The Life Purpose Podcast on Life Signatures Radio

I will say it over and over again, that purpose discovery is done while in motion. If you sit back and wait for a burning bush experience, you will be waiting for a pretty long time. However, when you are in motion, when yo are taking action, you tend to be "led" in the process. Part of the action that you can take is that which dispels your fears. It is that which is rather uncomfortable. I have learnt that doing the uncomfortable and the fearful is one of the most potent ways of purpose discovery. Listen to this.

At the risk of sounding antigovernmental, I want to contest the slogan "Securing Your Future". I am not doing this from the political angle, I am doing this from the philosophical point. The future is unknown. Heck, even this evening is unknown. To the degree that something is unknown, to that degree will we be afraid. It is not about securing the unknown future, it is about daring to go against our fears. Your purpose could be an unknown thing chiefly because you are afraid of pulling towards that direction. But when you do activate the fear factor and go there anyway, you will see incredible stuff revealed about your purpose. Listen to this.

There are very many binaries in life. Life or death. Blessing or Curses. Good or evil. Black or white. Male or female (I'm sure this will be flagged on Facebook). However, there is one binary that I want to focus on: Comfort and Discomfort. It is obvious that if you wanted to know your life purpose, the way of comfort will not work. One will need to select the route of discomfort. The problem is that the discomfort has to contend with fear. Wherever we are afraid, that is where we need to act. In getting the feedback from our actions, we are able to discover what really matters to us. Listen to this.

After clarifying your vision, one might face some doubts. One might wonder if it is the right vision. One might wonder if they are on the right direction in the first place. These doubts are real. In fact, it is for the reason of these doubts that many people would rather not follow through with their life vision. People are afraid to fail, to be laughed at and to waste their time. Thankfully, you can pass your vision through a series of tests that will help you to grow in confidence as you seek to deploy it. Listen to this.

How do you test the validity of your vision? Let's talk about this for a minute. Is getting the best car of your dreams a vision? Is going on vacation a vision? Is it a vision if you can handle it all by yourself? There are critical characteristics of vision that we need to internalize. If you find yourself in pursuit of whatever "personal vision" it is, then it follows that you need to check the validity and see if it really is a vision. At times we confuse things that are goals or milestones, wishes and dreams as vision. There is nothing wrong with that. However, vision really is a different ball game altogether. Listen to this.

Getting the vision could be easy. It could take you, like I keep saying, just about 15 minutes to clarify what your personal vision is. After that, there are questions about it. Doubts come up. The question is: how do you test the validity of the vision that is now yours to deploy. The reason why this is an important question to answer is that people tend to give up on their vision because they do not feel it. There is one critical test that we can make about the vision of our lives. Here it is. Listen.

Without a vision, people perish. People cast off restraint. I mean, there is no point of being circumspect in life if you have no vision whatsoever. But having vision is one part of the equation. There are two other parts. There is owning it and then there is deploying it. Frankly, as much as people say that finding personal vision is hard, it is not. It is the easiest thing in life. Where the rubber meets the road is when that vision has to be lived, breathed and deployed on a daily basis. How do we do that? That is the question that we have to answer to day. Listen to this.

Perhaps you have overcome massive doubts and even time to clarify your vision. I knew that I needed vision on a personal level twelve years or so before I ever clarified it. It might take that long due to some reasons, or it might take just 15 minutes. But now that you do have the vision in place, what happens next? In fact, what do you do to TEST and see the worthiness and the value of that said vision? How do you confidently pursue it? This first test will help you. Listen to this.

If you asked any random stranger about their "Personal vision", at most, you will get shocked looks. It is as if the issue of personal vision is not in the psyche and vicinity of people's minds. And yet if you talk to the successful people at all levels and all niches of life, they will tell you that personal vision was critical to their success one way or another. Why is it then that most people that you and I know do not have a personal vision? Why is it that they are not living and leading their lives around that personal vision? Let's summarize these reasons. Listen to this.

