Find your WHY: The Quest to Finding your Purpose

Find Your WHY: The Quest to Finding Your Purpose

Finding your WHY is one of the key essentials to your financial planning journey. Your driving force has to be meaningful. Without your WHY, it will be difficult to maintain the discipline to move forward. Hence it is important to know your WHY.

Without a meaningful ‘why’, chasing that big paycheck and having fancy cars but still feeling stuck and miserable, making money for all the wrong reasons.

Money is just a tool, not the goal. Money is just a means for you to build a rich and fulfilling life.

When you find your why, you free yourself.

Your why is your purpose; your ultimate driving force. Figure out your main motivations, and establish a very compelling WHY.

“When you create money with purpose, you align purpose with life.“

When you align goals with your purpose, you can pursue my goals with intention.

Money without Purpose

If your ultimate drive to financial wealth is only to accumulate material wealth and stuff, it would be hard to sustain efforts. Money is not usually the best motivator, nor is collecting fancy stuff should be the end goal.

Without a compelling purpose, we will always be restless. We will always get FOMO.

We will never be able to accumulate enough to be happy. The more money we have, the more we’ll want. There’s always going to be a newer/shinier/better object you need in the store shelf. There will always be something to chase. Humans are innately competitive; we will tend to compare ourselves to others with what we have.

Wealth doesn’t make you happy–there’s a lot of miserable millionaires. Money without purpose will leave you empty.

Money with Purpose

Money with purpose looks like something else–it is more mindful, conscious, and value-driven.

On the other hand, money driven by values help guide our choices and decisions. They help us avoid expensive mistakes, and they help us save more.

If your motivation is to help us to achieve a rich and purposeful life, you’ll have a much better chance of success. Your WHY will help you course through the chaos in life.

4 Questions that will help find your WHY

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Do you know your why? For most people, they don’t. Knowing your why is easier said than done.

A lot of us go through life on autopilot. We copy other people’s dreams, responsibilities and decisions, get jobs we don’t like to get into the rat race.

To find your why, ask yourself 4 following questions:

1. “What makes you feel alive?”

The question is beyond doing hobbies you enjoy or watching your favorite football team play. Yes, it’s beyond that–what keeps you up at night? What ignites your passion? Do things that make you feel alive–that’s the reason of living.

2. “What are my innate strengths?”

Ask yourself, what am I good at? What am I natural at, that can give me both personal and career fulfillment?

Doing things you are good at, but which you hate, is not the right path. We see a lot of unhappy millionaires out there. Know your inner strengths; and determine areas where you believe you can give the greatest value to.

Find the sweet spot where natural talent and skill meets passion.

This will give you better focus on endeavors that matter–where you can grow your impact and increase your influence faster and more meaningfully.

3. “What problem do you want to champion?”

Do you know that the word passion comes from the latin word ‘passio’ which means ‘suffering’? (e.g. Passion of the Christ)

We often mistake passion to mean our interests and hobbies, things that derive us pleasure. However, it goes beyond that.

What impact do you want to leave in this world? What problem do you want to solve?

You don’t need to declare that you’re going to solve government corruption or to find the cure for cancer (or COVID-19). But at the least, pinpoint a cause that you want to fight for, a cause that is bigger than you are; and congruent to your mission and values.

4. “What’s your ideal workday?”

Ask yourself what your ideal workday is like–how you will design your workday according to your own terms. Be as detailed as possible: where would you work? how would you work? what would you be working on? with whom? What would motivate you?

Irregardless of income, what kind of work fills you with meaning and purpose?

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Do this self-audit yourself to define your WHY. You will then have a better idea on how you enjoy spending your time and energy.

To find out my journey on defining my own WHY, read: Before finding my WHY, I was a hot mess

By articulating your WHY, it will become your guiding principle. Without your WHY, it would be difficult to maintain the discipline to execute your short-term and long-term goals.

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