The Why of Achieving Success: How Your Purpose Shapes Your Success

We all want to achieve success in our lives. We may want to achieve success in different areas of our lives and in different ways. But it is in our human nature to want to do better, achieve more, and feel successful. We have been taught since we were little that no matter what we choose to do in life, we should do our best—and try to win!

How do we do that? Some writers want to tell you about the "secrets of success" and lull you into the false belief that wishing will make it so. What I want to do is to make the principles plain to you and remind you of one thing you probably already know: success takes dedication and hard work. The keys to success are really the tips of the iceberg, and what you do every day in your own work will determine the extent and the quality of your success. This article is an introduction to the importance of knowing your purpose. Defining your purpose is a necessary precondition to learning the principles of success and applying them to your own life.

Let's start with a definition. Success means creating a new reality for ourselves, a new life of achievement of our goals and satisfaction of our needs. Our purpose may be to become wealthy and self-sufficient in our lives so that we can pursue other dreams in the next phase of our lives. Our purpose may be to save the world and as many of the souls in it as we can reach. Our purpose may be to be able to help family and friends and even strangers to achieve their goals in life. You get to choose. But remember this: the purpose of your path may predetermine the distance you will travel. If you do not have a purpose greater than yourself and your material needs, you are not likely to go far. Forget the money mantras. Go for goodness.

Here are a few brief examples:

1. Louisa May Alcott began selling stories as a teenager in order to help support her mother and sisters.

2. Alexander Graham Bell began inventing aids for the deaf as a youngster because he wanted to help his deaf mother participate in family conversations.

3. Harriet Tubman did not stop with her own journey to freedom but returned many times to lead hundreds of others to freedom.

4. Grandma Moses began painting at the age of 75 when arthritis put a cramp on her stitching and her work was discovered the market where she traded art for food during the Depression.

5. Booker T. Washington struggled to learn to read at age 7 when it was illegal to teach slaves to read, trading bits of bread for books, knowing that education was the ticket to freedom, and wanting to share it with all the young people he could.

These lives in history teach us about the power of purpose in becoming successful. Their purposes were found in reaching out to help others as well as themselves. Whatever your field, profession, and talents, you must decide now what your purpose is to give cohesion, dedication and passion to the necessary work. Although the science of success is something we can all study, it will be an empty exercise of mere self-will without the deeper spiritual and mental work that it takes to answer the question: why? It may well be that the failure to complete this deeper self-examination has prevented you from achieving success before now. To decide your purpose gives you motivation to step up to your own success. Knowing your purpose also gives shape and color to the masterpiece you hope to make of your life's work.

Many success stories reveal extraordinary talents, but many others demonstrate that ordinary people can achieve extraordinary success. Many of the remarkable success stories we can study, like the examples given above, involved a person who took a limitation or a disability and achieved success either in spite of it or because of it. These compelling life stories can teach us how to be strong, overcome adversity, and rise up above our limitations. And they teach us even more than those powerful life lessons. They teach us how to turn our own perceived limitations into the unlimited spirit of success by deciding that it will be our purpose to help others in the same difficult circumstances as ourselves.