Are you purpose driven? What do you often think about when you set out to achieve a goal? What motivates your action? It is quite plausible that the last thing people, well, say some people, think about when they set out to do the things, they aim for is purpose. Some simply go at their aims, so it does not appear as though they are idle people. They want their immediate society to reckon them as people of means and repute. But when their effort eventually produces a dispreferred result they instantly call it quit. There are some others who just settle for the dispreferred result. It goes without saying that when the purpose of a thing is not known, then abuse is inevitable.

Purpose is a tangible thing. It is worth defining for every intention and action. It is the simple ‘why’ of an action. You could call it your reason for an action or inaction, as the case may be. Why do you knot a tie to work every day? Why do you even do the work you do? What is the reason for that new friendship you’re looking at building? You want to start a new business, to what end? What is the essence of that race you’re running? The answers to these questions are pointers to purpose.

It suffices to say that purpose is a motivation for those who define it for every step of their carriage. It saves you so much headache when you are purpose driven. It becomes the mark by which you measure your actions and effort at the things you do alongside the result that comes to you.

I quite think that children have a beautiful sense of purpose even though they do not yet know how to define it tangibly. A child will cry for mistakenly stepping on a snail and crushing its shell because that child believes life is meant to be lived and the snail has now been deprived of that ability to live. That is being purpose driven. A child will insist that her homework be done as her teacher instructed; any other method does not likely matter to her. She simply believes, sometimes, that her teacher’s opinions and instructions are all she needs, and she keeps to them just so as to arrive at the expected result. That also points to a purpose driven life – the purpose of instructions.

How then does this pursuit of purpose wane out in the child in the course of growth? This sense of purpose goes silent in the child through various means. First, the response of the people around them when they make curious and expressive statements that show that they disagree with or do not even allow the child to express herself can ultimately shut the child up for years. When children are consistently shunned for being expressive of their thought processes they curl back inwards and become quiet creatures (losing that drive for purpose). They grow into becoming people who do or say the things that would not get them shunned. So, they lose that initial sense of purpose and just play by whatever appeals to others around them.

Secondly, children do not hear people talk about purpose so much as they grow. They may come across the word while they are preparing for spelling bees or having dictation classes in school and that’s all. Their initial sense of purpose is not backed up by consistent external information and, eventually, they lose it.

I could go on to give you a third but, this is getting too long already. Watch out for the next read. But till then, recognise that a purpose driven life ought to be the focus of every individual seeking to make a mark in life.