100 Ways to Motivate Yourself - #40 Find your soul purpose. - How do you know what your true life is? Or what your soul's purpose is? How do you know how to live this purpose? The answers to these questions are yours for the taking, but you must seize the answers and not wait to be given them. No one will give you the answers. One good clue as to whether you are living your true life is how much you fear death. Do you fear death a lot, just a little, or not at all? "When you say you fear death," wrote David Viscott, "you are really saying that you fear you have not lived your true life. This fear cloaks the world in silent suffering." When mythologist Joseph Campbell recommended that we "follow our bliss," many people misunderstood him. They thought he meant to become a pleasure-seeker, a selfish hedonist from the "me generation." Instead, he meant that in order to find out what your true life could be, you should look for clues in whatever makes you happy. What gets you excited? In the answer to that question, you'll discover where you can be of most service. You can't live your true life if you're not serving people, and you can't serve people very well if you are not excited about what you're doing. What makes you happy? (I know I already asked, but the fear that "cloaks the world in silent suffering" comes from not asking that question enough times.) In my own professional life I have finally found that teaching makes me happy, writing makes me happy, and performing makes me happy. It took me many years of unhappiness to finally reach the point of despair necessary to ask the question: What makes me happy? I was the creative director for an ad agency and I was making a good deal of money producing commercials, meeting with clients, and designing marketing strategies. I could have done this type of work forever, but my horrible fear of death was my clue that I was not living my true life. "People living deeply," wrote Anaïs Nin, "have no fear of death." I was not living deeply. And it took me a long time to get clear answers to my question: What makes me happy? But any question we ask ourselves often enough will eventually yield the right answer. The problem is, we quit asking. Fortunately for me, in this rare instance of persistence in the face of extreme discomfort, I didn't quit asking. The answer came to me in the form of a memory-so colorful it was almost like a movie scene. I was driving at night in my car 10 years earlier, and I was as happy as I had ever been. In fact, I was driving around aimlessly so that I could keep my feeling of happiness preserved and contained within that car-I didn't want anything to interrupt it. It was so profound that it lasted for hours. The occasion had been a speech I had just given. The subject of it was my recovery from an addiction, and the night that I spoke I was running such a high fever, and I had such a fear of speaking in public that I tried to call the talk off. My hosts wouldn't hear of it. Somehow I made it to the podium and, probably because my fever and flu were so intense, I spoke freely, without caution or self-consciousness. The more I spoke about freedom from addiction, the more excited I got. My creativity just soared. I remember the audience laughing as I spoke. I remember them jumping to their feet and cheering when I was finished. It was the most remarkable night of my life. Somehow I had reached people in a way I'd never reached people before, and their own expressions of joy lifted me higher than I had ever been. It was that memory of that moonlit night, driving in my car, that came back to me 10 years later after I'd spent weeks repeating to myself the question, "What makes me happy?" Now I had the picture, but I had no idea how to act on it. But at least I knew what my true life was, and I knew that I wasn't living it. Then one day one of my major advertising clients asked me to hire a motivational speaker for a big breakfast meeting they were having for their sales staff. I didn't know of anyone in Arizona who was any good-the only motivational speakers I was familiar with were the national ones whose tapes I'd listened to so often in my car, people such as Wayne Dyer, Tom Peters, Anthony Robbins, Alan Watts, and Nathaniel Branden. But Alan Watts was dead-and the rest were probably far too expensive for our little breakfast. So I called Kirk Nelson, a friend of mine who was sales manager at KTAR in Phoenix, and asked his advice. "The only person in Arizona