Self-coaching tool: Venn Diagram
Do this exercise to find your purpose
To find your obsession you must first become aware of it.
Here is another tool from my coaching toolbox that you can utilize to gain more clarity on your life purpose.
(You can draw this on paper or you can go digital and use a mind-mapping tool or a tablet).
You can see the picture above so let’s get to it.
Draw these three circles, and let's meditate on each one.
Circle 1. Unique Knowledge
Unique knowledge is what you have to offer to this world. This sphere includes your specific knowledge, skills, areas of expertise, personality, etc. Here are self-coaching questions you can ask yourself to fill in this sphere:
- What are your core hard skills?
- What are your strong foundational (soft/human) skills?
- Where do you feel the skill gap?
- What skills do you want to acquire?
- What are your natural strengths and weaknesses?
- How can you amplify the former and compensate for the latter?
- What are your areas of expertise?
- What projects have you completed in the past?
- What is the specific knowledge that you have accumulated which takes you above the 50th percentile in that domain of knowledge?
- What patterns can you observe in your past (career) experiences?
- Ask your inner circle: how would they describe you in 10 adjectives?
- When do you feel the most productive?
- What is your MVO? (Minimum Viable Offering — something you can offer people as value in exchange for money)
Why is this important to understand?
This is how most (if not all) 1-person businesses start.
You become a problem solver.
- You solve the problem for yourself.
- You become exceptionally good at solving that type of problem.
- You then come up with a way to package it in the form of a service or product that solves the problem for others.
- You apply leverage and serve the solution at scale.
- And voila! You have a business.
There are 2 forms of leverage that you can apply:
- Permission-based leverage
- Permissionless leverage
Permission-based leverage is the leverage where you need permission from other people:
- Capital — money that you can invest (e.g. Warren Buffet who’s managing other people’s money. Other people have to give him permission to do that i.e. trust him with their money)
- Human Resource — leveraging the mind and the labor of the collective (e.g. Any kind of company. People sell their time, skills, and unique knowledge in exchange for salary, benefits, and stability. Companies need people’s consent to leverage them.)
Permissionless leverage is something that has appeared with the rise of the Internet:
- Code — now everyone can learn how to code, create a software product, and ship it to the whole world. (e.g. Any app on your phone, or this website)
- Media — you can create a digital asset, and again, make it available to everyone online. (e.g. This article is an example of applying media as leverage. I am productizing my mind). Which brings me to my point:
Your mind is your product.
Understand what are you uniquely good at. Amplify your strength. Continue building up on top of the existing skillset. Gain clarity on your offering. Package it. Ship it. Fail fast. Fail forward. Iterate.
Circle 2. Passion
Your passion is your fuel. This is what pushes you and what pulls you. Gain awareness of those drivers because they will define your Circle 1. The way you manage and channel your attention will define the kind of specific knowledge you acquire. Where attention goes, energy flows, or in other words:
What you focus on expands.
Self-coaching questions for written reflections:
- What do you love to do?
- When have you experienced a state of flow?
- Solving what kind of problems energizes you?
- What is the change that you want to see in the world?
- If you could dedicate your life to one problem, what would it be?
- What have you been doing in the past?
- What elements of that work have you truly enjoyed?
- What are you researching constantly?
- Who do you follow for their thought leadership?
- If you were to write an article on Medium, what would it be about?
- What is stopping you from writing it?
- What do people in your inner circle think you should be doing?
- What is your ethos?
- What reputation do you want to build? (What people should say about you when you are not in the room?)
- What are your Values? (Complete the Values exercise here)
Understand what pulls you. Why is this important? Because what pulls you will pull your attention. Driven by your curiosity you will be deepening your specific knowledge in that particular domain of your interest.
Examples are everywhere:
- If being Fit is your Value. You will research workout routines, diets, and supplements. You will go to the gym and hang out with fit people. You will work out. And, eventually, you will be fit.
- If being Smart is your Value. You will read, write, and listen to other smart people. You will reflect, think deeply, spend time in academia, do research, create knowledge-based products, etc. And eventually, you will build up your intelligence.
- If being Rich is your Value. You will research the hell out of Alex Hormozi and the likes. You will read Napoleon Hill and other books on wealth creation. You will grind like crazy. You will constantly seek to build monetization vehicles. Eventually, you will make money.
