Competition vs Purpose - Discovering Your Life's Purpose

By Moshe Reuven Sheradsky 

As a branch from my last article on activating your talents and gifts. I’d like to elaborate on one point in a way I didn’t then.

The concept that each person has their very own specific mission in life can save from more than just a bad self esteem. It can save from chasing other people’s priorities, goals, likes, interests, and so on.

Here’s how…

Why do we keep up with the Jones’s? Or at least try to? Or at least want to? Or at least are suggested by our social circles to?

There’s a famous business book called Blue Ocean Strategy. It’s unbelievably helpful in business as in life, and it can be used to help explain how knowing you have a mission will save you a lot of time, energy, indecision, regret, sadness and more..

The red ocean strategy is a strategy completely run by competition. It’s this is what everyone want and is focused on doing, and the way to be is to focus on it and compete with them in it. In business that may mean making the 30,000th replica of Instagram and posting it on the App Store. Or opening up a pizza parlor next to all the other pizza shops in Chicago. In life it can mean making sure you each have this type of car, or this type of vacation or this type of bar mitzvah with these things in it. Or could just mean my kid has to have this degree and work as either a doctor, lawyer or accountant, otherwise I failed as parent… and not because that’s the real goal.. but because jane’s kid is becoming a lawyer and will make 50,000 dollars a year for the next 5 years, and slave away for people’s law firms his whole life, and will be looked at with prestige and honor, retire happily finally wealthy enough to support the family’s consumer lifestyle and survive another 30 years. Red ocean red ocean red ocean. There’s tons of examples of it.

Blue ocean strategy is okay everyone is fighting for a small pie over there… I’m going to go over here where no one is even thinking of going because they are where everyone else is… and I’m going to have the pie for myself. Maybe even patent the entire pie and have everyone that wants to be involved send me checks the rest of their lives for benefitting from my pie.

So too with life. People are different from their purpose with the majorities goals and values being imposed on them. Most people, unfortunately, live in red ocean strategy mode. What is everyone else doing? Okay maybe I can try to do it better than the rest of the 7 billion people doing it.

What if I said, “You have a purpose, and in your purpose, no one can take from you, no one can beat you, no one can make you feel wrong for pursuing. It’s your pie. The only question is, “are you having your cake and eating it too?” “Is there a crum left on your plate?”

It may involve being a lawyer. For some people that’s a part of their purpose. My Grandfather of blessed memory used to always tell my Father that he was one of the only people he knew in his field that was fulfilled and happy being a lawyer. I’d imagine maybe some of them may have wondered if they left their blue ocean for what everyone else was doing somewhere along the way.

If we start our journey and carry them forward based on what’s my purpose? How am I a part of Your plan? What is it that makes me the purpose I am that You put here and what am I supposed to do? We are asking “where’s my blue ocean?” Then if your purpose is to be Jones's son who is a lawyer, your goal is to be the best you can be but because that’s your profession that is part of your purpose. It’s not your only and sole identity, you’re not playing in the red ocean where you need your work applauded, you are fulfilling your purpose.