Life affords us options. Even the person that thinks that they have no options, it will just be a matter of perception that will make them realize that all along, they had been surrounded by options. There will always be an option to pursue personal vision or to do what status quo has conditioned you. I was in that bracket for some decades until I documented what my vision in life was and started following it. Even then, there will still be opposition. There is either internal opposition or external opposition to the pursuit of vision. Let's find out a curious reason why many people do not pursue their personal vision. Listen to this.

It is so refreshing these days to hear the language of some of the children who attend some special schools. You hear them talking about goals for the day, goals for the week, goals for the month and so on. And I am talking about pre-teens! It is very refreshing. That is the route of locking our sights on a personal vision. Unfortunately, for the large percentage of pupils, we are steeped into the cramming of general information and technical know how. In the end, we fail in having a personal vision for our lives because we have elevated other types of information so high and forgotten vision. Yet when push comes to shove, it is vision that is needed for us to succeed. Listen to this.

📣 New #Podcast! This is not a sales pitch. It is not a hidden secret. Tony Robbins says that "clarity is power". The best way to have clarity about your life is to create a vision for it. Vision will have that life not only focused, but also respected. Personal vision is a seed that opens up the boundless possibilities in the world. It helps you to unearth your potential and to push up in life with direction and urgency. Without the vision, you are all over the place. People sadly think that getting focused with vision is to limit the opportunities that can come into your life. Nothing can be further from the truth. The opposite is actually true. Listen to this.

Even though we are aware that having vision on a personal level is important for success, we still have a very large percentage of people in any gathering visionless. Some statistics show that it is less than 10% of any gathering that have vision. It is even a smaller percentage when you talk about a vision that has been written down and clear and being followed or worked upon daily. The question therefore is: Why is it that people do not have vision on a personal level? Where could the problem be? Let's find out in this episode.

The Scriptures say that "without a vision, people perish." They cast off restraint. In order for us to succeed, we need vision. There is no success at an individual level worth mentioning that did not come about as a result of vision. And yet personal vision is one of the most ignored tools in the world today. We are so adept at seeking information from all over the place but neglecting the nucleus that will give us exactly what we need to succeed. Here is why vision, especially that at a personal level is paramount for anyone who wants to make it in this life and succeed. Listen in.

As you already know, we are in the midst of a flood of information overload and yet we are starved of information that can lead us to success. You might have all the military hardware in the world for example, but if you have no intelligence, an inferior enemy can take you out. That is the same thing with success. We need "intelligence" in order to know what to do, when and where and in what order. Success might not necessarily need all the information in the world. We just need few bits and pieces that we can create from them a combination that can work. Here are the five pieces of information that are critical to any success, especially at the individual level. Listen in.

There is no doubt that in order to succeed in life, we all need knowledge. We need information and we need revelation. The question is: what kind of information will be potent enough to give us the success that we need? We live in a world that is flooded with information. Information is not necessarily the problem we have...unless of course we are talking about an overload of information. It makes it a bit cumbersome to try and sift out the useful from the millions of trash. It's a task. Success though does not need lots of information. It needs the right kind of information in the right context. Still that information has to be applied. Application is the foundation for fruitfulness. Listen to this.

You will rarely find a person who is not interested in success. Of those you find, probably their identity has been so messed up that they think they do not qualify for it. Nevertheless, different people will tell you different things about success. Most of them will also allude to the fact that success was directly connected to something greater than themselves. Some will call it destiny, calling, higher purpose or such like. At the end of the day, there will be no success worth writing home about if we do not find that purpose. Listen to this.

We are all anchored somewhere. There are some people whose anchors are so strong that they affect them positively. As a human race the knowledge about our origin, whether in terms of our actual cradle or where we have been cultured will automatically affect our success. As such, the question of where we come from has a dimension that will determine different pieces of information that will be critical to our success. At the end of the day, success is about the right amount of knowledge, in the right context and used the right way and with the right timing. Listen to this.

