B00CHVIVMY EBOK by Jon Acuff Read Free Book Online

us forever?
    Forget finding a purpose. It’s a never-ending story that will leave you empty. Live with purpose instead.
    Get up and go to work with purpose. Handwrite three thank-you notes to employees today.
    Play with your kids with purpose. Apply the same creativity and energy you use for projects at work to your playtime with your kids. Create “family goals” like “Walk my kids to school fifty times this year.”
    Love your spouse with purpose. Go on dates, don’t wait for moments to reconnect to happen naturally, and encourage them with intentionality.
    Vacation with purpose. Turn off your email for longer than twelve seconds and realize no one died during your absence.
    Dream with purpose. Follow the action steps in the back of this book instead of just reading it and putting it right back on a shelf.
    Whatever you’re going to do, do it with purpose. Not as if purpose is a key you’re going to find in the bottom of a trunk of old sweaters, but rather as if purpose is an approach to life that can shape everything you do.
    The Great Wall
    How will you know when you’re living with purpose instead of trying to find purpose? When you stop worrying about the great wall of purpose. That may feel impossible at first because it’s so massive. It stretches miles and miles in either direction. It’s 1,000 feet tall and disappointingly close to the starting line.
    It stands like a sentinel on the path to awesome. We can’t dig under it. We can’t scale it. We can’t break through it. But there is a door right there in the middle of the wall. You can see the land of awesome through the keyhole. You can hear awesome if you put your ear against the door. You know awesome is just on the other side. But the great misconception is that you need a key to open the door. You don’t.
    The door is unlocked. You just need to turn the knob and walk through it.
    That’s the first secret about purpose. The door has been open the whole time. Push the door open and take the next step into awesome.
    The second secret about purpose is that it usually finds you. Purpose is attracted to motion. Purpose is attracted to momentum. Purpose loves to surprise you mid-stride. Very rarely will it greet you on your front doorstep. More often than not, you’ll encounter purpose in the middle of the road when you least expect it.
    So start. The door has always been open.
    But I must warn you. The moment you decide, “I’m going to live with purpose today instead of trying to find my purpose someday,” you’ll be tempted to look for shortcuts. Now that you are free to start down the path of Learning, you may want to turn that freedom into a license to jump ahead. Don’t. It never works out.
    Shortcuts
    I don’t know about you, but I am exhausted. We escaped average. Took our first step toward awesome. Opened the door in the great wall of purpose. It’s been an arduous few hours. And now we’re on the edge of the land of Learning and the horizon looks massive.
    Want to jump right over the first three destinations and land in Harvesting? Wouldn’t you rather leap from the start straight into the land where it rains money? I would. And if you’d prefer that too, congratulations, you’re human.
    We all want a shortcut.
    When confronted with work and a reward, we all would prefer the reward first or at least as soon as possible. But the path to awesome doesn’t work that way. Ask any honest sage if they were an expert at something the first time they tried it, and they’ll giggle and probably give you a caramel.
    We all search for shortcuts. We all secretly hope there’s a back door to our dreams. But there’s not, even if you’re Gwyneth Paltrow.
    She is in the Mastering stage when it comes to acting. She’s won an Oscar, been in more than twenty movies, and married somebody famous. I guess that last one doesn’t make you a great actress, but it felt relevant somehow.
    One day she decided she wanted to be a musician too. She signed