How To Find Your Life Purpose And Achieve It – In 11 Steps

How to find your life purpose.

You find your life purpose by identifying what you want to do, be, achieve, create, and contribute over the course of your life. Then, you figure out what that version of your life looks like in the future, and you set a goal for it.  

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How to find your life purpose. 

This is definitely not an easy question to answer. 

And every single person will need to follow a slightly different path to find out what it means for them.

Personally, it took me almost 30 years to discover my life purpose. 

And even then, I only really figured it out when I came to the understanding that your life purpose is usually something that you create and adopt for yourself, rather than something thrust upon you by the world. 

(Though it is true that sometimes the circumstances of your life will play a crucial role in leading you to determine what this purpose is.) 

I could write several books on the entire process of finding your life purpose.

But for the purposes of making this blog post as concise and as helpful as possible, I’ve condensed it down into 11 steps to help give you the bullet points of all of the most important and crucial elements of the journey that I’ve discovered along the way.

Let’s dive into it.

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Note: If you’re interested in the content matter of this post, then you’ll definitely be interested in our master guide to becoming truly alpha. Make sure to check that out to get a full rundown of the entire process, from beginning to end, along with a full list of resources and other guides.

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My Story…

I want to take just a moment and preface these following steps with a small cliff notes version of my own personal story. 

When I was young, I didn’t really take life that seriously. 

My life had very little meaning, and I didn’t really have a set purpose for myself. 

I was very religious. So in many respects, religion became the object of my purpose. 

It kind of filled that spot for me to such an extent that I never really went on my own journey of self-discovery. 

By the time I was 25 years old, I had still not embarked upon what I call the hero’s arc.

However, at 26 years old, I walked away from religion—and not long after that, a lot of other things happened in my life.

My wife ended up informing me that we were getting a divorce, and long story short—I needed to perform a total life reset at the age of 30. 

I pretty much had to leave everything behind and start my life all over again as a single divorced father in his early 30s.

And this really shook me awake. 

You can read more about the details of my story here. 

I also talk a bit about it in this blog post.

But suffice it to say, I came face to face with the grim reality that everything I had known about life was crashing down around me—and I had no clue how to move forward or figure out what to do. 

I had really hit rock bottom, and I was faced with a big decision. 

I could either give up—or I could try to figure out how to fix my life and move forward. 

I chose to try to fix my life, and this led to me eventually discovering what I now call the alpha mentality.

Now, there’s a lot more to my story that I haven’t told here. 

And if you tune in to my podcast, read more of my blog posts, or watch more content on my YouTube channel, you’ll probably get a better idea of exactly what that process looked like for me on a personal level. 

But suffice it to say, I spent a great deal of time and energy trying to figure out what my purpose was in the wake of my failed past life—and these 11 steps that I’m about to share with you proved to be the steps that guided me to finding my true path and discovering my own purpose. 

In other words, these aren’t just 11 steps that I pulled out of thin air. 

These are the steps that actually worked for me, that actually helped me to transform my life from a complete train wreck to being successful and characterized by meaning, fulfillment, satisfaction, happiness, and victory.

My life certainly isn’t perfect. And I haven’t achieved as much as some other people have. 

But every day, I’m in the trenches—and every day, my life is moving in a more positive direction in all of the vital domains and areas that matter.  

And I’m definitely on track to achieve all of my goals!

Alright, enough about me for now. 

Let’s jump into these steps and help you get started on the path to finding your life purpose today.

1. Determine What You Want

Before you can begin to decode the purpose for your life, you’ll need to figure out what you actually want.

What matters to you?

What constitutes success in your eyes?

What do you desire for your life, and why do you desire those things?

Before you can draw a map, you need to know what the destination is. 

Start by taking a piece of paper and writing down all the things you’d like to have, accomplish, and be known for. 

For me, I actually began this process by thinking about what I wanted people to say or think about me at my funeral. 

I thought to myself:

“What would I want to be known for at the end of my life? What would it take for me to feel like I had lived well? What would I need to do or achieve in order to be proud of my accomplishments when I finally reach the end?”

You should write down everything you can think of on a piece of paper.

This is a really challenging step, but it’s an important one.

In fact, I would recommend doing this at least once per year. 

Figure out what success would really mean to you.

Once you’ve performed this step, you’ll be ready to move on to the next one. 

2. Visualize Your Future

Once you write down some things that you would like for your future, it’s important to start visualizing what those things would look like and mean to you in the real context of your life.

For me, I often visualize what I want my life to look like when I’m 40, 50, 60, and beyond (I’m 35 years old as I’m writing this blog post). 

In fact, I’ve even written down many of these visions, and I’ve enhanced them, adjusted them, and fleshed them out as time has gone by. 

Creating a vivid vision for your future will help you as you strive to determine and create your purpose. 

3. Figure Out What Kind Of Legacy You Want To Leave Behind When You’re Gone

As you strive to learn how to find your purpose in life, remember that you’re not just trying to visualize the stuff you’ll have (money, cars, houses, etc.). 

You also want to visualize what you’ll be working on.

