Do you ever feel like something is missing from your life, or that you aren’t entirely passionate about what you spend most of your time doing?

Until the age of 30, I lived an immoral and self-consumed life; I lived for the moment, I spent most of my time pursuing happiness and would only commit time to those I believed I could benefit from in some way. In short, I was a self-absorbed prick.

I struggled with unbalanced emotions; I was anxious about my future and confused or sad about my past (like the best days of my life had already passed). I spent years, travelling the world, moving from job to job, doing work I hated, helping business people get richer, living for the weekend and justifying myself to those I’d sell my time to.

Ignorantly, I used to envy ‘rich’ people. I envied the money and materialistic possessions that ‘rich’ people had. I didn’t give any consideration to the years of hard work and effort that those ‘rich’ people had committed to ascertaining these things.

As I regularly compared myself and my life achievements to those of others, I would beat myself up for not having accomplished anything that I perceived to be meaningful with my life to date.

For years, I strived to establish whether I had a purpose in life, or whether I was just a waste of space and a purposeless moron. I guess hat no-one teaches you this kind of thing in school!

While my mind would race with thoughts about the 1,000,001 things I ‘could’ do with my life, I didn’t have a vision and didn’t know what I wanted to do.

Having a nice idea isn’t the same as having a vision for your future. Over time, it because apparent to me that my biggest problem wasn’t that I didn’t know what life purpose was, but it was more to do with how I was attempting to find it.

Most people try to think their way in and out of their major problems in life. Many people spend their days doing what they think is right, for themselves or others, opposed to what is right, for themselves or others. Most people try to think their way into a more fulfilling life.

Albert Einstein once said ‘The biggest problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them.’ This is a fascinating idea.

Having spent many years working with people from all walks of life and with a full array of different problems, I’ve recognised a trend. The biggest problem that most people have is that they don’t have a clear vision for what they want to achieve in their future.

Most people live most of their lives inside of their heads. Most people think about living a better life than what they actually live.

When I was 17, I had a problem. I was skinny legged and didn’t have as much muscle mass as many of my other Army peers. I’d compare myself to those who had bigger muscles than me, and put myself down as a result.

Eventually, I found a mentor. Corporal Moy. He took me under his wing; he taught me what foods to eat more of, what foods to eat less of, and how to exercise my various muscle groups by lifting different sets of weights through multiple sets of repetitions.

I can remember going home after a hardcore gym session, barely able to move. For my first few weeks of weightlifting, there wasn’t a day I didn’t wake up with aching muscles.

In concept, weight training is a simple practice. We lift weights; we wait a while; we lift more weights; we improve over time and eventually become bigger and stronger than we were before. Simple. Right?

What is true for our muscles applies to all other things in life. Especially our thinking. If we don’t exercise our muscles, our muscles won’t grow. And if we don’t exercise our minds, our minds won’t grow either.

In time and through practice, I learned to lift weights, and my muscles eventually became stronger. Similarly, in recent years, as I’ve exercised my mind, my mind has also grown stronger.

Although I can’t speak for anywhere else in the world, I can talk for the women of Scotland when I state their common complaint about how emotionally inconsistent Scottish guys are.

Since the dawn of time, women have wanted, admired and respected strong men. Young girls find big muscled guys attractive, but mature women choose strength of character opposed to strength of body.

Gone are the days of Jane needing a Tarzan. Jane doesn’t want a circus strongman anymore. She wants a mature man whom she can trust.

So, here’s a few words for all the guys out there who spend more time strengthening their biceps than their minds: the kind of strength that women want cannot be built in the gym through exercising our quads or our biceps. Real strength reflects itself through the life we lead and the decisions we make.

The kind of strength that matters most to people has more to do with integrity and character, not physicality or muscle mass. The kind of strength that matters most to people is having the courage to live out our convictions with disregard for what the crowd is doing. This is what separates the weak from the strong.

Most people who follow the crowd, often don’t know why they do. Most crowd followers give little thought to the direction in which they are headed. Crowd followers mainly believe that if ‘everyone else is doing it’, it must be OK!

Resultantly, most crowd followers think that they’re heading down the High Street when they’re really just walking down a dead end road. People who give time to reflect on where they’re going in life understand that those who follow the crowd usually get stuck in it.

In reality, those who commit their lives to following the crowd are lost and directionless. Employees are lost and directionless. Religious folks are lost and directionless. Gang members are lost and directionless.

These people might think they’re moving forward in life; they might act and behave as if they’re moving forward in life. They might even argue that they’re moving forward in life, but they’re not, they’re lost.

If we want to know our purpose and calling in life, we need to grow into it. We can’t think our way into knowing our life purpose; we can only make sense of those things that we’ve already stepped into it.

Time is the most valuable commodity that each of us possesses, so be sure to treat this time with caution. We can spend your time making money, but you cannot spend our time making more time. Once our time is spent, it’s spent.

To find a meaningful direction in life, we’ve got to get familiar with ourselves and what we want to live for. We need to know what motivates us, what we’re good at, what we enjoy, what inspires us, what excites us, what we pretend to like but don’t, and what lies we’re telling ourselves about our skills, natural talents, abilities and gifts.

Here are three questions which can get us in a ‘moving forward’ way of thinking;

Qu 1. What would you do with your life if you weren’t motivated by money?

Qu 2. What would you do in life if you weren’t bothered by what people think of you?

Qu 3. What would you do if you were no longer driven by making a name for yourself?

If you answer these questions honestly, you should be able to see how to move your life forward. Hopefully…

As you become more familiar with ourselves and what’s important to us, we can utilise your time doing more of what needs to be done, and less of what merely boosts our selfish egos.

Most people are too busy reacting to the events of their lives that they don’t carefully examine what’s working for them and what’s not. Don’t get caught out. Don’t be one of those people.

If you want to live a more rewarding, fulfilling and efficient life that means something to anyone beyond just yourself, I’ve created a free eBook which you can access via the link on the right-side of this page.

You’ll benefit from it most if you answer the questions honestly.

If you do, you’ll find greater clarity about the first steps you can take today towards a life and a career that you’ll be passionate about living.