over the years I receive thousands of emails one of the questions I get all the time is Robert I have no idea how to find my life's task I'm completely at loss at to this please help me and fortunately now I've talked about finding your life's task given specific advice in hundreds of interviews over the years and here are clips that going to help you find your way discover your own life's Tas ask so I don't have to answer each and every one of these emails which would take me a lifetime even though I would
like to the key to everything is actually being strategic with yourself and looking at yourself and being honest with yourself so if you figure out what your life's task is if you figure out I was meant to start a business or to write a book or whatever and it really connects to you and you have a great love and excitement about it then when people are being political and they're trying to distract you or they're giving you bad advice you have the energy to move past it but if you're filled with doubts and insecurities if
you go oh I kind of want to write a book but maybe I want to start my own restaurant or maybe I want to write poetry or maybe I want to be a rock star it's never going to add up to anything right and then when people come up with their bad ideas or they're political or they're envious you'll fall for it so you have to have a real good solid sense of who you are what makes you different and what you love well you know being a human being is not easy as opposed to
an animal because we're born and nobody gives us a direction our parents might be a little bit our college teachers Etc mentors but generally we're on our own and it's a very very difficult process you wake up in the morning and you don't really know what you can do you could choose 12 different paths it can be very confusing and very overwhelming when you find that sense of purpose when you find what I call your life's task everything has a Direction everything has a purpose your energy is concentrated it's not like you're just going down
a single narrow pathway it's not like life becomes boring and it's just about discipline and solving problems it's actually the most exciting thing that can ever happen to you because you never have that lost feeling you wake up in the morning you go yeah this is what I need to accomplish people come at you with all kinds of distractions and boring and irritating things you're able to cut it out it's just the most marvelous piece of internal radar that you can have so I genuinely wish that everybody can find that kind of internal radar you
can fake your way when you're in your 20s and 30s because you're young life's exciting you can make money can be sort of a motivating factor but what happens is you're less and less engaged in your work you're not connected deeply you're kind of bored you're not paying deep attention you're sort of skating by and by your late 30s it starts to catch up with you and people are coming up who are younger than you who are who are handsomer who who are less expensive they replace you you're downsized you're out of a job and
suddenly you don't have the skills to adapt because you didn't really follow something you were meant to follow finding those things that when you read a online and you find a subject what what your eyes light up at what you want to explore it's a process it's not going to happen overnight it depends on how old you are where you are in life it's never too late to make an adjustment or to find who you are I didn't write the 48 Laws of Power or start writing until I was 36 and up until that moment
I was kind of a lost soul I was kind of unhappy and I was wandering around it can take time as long as you're trying as long as you're exploring it'll probably come but if you're only following what other people are doing you're in trouble the people who really get far in life who really achieve something it's not that they're so gold driven they don't think I want to become a master I want to write this great book they're actually people who enjoy the process of their work like I enjoy putting the book together researching
it building it if all I thought about was the end and getting money and attention and being on Barry kibri it wouldn't work you have to actually literally enjoy the details that are involved in your work and how do you do that well you choose a career that at least excites you in some way where you can handle the setbacks the tedium the practice the boring hours it's inevitable if you want to be a great violinist you you're not going to be born that way you have to put in the 10,000 the 20,000 hours and
the more you do it the more pleasurable it becomes the more pleasurable it becomes the harder you practice if you spend your 20s trying to learn skill and something that connects to you deeply then things are going to happen to you by the time you reach 30 you've discovered your life's task it may not be something so specific for me it was writing words but I didn't know what to write I tried novels I tried journalism I tried theater I tried screenwriting but you know it it gives you a direction and you try and you
try and try and you know that's what you were meant for that's what you were destined for you feel connected to it you feel a love for it and so when it comes time to do the tedious stuff you're able to do it because you know in the end it'll pay rewards you'll get better and better at it and the con is so deep that to not do it would be miserable psychologist Abraham maslo who studied a lot of of children for instance he said that children they have what he calls impulse voices and these
are voices that say I like this I don't like that they're very clear they know what they like and what they don't like everyone had that because it's the nature of being an infant in this world right because it's natural it's a voice that's naturally inside all of of us and then as you get older you start listening to Mr Harbinger and Mrs Harbinger telling you don't do this do this you know this is what you should behave like this don't behave like that and slowly you go through a process where you're not hearing it
anymore you're hearing what teachers tell you you're hearing what parents tell you you're hearing what peers are telling you about what's cool what's not cool I'm talking about like your career what you were meant to do and then you arrive you're 18 19 years old and you haven't a clue because you can't hear that voice anymore and you're going to try this that that the other not based on things that are deep inside of you but based on what other people have told you you should do or what they think is cool the amount of
motivation you feel the emotional connection you have to what you're studying or doing that is something within your control that is something you can choose to take you you're going to find people giving you all kinds of great advice about your careers about where you should go for your MBA Etc but if there's one piece of advice that I think is more important than that is that is it is this idea of following this these natural inclinations and creating your own career path and finding a way to engage those deepest motivating parts of your psyche
you've got to find out what makes you unique what it is that you love that's completely who you are that is like your potential when you were born that thing that really nobody else can do it's a process it's not going to something that's going to a light bulb goes on in your mind but there are indications of it in your childhood when you were 16 or 17 things that you love that connect to you in a very deep emotional way it's not just suddenly quitting your job and going off and writing poetry or playing
the guitar we all have to make a living we have to be practical but there are ways for adjusting your life's path so that it matches something that excites you if you have no connection to who you are and what makes what you really love you're going to hit that wall at 35 and life isn't going to be pretty there's a book I recommend for everybody it's Howard Gardner's five frames of mind it's helped me immensely the idea is he talks about five forms of intelligence our problem is we think of intelligence as mostly intellectual
but there are many forms of intelligence there's the intelligence that has to do with words there's abstract intelligence that has to do with patterns and Mathematics there's kinetic intelligence that has to do with the body there's social intelligence he has five of them and the idea is your brain naturally veers towards one of them it can veered towards two of them that happens but generally one of them kind of dominates and it's like a grain in your brain that's going in a certain direction you want to go with that grain because that's where your power
will lie so when you're young if you go back and think about when you were four or five you you can maybe get a picture of some kind of direction or voice inside of you that was impelling you towards this your life's task as I call it is to return to those inclinations and to that uniqueness that marked each and every one of you at Birth at whatever age you find yourself you must reflect back upon those earliest inclinations you must look at those subjects in the present that continue to spark that childlike intense curiosity
in you and you must look at those subjects and activities that you've been forced to do over the past few years that repel you that have no emotional resonance based on these Reflections you determine a direction you must take right or music or a particular branch of science or a form of business or public service