You’ll want to visualize what projects you’ll be devoting your time to, and how you’re going to be helping the world.

This is crucially important. 

I believe that we should all strive to leave a lasting legacy of greatness in the world. 

In other words, we want to leave a dent in the universe. 

We want future generations to have been impacted by our work and our pursuit of excellence. Ultimately, we want what we do in this life to matter. 

Imagine—if people were to write about you in history books in the future, what would they say about your life?

How many lives would you have had a significant positive impact on?

All of these questions matter now as you strive to learn how to find your purpose and figure out how you should live on a daily basis. 

Some people may not be interested in leaving a legacy. But if you plan to live like a true alpha, this must matter to you.

4. Figure Out How You Want To Make A Difference

As you strive to figure out how to find your life purpose, create that purpose, and then manifest that purpose into existence, it’ll be vitally important to understand how you want to make a difference in the world through that purpose. 

For example:

When I think about my coaching clients, I don’t just think about booking more of them so that I get more money. 

Of course, I want to make more money. 

But I also always make sure that I’m investing in the clients that I already have, so that they can go on to produce real, amazing results in their own lives. 

In fact—most days, the stuff that weighs heaviest on my heart is how my current clients are doing. 

Are they growing? Are they learning? Are they making progress in the right areas?

I often give away far more time than I get paid for just so that I can do my very best to provide value and help each and every one of them to achieve their goals—and guess what? Even though I don’t always get paid for doing the extra, I would never change a bit of it—because at the end of the day, what I really want is to make a real difference in the lives of each of my clients. 

It truly matters! 

5. Start Setting Goals 

Now that you’ve figured out at least a rough visualization of what you’d like your future to look like, it’s time to start setting goals that will take you in that direction. 

Don’t worry, it doesn’t have to be perfect right now. 

You may change your vision as you progress down the path. 

But it’s really important to get started using your future vision of your life as a destination. 

Begin writing down what steps you’ll need to take to get there. 

This will probably include many different domains. 

You’ll want to make goals for how to achieve financial success, how to build the type of family you want, how you want your dating life to look, how you’re going to level up mind, body, and spirit as you get older, etc.

All of these things are important.

I often speak about the importance of doing the following things as you set goals for your future. 

You want to:

• Mind your business 
• Get your money 
• Pursue your purpose in life
• Level up mind, body, and spirit
• Leave behind the victim mentality 
• Embrace radical self-responsibility
• And become 1% better every day, to make sure that you’re not stagnating and deteriorating in your life

Make sure to include all of these elements in your goal-setting process. 

6. Make A Plan

Breaking your goals down into achievable actionable steps is the beginning of the process of making a plan for finding your life purpose and pursuing it.

Sometimes, this will require some creativity. 

For example, you may need to take a look at your talents, interests, and passions as you do this. 

You’ll also need to take a look at things you’ve experienced in life, and blend them together to figure out how all of these tools can fit into helping you to achieve the future you desire for yourself. 

See, for me, I began my journey by leveraging my talent for writing with my passion and experience in the self-help niche (because I was very actively engaged in the process of trying to rebuild my life after my divorce).

I also combined this with my natural personality inclination to be an empathetic leader. 

For me, this was a perfect blend of ingredients to start blogging, YouTubing, and podcasting. 

It’s important that you blend these things together to create a plan that works for you, that utilizes your own talents, gifts, passions, experiences, personality, etc. 

We’re all unique, and we all have something incredibly powerful and significant to offer the world. 

So try to take all this into account as you create your plan, and make sure that it gives you as many advantages for succeeding as possible. 

To learn more about this process (especially where goal-setting is concerned), I would also encourage you to read this post by my good friend Jay O’Donnell: 12 Steps To Finding Your Passion And Purpose In Life. 

7. Start Diligently Working Toward Your Goals

Unfortunately, the only way to get to the top of the mountain is to start climbing. 

This means you’re going to have to work.

You’re going to have to work hard. 

Thomas Edison once said:

“Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.” 

And guess what?

He was right. 

And one of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 6 Rules of Success includes this step:

“Work like hell.” 

There’s just no way around it. 

Once you determine what you want, set goals to create a roadmap to it, and then break those goals down into a more structured plan of action, it’ll just be time to start working your ass off to get to where you want to be. 

This is going to be a difficult process. 

But it will be made easier if you can cultivate powerful life habits for yourself.

8. Cultivate Powerful Life Habits

Habits are essential to success.

The better your habits become, the better off you’ll be. 

Don’t get me wrong—hard work is always hard work. 

But when you create powerful life habits that empower you to get more work done with less pure brawn and strength of focus—well, you’ll be that much more likely to be able to make meaningful progress on a daily basis. 

For best results, start identifying the parts of your life (bad habits) that aren’t contributing to forward progress—and then begin replacing those parts with positive habits that will actually help you to take you closer to your goals. 

For example:

I recently gave up the habit of eating potatoes with almost every meal, and replaced it with a habit of eating broccoli, cauliflower, or green beans with each meal instead. 