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They say that knowledge is power, but we now know that it is acted upon knowledge that is power. If you have all the knowledge in the world and you do not act upon it, it is as useless as not having the knowledge. In fact, the Bible says that knowledge puffs up...but loves builds up. There is no way that you and I can be successful if we do not have the right knowledge and in the right context and then we take action on that knowledge. The knowledge I am talking about here is not academic knowledge. For instance, if you did not have the knowledge that you are entitled to succeed, you might not. Listen to this.

There is a curious connection between success and knowledge. I am not talking about general knowledge, technical knowledge or current affairs. Those do have a critical place they play. However, the knowledge and the revelation that we as humans are entitled to success will go a long way in catalyzing our success in life. If we knew that we are to be successful, then we have a chance. The opposite is also true. If you knew that you were not entitled to it, you won't seek it in the first place. Listen to this.

Success in life is attainable by "whoever". It is all about a matter of following some "simple" principles. No one in life is exempt from the life of success. All are candidates. Whereas we often look at what is not in place that can help us to succeed, at the same time we always overlook or are oblivious of what is already available that we can use to get the journey started. A good example is the day that we have been given. The secret to success is to use this day just the way it is and put in some efforts that can lead us to success. What efforts could those be? Listen to this.

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Success and a life of legacy are always in the vicinity, or at least we have around us a place where we can start crafting it. The most oblivious thing that we are blessed with is the day. It is in the day that we can find solutions. The greatest question that we must answer each day is this: What good did I do today? If there are positive answers to this question, we are well on our way. In this episode, we look at one more thing that we can do today that can lead us to success. Listen to this.

The most forgotten day is today. Why? Because it might not give us the instant breakthroughs that we are looking for in life in order to be successful. The fact that we might not get paid today does not mean that it should go to waste. Success is brought about by faithfulness in expending efforts each day that we are alive and healthy. Without effort, forget about success. Without patience with process, forget about success. Therefore, our question remains the same: What can we do today that is good and will contribute to the success and the legacy that we desire? Listen to this.

Someone said that if I were to see success in your life, it would be found in what you are doing daily. They meant that each day consistently taken specific action on constitutes success eventually. An effort a day can be something that can easily be taken for granted. Probably there will be no major reward in the day. No earning. No contract. No connection. However, that activity that you have done, that effort that you have expended cannot be counted as nothing just because there was no pay in it. The question we need to answer is this: What good can you do today? Or better yet, What good did I do today? Listen to this.

Success in life can have as many meanings as there are people who are seeking it. True success though is never attained acutely or big bang. It always is going to take time and process. The most oblivious thing that we are aware of about success is the day. That 24 hour period. What we look for success outside of the day could not necessarily be available. However, around us we have the day, and whatever effort we expend on that day will eventually result into the success we seek. Listen to this.

Ask different people about their opinion on the most sinister word in the English language and you will definitely get different answers. It depends on people's belief systems and their values...but also on what they see in their productivity. For me, the most sinister word is the word "oblivious". It tells me that all that I needed to be successful could be around me, but all along I am looking for the expensive, the complicated, the spectacular and the elusive green card. All along, the answer is around or within me. Listen to this.

What If I told you that EVERYTHING you an I needed to be successful in life is already available around us and within us? What would you say? Someone said that the secret to life is what we do daily. The key therefore is what you and I have: A day. We both do have that advantage every 24 hours. It is what we do in terms of efforts that will contribute to our success. For a day to count, we have to have the spine to ignore the words and perfections of the critics. Without you, the critic would not have his life anyway. Listen to this.

Do not be fooled that the language of "vision" is only applicable to "mature" adults, and as such, children cannot have vision. If we think that way, we ought to blame the way we were raised up. Where there is no vision, people perish. Certainly, one of the most potent things we can ever give our children, one critical weapon for success in life is a life with a vision. In fact, the only thing that we need to do is to emphasize it. We need not teach them, we just need to help the catch it, for it is already there. Here are 6 reasons why it is important. Listen to this.

