Feeling Lost? Discover the One Insight That Gave Me Clear Direction and Purpose

I used to think personal development was the answer to all my problems.

After all, you should strive to achieve your full potential, right? And on top, growing personally can be done every day without even knowing your passion or purpose. Therefore, focusing on personal development will make everything better in the long run.

What I didn’t realize: making personal development my end goal made me miss the bigger picture.

If you make personal development the end goal, you engage in mental masturbation a helluva lot. You get caught up in your head, thinking you're a better person than anyone else around you. You might even start looking down on people.

This is why you cannot make personal growth your end goal.

Today, let's talk about what you could do instead.

Focus on usefulness, not personal growth

Being useful should be your main target.

It incorporates two main dimensions that are extremely relevant. First, you focus on the needs of others, not only your own. Second, you still have to grow personally to make yourself more useful.

Here's a personal story to illustrate this:

A few years ago, I embarked on my self-improvement journey because I was lacking the answers to the big questions of life. I wanted to solve my own problems and personal development was the tool of my choice. But I was sucked into the endless world of personal development - where improvements are made just for the sake of improving. Consequently, I forgot about the questions I wanted to answer for myself, got caught up in my head and didn't prioritize action and experimentation.

All of this made me feel miserable. I was thinking and watching "smart stuff", but my problems didn't go away.

This is what happens when you (accidentally) make personal growth your end goal.

By making usefulness your end goal, this won't happen to you.

There's a saying that goes something like this: "Your passion is for you, your purpose is for others". You can argue if that is true or not, but it nicely illustrates that you shouldn't make your purpose about yourself. Your purpose should incorporate other people's needs and wants - and this is exactly what happens when you focus on becoming useful.

When you focus on increasing your usefulness, your growth efforts are channeled and moderated by the needs of others.

How to increase your usefulness

When I say "become useful", I really mean provide value to someone.

Bonus points if that someone is a person or a group of people you care about. This concept is about as old as humanity itself. To not be abandoned by their tribe in the Stone Age, people had to provide value to their community.

The community wasn't only the group they cared about most, but a crucial component to survival. Providing value could mean different things to them, e.g. gathering plants, berries, firewood or hunting down animals.

Providing value requires you to become better and earn the respect of your group.

To do this, you have to execute the following 3 steps:

1 Define the sub-groups/people valuable to you

Make a list of the people and sub-groups you care about.

This could be your family, your friends, work-related and hobby or interest groups you are part of, e.g. cyclists, accountants, fiction-readers, computer nerds, crypto-investors etc.

2 Brainstorm current problems of these groups

Being useful means providing value. Providing value is best done by solving current problems of these groups.

Food and shelter were the main problems to be solved in the Stone Age, so people went out to gather and hunt. If you're an avid fiction-reader, your problem might be that you cannot find high-quality fiction books. So start by solving that problem.

3 Solve problems, become better, repeat

In the example above, you might start a blog recommending your top book finds once a month.

This will require you to become better and learn skills you currently don't have, such as website design, marketing and writing. Solving relevant problems will earn you respect and appraisal from your peers, so you'll want to repeat this process over and over again.

That is where the beauty of this mindset shift lies.

By focusing on becoming useful and providing value, you focus on solving the problems of others.

This will earn you their respect but also require you to become better. So you don't have to give up personal growth, yet don't run the risk of forgetting about the real-world problems you initially wanted to solve.

From my point of view, that's a win-win for everyone.

Stay seeking.

Philipp