- If being Spiritual is your Value. You will be building the foundational knowledge, reading spiritual literature, and seeking gurus to listen. You will meditate daily. You will learn how to fast. Eventually, you will experience Awakening.
This is not rocket science really :)
Understand what pulls you. Understand what you are naturally good at. Combine both and go into that place to become even better. Persevere. Apply discipline. And eventually, you will become the best.
Become that best at being you.
And there you will find no competition because there is only one you in this world. You are unprecedented. You are the monopoly. You are the niche of 1.
When something is a play for you and you can do it for 16 hours straight completely losing yourself in the process, anyone who calls it work will lose if they play against you.
Circle 3. Demand
The last sphere includes the “external” world. Yes. I deliberately put the word “external” in quotation marks. There is nothing external about the world. This is just an illusion of duality.
You are in the world and the world is in you.
But I don’t want to go on a philosophical tangent here.
The questions that you need to ask yourself here are:
- What does the world need right now?
- What are the problems that are being solved right now and who are the people that are being paid for solving those problems?
- Who are the high-earning people I admire?
- How have they built their wealth?
- What is the money-making potential here?
- What is my target market?
- Who is my client?
- What do they care about?
- What is my method of solving their problem?
- How can I offer a service?
- How can I start consulting?
- How can I build a product?
- How can I scale?
- I have solved this problem for myself. Why would someone pay me for solving this problem for them?
- What is their psychology of buying? How are they making their decisions?
- What is my psychology of buying? What am I buying and why?
- How do I get my message out?
- How do I introduce my solution?
This part requires thorough research. Luckily there is no shortage of data points. People out there are making money.
They are hustling driven by their Passions and Values and discovering creative ways to leverage their Specific Knowledge that they acquire in the process of following their Passions and Values.
You can do that too. And that is the point of Convergence of all 3 spheres.
Your Purpose.
Convergence
If you have done all three parts of this exercise thoroughly, you have increased your self-awareness and should have more clarity by now.
Chances are you have already come to the realization that your Purpose has always been there, you start seeing patterns, and you’ve been living it (maybe not always consciously) this whole time.
What’s next?
Execute.
Let’s agree on a new concept of MVP. Minimum Viable Purpose.
If you don’t have absolute clarity on what you want to do with your life, that’s totally fine. If you don’t want to solve the world, that’s fine also. Not everyone should have a grand mission of colonizing Mars.
If you can take just one piece of land on this planet, your sphere of Influence, however small you think it is at this point, and make the most of it, serve people, and make it beautiful, wouldn’t that be You Living Your Purpose?
If your Purpose is to serve your Family, this is great. If your Purpose is to serve your Community, this is great. If your Purpose is to serve Your Self i.e. become the person you dream to become, this is great.
Go there.
Personal development is Purpose development.
By the time you are there, you will be transformed. You will find a new purpose. Your Purpose will evolve with you.
One last thing…
Talkers must DO. Doers must TALK.
One of the problems with this world is that the smartest people keep silent.
Why?
Their rationalization of why they should keep silent is always too sophisticated.
They are so good at intellectualizing and convincing others that they have convinced themselves that they are not the people to speak. But the question is always the same: who if not you?
Who must take the ultimate responsibility for the things you so deeply care about?
Obviously, the other side of this problem is that the fools are too loud. It’s easy to create noise.
Empty vessels rattle.
To be full means to have substance. I know you do have substance because otherwise what would you be doing here?
You are here because you question your purpose. You want to know how to self-actualize, serve others, and build wealth on the way. The ones who suffer from ignorance are too busy perpetuating their ignorance.
Have a good reflection and I hope this tool helps you on your journey.
To discover more tools of meaning visit my personal website HERE. 👈
I will leave you with my favorite poem by Marianne Williamson:
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear in that we are powerful beyond measure.It is our Light, not our Darkness, that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be?You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the World.
There is nothing enlightening about shrinking
so that other people won’t feel unsure around you.We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us.
It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone.As we let our own Light shine,
we consciously give other people permission to do the same.As we are liberated from our own fear,
our presence automatically liberates others.”
