Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich had a profound influence on the way people approach business. However, The Law of Success in Sixteen Lessons, Hill’s lesser-known 1,600+ page monstrosity published prior to Think and Grow Rich, contains a lot of useful information that can help you reach your potential. In this series, Joshua Moore covers each of these attributes in a practical way that you can apply to your life and work.
Also in this series:
Everyone needs a definite aim for their life.
A definite aim provides clarity and focus towards a single endeavour. It also serves as a compass you can use to assess any job, business investment or decision. A definite aim helps you to prepare for finding like-minded people who are interested in accomplishing similar feats in life. It can also help provide direction on where to go from here.
How to determine your purpose in life
You can determine your purpose by spending quite a bit of time answering these two questions:
- What do you think about every day?
- What one thing (i.e. teaching, leading, etc.) do you find the easiest to do and also derive the most satisfaction from in your life?
Before I determined my definite chief aim, my plan was:
- To make lots of money and be successful in business.
- Go back after being successful and help people to reach their potential.
I think about helping others I know almost every day. I am excited every time a friend calls me and tells me about a promotion, a new business idea they are developing or that they have stopped smoking. Realising that I wanted to ‘help people reach their potential’, I now had a tool to help me focus my career aspirations and my business endeavours.
Henry Ford is a great example of someone who had a definite chief aim. Ford wanted to ‘democratise the automobile’. He established the production line and was able to mass manufacture cars and sell them at a fraction of the cost of his competitors. His definite chief aim is validated every time a Ford passes by on the road.
Bill Gates’ definite chief aim of ‘having a computer in every home’ can be seen all across the world. The amount of people who continue to follow the spiritual teachings of visions of Jesus, Gandhi and Mohammad demonstrate that their definite chief aims were not in vein.
What is your major life purpose? What do you think would be the benefits of sitting down and determining a definite chief aim in your life?
Actions
- Spend a bit of time thinking about your major purpose in life.
- Assess your current job, business ventures, etc., based on your definite chief aim. Do you need to make any adjustments to your current situation?
- Take action (however small) towards your definite chief aim today. This might be as little as writing it down on paper, making a phone call or simply reading an article on the web.
