The fulfillment of your purpose is not a destination. There is no point where you stop fulfilling it. Even if you’re blessed to retire early, your purpose will still be in you wherever you retire to. This concept is important to grasp so that we don’t become distracted along the journey and so that we take time to celebrate small but important steps in the lifelong journey of fulfilling our ultimate purpose.
In order to become a doctor you must get accepted to medical school after you’ve already completed an undergrad program. Both of these are small but important victories. If you’re a surgeon you will likely hone your technique using a cadaver before putting your skills to the test with live patients. This is a small but critical victory we patients take solace in.
In life, growth of any kind is the result of taking each challenge seriously and accurately assessing how you handled it. I heard Dhati Lewis say, “be honest with where you are so you can best assess where you’re going and how to get there.” Among other things, knowing your purpose helps you to know if you’re going or growing in the correct direction. It would be a shame to achieve several victories and then find out 10 years later that you won at the wrong game. Purpose keeps you on a straight and narrow path that ends with ultimate victory.
UNEARTHING VICTORY
Every journey has a starting point. Every life has an ending point. Fulfillment occurs between those two benchmarks. If our focus is not on the teachable moments as well as the momentous moments we might miss the moment. I have a tendency to focus on what didn’t work. Often it isn’t until I talk with other people that I gain a clearer perspective on what victories I did achieve.
Additionally, you may experience victory in some areas of your life that won’t become apparent until years later. You may have gained some knowledge through adverse circumstances that in the future will help you find a solution where others still see a problem. Smaller victories of our past are often unearthed when we are forced to recall them in future predicaments.
UPWARD VICTORY
It takes discipline to achieve anything worth achieving. Sometimes we claim to want to be better or do better but our effort tells a different story.
In The Spirit Of The Disciplines, Dallas Willard writes, “It is part of the misguided and whimsical condition of humankind that we so devoutly believe in the power of effort-at-the-moment-of-action alone to accomplish what we want and completely ignore the need for character change in our lives as a whole. The general human failing is to want what is right and important, but at the same time not to commit to the kind of life that will produce the action we know to be right and the condition we want to enjoy. This is the feature of human character that explains why the road to hell is paved with good intentions. We intend what is right, but we avoid the life that would make it reality.”
Every step matters. Practice really does make perfect. Make sure that whatever purpose you are called to deliver in public you have practiced in private.
ULTIMATE VICTORY
Ultimately we want to fulfill the purpose we feel called to complete. If you are a speaker you will make mistakes from time to time. Just make sure you make different mistakes each time. As a teacher, business owner, author, athlete, actress, or inventor you will have small defeats as well as small victories. The journey doesn’t end until you stop traveling. Minor defeats do not derail the opportunity for ultimate victory. If we have the proper perspective those defeats are not defeats at all, but rather valuable lessons that we learn that will give us wisdom for the future.
Abraham Lincoln said, “the best way to predict your future is to create it.” We need to visualize the ultimate victory of fulfilling our purpose while being present in our experience of smaller victories. There are no shortcuts to victory, not in sports, not in business, and not in life. Remember that the day you plant the seed is not the day you will eat the fruit. Small victories are where the seeds of victory are planted, watered and nurtured. Those small steps, if done correctly, guarantee that fruit will ultimately be produced.
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