At times parents make vows that their children will never go through the same "hardship" that they went through. And so we go through great lengths to make sure that they are shielded from our perceived hardships. At the end of the day, there is a way in which we deprive them of the vision to serve humanity. One of the greatest things we can leave in our children is vision. Since vision is always outward looking to other people, there is a way that it can help people to serve humanity. Listen to this.

Someone said that what you leave to a child is not as critical as what you live inside a child. In other words, if you put vision in them, it would be much more potent and critical than leaving them with things they can touch and feel, minus vision. What vision does is to compel them and constrict them. The child with immense vision would not worry you about the company of people that they are going to keep. Friends, business partners, lovers and so on will be sieved through that vision. Listen to this.

There could be a slight difference between productivity and performance. One can lead to another but one can do one and not get another. The seed for productivity in the life of a human being is vision. If you were to give a child one potent weapon to make it in this life, that weapon will have to do with vision. There could be many other things that we can give them but without vision, they will struggle. Listen to this.

The Bible says that without vision people perish. They cast off restraint. It's true. I do believe that the worst thing you can do for a child is to give them a parent with no vision either for themselves or for that child. The opposite is also true. The best thing you can do for a child is to give them vision of the best possible outcome, and also have a vision for yourself as a parent, guardian, or anyone in authority over that child. When your child tells you that they are bored, it is a sign that you have not given them vision or created an environment for engagement of any vision, however big or small. Listen to this.

Children are impressionable and malleable. Just about the same way that religious people are but let me not digress. My point is that it is possible for a child to follow course that they have been put on and go through it in absolute trust and blindness. Yikes! So when we tell our children to study hard so that they can get a job and escape hardship and poverty, guess what? That is exactly what they do by the billions around the world. Who takes time to cast vision for them? Vision for leadership? Impact? Transformation of the world? Creation and invention and innovation of things? If we don't do this, the default takes shape. They grow up to "Make it in life" whatever that means. Listen to this.

Can you remember as you grew up when people spoke highly of you? When they said that you have a promise and great potential? What did that do to you? Of course it inspired you. If you do not remember that part, you know exactly what you missed. Unfortunately there are those who remember the complete opposite. They were told that they would not amount to anything. It must have affected them. Just a few escape from this projection and build exemplary lives. Vision is critical in the life of a child. Listen to this.

You can never fail to talk passionately about children. They represent potential and possibility more than any age group in life. The represent malleability, pliability and ease of shaping. If you asked different people about the most important thing that you can give children, you will probably get different answers. I saw a friend asking for any three books that you can recommend for your son. Different answers were given. I tend to believe though that there is one most potent thing that will shape the destinies of children. It is the power of vision. Listen to this.

At the end of the day, the quality of life we live is directly connected to the quality of decisions we make. Granted, we unconsciously make decisions on a daily basis. However, there are a pocket of decisions that need to be made intentionally, deliberately, consciously, instantly and incessantly in order to direct the kind of life that we would love to live. If you asked different people, they will probably tell you different things about those decisions. Here is a summary of the 6 top decisions that I think we should be making in life. Listen to this.

We live and transact in a body. Technically, we are spirits, but no spirit operates on earth without a body. That makes the body one of the most fundamental aspects of life. It is therefore important for us to make critical decisions regarding our health. The key decision is not just to maintain health and to be healthy. We need to go a step further and make sure that we are healthier as the years progress. Well, just like the previous points already shared, no one will ever be healthier unless they make a decision about it. Listen to this.

The growth and development of the individual person can be attributed to not very many things, but just a few pillars here and there. One of the main things that will necessitate one's growth, improvement and development is the habit of making instant, constant and fast decisions. It goes without saying. There are not so many decisions that one needs to make. I am talking about the major decisions that we need to effect in our lives. Just a few of them are important. Of them, there is the decision to collaborate with men and women of like passions that will go a mighty long way. Listen to how this is important.

