Your goal in life and the progress you make towards that goal has great effect on how you feel about yourself, your self-esteem.  I’ll prove it to you!  Imagine someone that is unemployed, lives with their parents, and plays video games and watches TV all day.  At age 5 you could call that being a child, but at age 40?  What about someone who seems like they’re constantly getting drunk and hooking up with random people.  At age 20 you could call that a frat boy, but at age 60?  Who knows!  Maybe it’s your dream to be supported by your parents or live for the night life until you die, but my guess is that you could do better…and until you do, you won’t be able to take pride in who you are.  What you need is some purpose or goal in life, some self-direction.

Self-direction requires two things: a purpose that is worthy of your devotion and focus in order to make progress towards fulfilling that purpose.  Without purpose and focus, you will have a difficult time wading through the rough seas of life.  A person without a purpose is like a ship at sea with no destination; any movement will seem arbitrary and it may as well not go anywhere at all.  Similarly, a person without focus is like a ship at sea without a compass; it will lose its way and may never arrive at its destination.

Purpose

Purpose is what gives direction to life and is constructed with the help and influence of family, faith, and society.  The difficult thing about purpose is that it is not something that can be merely decided.  No one simply wakes up and decides what they will do for the rest of their life.  Purpose is discovered through a process of self-exploration and wrestling with what it means to live and what makes life worth living. It is a seeking of answers to questions like “What do I want to create in my life?”, “How do I want to be remembered?”, and “What in this world is worth my dedication?”.  Failure to answer these questions results in a life filled with entertainment and despair.

Entertainment and despair is a pattern of living that can steal years of your life away.  Anyone who has spent the entire day watching TV has experienced this.  Maybe the first few hours are fine, but as the day goes by, a sense of desperate boredom begins to creep in until the day is done and you feel anxious and lethargic, angry at yourself for having wasted the day.  You seek entertainment to relieve the despair, and it partially works…but just like sleeping on a futon, it gets increasingly more and more uncomfortable as time goes by until you feel like the entertainment itself has become your boredom.  As Dave Ramsey says, “you eat enough lobster and it will begin to taste like soap”.  What is the solution to this problem?  Stop entertaining yourself and take control of your life!  Stop seeking pleasure for pleasure’s sake and start pursuing a purpose that is worthy of your dedication!

Purpose is what gives meaning to life.  Do you have someone that you look up to in life?  Chances are that they have a clear purpose and have stayed true to it.  Ask them and they’ll tell you that staying true to their purpose is what made them who they are today.  A good purpose will sustain you through the tough times and will give meaning to the good times.  It will create a sense of stability and joy in your life.  Staying true to your purpose will allow you to feel good about yourself (self-esteem) because you’ve accomplished something in life and you can be proud of it.  All that’s left is to maintain focus.

Focus

Having a good purpose isn’t enough.  You must also have focus.  Loss of focus is perhaps the single greatest source of regret in this world.  How many people were running strong until they got distracted, lost focus on what mattered in life, and did many things that cannot be undone?  The world is full tragic stories of infidelity, drug abuse, and fraud where somebody lost focus and destroyed what could have been beautiful.  Staying focused will make all the difference in your life.

A focused life is like an arrow shot from a bow that flies straight and true and hits the bulls-eye dead on.  Picture this: the archer eyes the target, pulls out an arrow and loads it into the bow, takes aim, pulls back the bow string, and releases the arrow with great precision.  Is your life like this?

Here’s a good principle to follow: “Anything that refreshes you without distracting you from, diminishing or destroying your final goal is a legitimate pleasure in your life” – Ravi Zacharias.  This is a good test for the pleasure you seek in your life.  Does it refresh you or does it distract you from your purpose?  Do you feel energized or do you feel sluggish?  Anything that takes away from your purpose is self-sabotage and should be discarded.  Even if the thing is good in itself, if it prevents you from reaching the goal, then it doesn’t fit in your life.

So what is your purpose?  Do you aspire to be a dedicated and loving husband and father?  Do you want to start a program to help your community?  Do you feel the call to be a musician, a chef, a minister, or a counselor?  What will you have to do to get there?  What will you have to stop doing to get there?  The canvas is waiting.  Pick up the paint brush and start painting.  Stay true and focused to your purpose and you’ll soon start to feel better about who you are and why you were put here in the first place.