lives of other people. And the reason I put the word selflessly in there was because I caught myself only adding value and it was convenient for me when I felt like it, when I was in the mood. And then I went, I don’t want my purpose to be, not tainted, but I just want it to be pure. I want it to be pure. I want to live this unconditionally. Not conditionally, there you go. I don’t want my purpose to be conditionally where I will add value to your life if it benefits me or if I feel like it.

 

No, I want to be someone who selflessly adds value to the life, the lives of every person I ever come in contact with, whether that is a waiter or a waitress at a restaurant that I’m going out over and above, trying to just connect with them, make them feel good, give them a great tip, like whatever I can do to add value to their life. And sometimes, it’s as simple as kindness. In fact, if you go back to the passage that we shared in the beginning, and I’ll read that last paragraph, your problem is that you equate your purpose with goal-based achievement. Kind of ironic that you’re listening to the Achieve Your Goals podcast.

 

The universe isn’t interested in your achievements, just your heart. When you choose to act out of kindness, compassion, and love, you are already aligned with your true purpose. No need to look any further. I don’t know about you, but I resonate with that. It’s so simple, but it’s so true.

 

So, going back to my purpose that was inspired by Tim Sanders in his book Love is the Killer App, to selflessly add value to the lives of every person. And here’s what I found, is that when you identify a purpose, clarify your purpose in a way that serves other people, everybody wins. I’m going to say that again, when you identify and clarify your purpose in a way that serves other people, everybody wins.

 

The people that you interact with, they win because you’re always looking to serve, you’re always looking to add value. But you benefit because you become known by your sphere of influence, by your friends and family and colleagues as someone who is always adding value to their life. And the more value you add to someone’s life, the more they value having you in their life. I’ll say that one again. The more value you add to people’s lives, the more they value having you in their life, and then they reciprocate.

 

So, you can selflessly adding value, but you can be selfishly selfless, meaning you know that, hey, if I’m always adding value, but here’s the caveat. This is not about manipulating people. You can’t be selfishly selfless where I’m only adding value to see what I’m going to get in return. And if I don’t get something in return, boy, am I going to be upset? I’m going to stop adding value for that person. No, this is not about keeping score.

 

Selflessly adding value, the word selflessly, it is pure. So, I guess I shouldn’t say you should be selfishly selfless. I think you need to flip the order of those words that you can be selflessly selfish, meaning you know that good things are going to come back to you, whether you call that karma or practical karma or the law of reciprocation, whatever you want to call it. When your purpose in life is focused on serving others, everybody wins. You win, they win, and humanity wins. And to me, that’s how simple purpose can be. It’s about adding value for other people, adding value for other people. And when you do that, you enrich their life and you enrich your life. Everybody wins.

 

So, let’s keep today’s episode short. We don’t usually do that, but I hope this is helpful for you. To me, it was very eye-opening to realize my purpose is not predetermined. It’s not fixed. I don’t have to search for it. I get to create it based on what feels right. And I can even borrow it from other people. I can model other people.

 

I read Matthew Kelly’s purpose to become the best version of myself, and wow, that resonates. I’m going to adopt that purpose. I learned my first purpose, actually. If I go back further, why didn’t call it a purpose. But when I was 19, my purpose I wrote down was to be the most positive person I know. I was introduced to positive thinking by my mentor, Jesse, and I wrote my– I called them my commitments, I think. It was like my self-improvement commitments or something. I have the document somewhere on my computer, but I wrote down, like my first commitment was I’m committed to being the most positive person I know.

 

And here’s the thing about a purpose. And I was about to finish the episode, but there was a little add-on. But the thing about a purpose is that once you identify it, once you clarify it, once you commit to it, it informs how you think and how you behave, how you treat other people, how you show up for other people, how you show up for yourself. So, once you have a purpose, again, just like values, just like a guiding principle, they’re all cousins, if you will. They’re all related.

 

But once you clarify your purpose, and this is the power in it, it informs how you think, how you behave, how you show up. And when I define my purpose is selflessly adding value, let me give you a couple of real-world examples of how that showed up for me. Immediately that year, it changed everything. I began leading a group of my colleagues. There were about 15 of us that got on a call every week. I didn’t get paid for this. This was my first big initiative to selflessly add value to the lives of other people is I chose my colleagues who were all my friends. I was pretty close with most of them.

 

And it was like, I’m going to lead this call and I’m going to serve them. I’m going to help them as much as I can with what I’m going through on my journey to achieve my goals this year. And so, I did that, and it was a national call. There were people from all over the country that were on that call. And corporate, our corporate, the company that I work for, Cutco, corporate got wind of that and they started hearing from my colleagues that, wow, yeah, Hal’s leading this call every week and he’s adding value.

 

And then I started volunteering to speak at events and just– you name it, literally, everything, every choice I made it was how can I add value for this person? And I did it with my friends, with my family, like it was unconditional. Every human being on the planet, I’m committed to adding as much value as I possibly can.

 

And of course, there’s a balance. You don’t want to overextend yourself. That doesn’t mean saying yes to everything, by the way. I think that’s an important distinction because if you say yes to everything, and we’ve probably all been there where we say yes to too much, but right now, you’re burnout. Now, you’re no good for anybody. Now, you’re unhappy, you’re stressed out, you’re disgruntled. And now, you can’t really give your best. It’s the old oxygen mask analogy, put your mask on first.

 

So, adding value for the people also means protecting your time. In fact, that’s something that I’ve gotten better at. You’re saying no, and saying no is a way of honoring the people that I’m committed to adding value to because you can’t help everyone. So, that’s an important distinction. So, this guiding principle of selflessly adding value for others, there are limits to you living your purpose. There’s only one of you to go around kind of thing.

 

So, anyway, with that, I’m inviting you to consider that you get to choose your purpose. You can adopt any of the purposes that I’ve shared today, the one I learned when I was 19 on being the most positive person I know, the one that I decided at 25 on selflessly adding value to the lives of every person I possibly can, which still drives me today. That’s still one of my guiding principles, one of the purposes that I live by because you can have more than one.

 

Or whether you resonate with Eckhart Tolle’s spiritual purpose, which is to awaken, to connect to the dimension of life that is timeless and eternal or you may resonate most with Matthew Kelly’s purpose, his take on purpose, which is to become the best version of yourself. Or you might resonate with all of the above. You might want to combine these, or you may resonate with none of them. But you’re inspired to think about purpose in a different way and to create your own.

 

I hope this has served you. And if we all live life on purpose, I believe that the world will be a better place. It’s a part of us elevating our own consciousness, and therefore, elevating the consciousness of humanity one person at a time. And thank you for being that person today. I love you. I appreciate you. And I will talk to you next week.

[END]