One of the characteristics of the human race is that we are always predisposed to improve. We have gone through one revolution and another and still when you look at the projections in robotics, AI, Nano tech and so on, we can still be better. Take a look at it from the individual perspective. There is a great chance that I can be a better man. I can be a better father, husband, CEO and so on. This, however, does not happen arbitrarily. There has to be a conscious choice made towards that. In this episode, we talk about one more powerful decision that you can make in your life that will be beneficial to you for years to come. Listen to this.

There comes a time in life when we have to make a decision concerning how our lives will go. Unless that moment comes, nothing happens. The default mode of life is not growth, it is always drifting. That is why decision-making is one critical aspect of life. What we do not have can be brought about by making a conscious decision. That's where the rubber meets the road. In this episode, we look at one of those decisions that you need to make in life. This is absolutely powerful. Listen.

There is one major thing that we can do daily that can impact the quality of life that we live. You notice that on a daily basis, from the moment we are awake, we are thinking all the while about activities. We want to do this and that. Tackle this and that. Solve this and that. In between, there are many distractions and detours that we need to handle. Before you know it, the day is gone, well spent. We find that we have not had some time to just be reflective, be quiet and be meditative to consider our lives. And yet the decision to do this can be very instrumental in the quality of life that we are going to have. Listen to this.

When it comes to forging forward in life, one person said that it could be simple...and yet not necessarily easy. All of us have the wherewithal that we need to make changes and transformation in life. It is within us or around us. There is one major ingredient that shapes the way our destinies will look like. That one thing is simple: Decision making. Think about it for a minute: Before you make any decision on anything, things remain the same. The moment a decision is made, changes start being effected. Indecision therefore is one of the biggest problems we face for individual transformation. Listen to this.

There could be many things available either within us or around us that would be the starting points of our breakthroughs. If you are talking about health, wealth, relationships, businesses and so on, the biggest mistake we make is to think that the breakthrough lies elsewhere. The truth is that we could be oblivious of what seeds of breakthrough are around us and we just ignore. There is only one thing that we have to do...and it is simply to make a decision. Listen to this.

You can have your vision written down in less than an hour, actually in less than 15 minutes. You know why? Because you already know what it is. It is not foreign to you. It is not something outside of you. It is not even complicated. What is keeping you from not having your personal vision written down is simply a decision. Probably you do not feel so comfortable and confident enough to craft the vision and follow through. Probably you are afraid that what you will come up with would be wrong. Well, if that is your fear, then how do you compare what you are afraid to come up with with what you already are living under? Listen to this.

W. Clement Stone said that "definiteness of purpose" is the beginning of all forms of success, something like that. This means that it is important for individuals (that's what I am drawn to) to determine what their life will be all about. Frankly, people think that coming up with a personal vision is one of the most complicated things. It is not. We all have passion, desires, wishes and so on...and those give us a hint of what our personal vision in life could be about. Listen to this and learn how easy it is to come up with your vision.

Like a broken record, let me say this: Coming up with a vision is the easiest part. In fact, that can be done in a sitting of 15 minutes, I kid you not! If you do not have a personal vision, you are only 15 minutes away from crafting one. Make a decision and do it. What is the difficult part is what follows after you have crafted the vision. To bring it to fruition is the most critical part and perhaps the difficult part. That is one major reason why people would rather not have a personal vision. Listen to this.

The fact is that working on your long term personal vision is not the only option that you do have in life. There will be very many opportunities for you to work on other people's vision. Heck, most people do that for their entire lives. However, in the wake of the uncertainties in life, and in the availability of different options, what do you do when you have to make your vision a reality? Do you work on your vision or you take up someone else's vision (get employed?) How do you navigate that? Listen to this.

One of the greatest reasons as to why people would rather be employed than work on their vision is impatience. A job gives you instant cash in 30 days. Your vision gives you no promise, at times even for years. However, when the vision starts paying off, it doesn't just pay your bills. It pays for families. If you wanted your vision to come to fruition, one of the most neglected things you will need to do is to stick with it through thick and thin. This is what a baby does when she wants to walk. She tries....UNTIL. Listen to this.