I also recently gave up the habit of eating steak and fried eggs with each breakfast, and adopted a habit of eating a healthier (lower calorie) bowl of oatmeal with one hard-boiled egg to help me reach the caloric deficit I needed for my weight loss/fitness goals. 

These may seem like small habit changes, but they are just two of dozens of other habits that I’ve used to help take me further along in my path, and to make myself a better person than I used to be.

And guess what?

This process never stops. 

Almost every week, I’m looking for new habits to adopt, and old outdated habits to replace. 

This is all part of continuing to level up to be 1% better every day. 

9. Be Genuine, Authentic, And Real

Oftentimes in life, we’ll be tempted to change ourselves so that we’ll be ‘more liked’ by other people. 

Sometimes we’re tempted to give up on our journey (and the destiny we truly want) because it just seems too difficult. 

Sometimes, we’ll be tempted to take the easy way out in order to avoid some of the hard work that success requires of us. 

Now, don’t get me wrong. 

Analyzing our path, revising our techniques, and trying to adapt to our circumstances are all strong points. 

But if you truly want to succeed in this life, you must be genuine, authentic, and real. 

And if you as a person aren’t the kind of person who’s capable of achieving success being the ‘real you,’ then it’s time to start transforming yourself to become the person you need to be in order to achieve the purpose you desire for yourself.

This doesn’t mean that you need to put on a persona. It mostly means that you just need to change your behaviors, to adopt behaviors that are more likely to help you succeed.

10. Adopt A Code Or Set Of Rules For Your Life

When my life fell apart and hit rock bottom back in 2017, and I was forced to take a long, hard look at myself, I realized that I had done a lot of things wrong to contribute to my current state of suffering. 

The truth is that the alpha mentality demands that we be radically self-responsible, and that we take full responsibility for everything we experience in life. 

Sure, there’s a certain amount of my failed marriage that may not have been completely my fault. 

But I still take full ownership over it. 

See, when I truly accept responsibility for my shortcomings and vow to become better, I take full control over everything that I have control over, which is really only my own actions. 

This gives me the power to fix my life problems, and helps to keep from being stuck in miserable circumstances that are beyond my control. 

Don’t get me wrong. It sucks, hurts, and feels terrible to take responsibility for my problems in life. 

It would feel a lot better in the short term to blame my divorce on my ex-wife, point fingers at her, live a bitter life, and take solitude in my own little cocoon of delusion.

But this would not only be a lie—it would also just contribute to the problem. I would never grow, become better, or figure out how to actually solve the problems that led me to such destruction. 

Now, one of the methods that we must utilize if we want to do this (if we want to solve our own life problems) is that we must create or adopt a set of rules for ourselves. 

For me, this took the form of the 18 Vows of the Oath of Kings and Queens. 

This is the alpha mentality code that helped to guide me in the aftermath of my divorce—and these ‘rules for life’ truly saved me and changed everything.

I created this list of rules to help me avoid making the same mistakes that I had made in my past, and it has served me very well ever since I adopted them. 

I strive to meditate on these rules and follow them on a daily basis. 

And whenever I stick to them, I find that my life gets better—and that I continue onward in a positive trajectory toward my true life purpose.

11. Commit To Becoming The Best That You Can Be

At the end of the day, it’s important to realize that none of us are perfect. 

I’m not perfect, and you’re not perfect. 

And guess what? 

Neither of us is ever going to be perfect. 

But here’s the thing.

Imperfection isn’t what destroys us.

Failing to strive to become better on a daily basis is what destroys us. 

How? 

Because when we don’t commit to leveling up every single day in all of the vital areas that matter, we basically succumb to a sort of ‘life stagnation’ that actually leads to deterioration over time. 

In other words, a lot of people peak at some point early in their lives, and then they just deteriorate for the rest of their existence. 

This is a recipe for pure disaster, misery, and suffering. 

Instead, we must be focused on leveling up every single day—to be at least 1% better than we were the day before. 

We must level up our mind, body, and spirit, and always seek to be embracing radical self-responsibility so that we can leave the victim mentality behind, and take full initiative in creating our own life and destiny. 

At the end of the day, this is what the alpha mentality is all about—to take action-oriented, intentional control of your life energy and trajectory—embracing radical self-responsibility, shirking victim mentality, and determining to utilize your time and resources wisely to create a meaningful, significant destiny and lasting legacy of greatness in the world.

Books To Help You With The Process Of Finding Your Purpose In Life And Achieving It – Like A True Alpha

Final Thoughts – How To Find Your Life Purpose

Hopefully, this post has helped you to understand the steps that are required to not only discover your life’s purpose, but to also pursue and create it as you manifest your destiny in the world. 

Of course, these tips are only the very tip of the iceberg. 

There’s so much more to this process that I could never fit into one blog post.

But if you have more questions, please feel free to reach out and message me. 

I’d love to discuss this more with anyone who’s interested in discovering their true life purpose, who also has a strong desire to pursue the alpha mentality. 

Go with grace, my friends—and never give up your power. 

Until next time…

– Joshua K. Sigafus