Article by Kardi Teknomo
 

 Life motivation is extremely important. When you purify your own motivation, you will gain much from what you have now and you can start the real flow of life.

Have you ever counted how many days you still have in your life? Say, you may expect that you will live until 90 years old.  If you are still teenager now, say 17 years old, you still have (90-17) x 365 = 26,645 days to live. If you are in the middle age, say 40 years old, your remaining days are about 18,250 days. Our days on earth are limited, but only a very few people realize that.

There is a saying that elephant leave its ivory, tiger leave its stripe and human leave its name and memory. The value of your life is remembered by others from what you did in your life. What have you achieved in your life up to now? What do you expect to accomplish using the remaining days of your life? What do you want people to know and remember you? If the doctor told you that you have an uncommon disease with no cure, then you will start to realize that you need to do something before you die. However, why should you wait until someone tells you that you only have a very limited time to do what you need to do? You can start to change things from now.

Often, the question on life’s purposes is not what you wish to do in your life, but what you need to accomplish through the remaining days of your life. Your life purpose is what you have completed through your life. The purpose of life is not only a set of targets that we need to accomplish within our life time. It is measured by other people after you have finished your life. It is not you, who can directly measure your own accomplishment. You can only measure what you have achieved indirectly through what you contribute to the world around you. Thus, purpose of life is strongly correlated to your life’s contribution. It is what you give to others through your life. It is not what you get, but it is what you produce.

The pure life motivation is to give and to contribute rather than to get and to own something. When you give, you shall not worry about what others will do to what you have given. Worry makes your life motivation impure. To overcome that, you simply give yourself more to others. You give because you love them. When you give more, eventually you will receive more and much more. When you own something, you will become attached to what you own. Then you will become worry to loose it. It does not mean that you cannot or shall not own anything. When you own something, think about the responsibility. To own is to be responsible and to take care, not just to exploit it. Your focus on giving does not mean that you do not want to be responsible. On the contrary, you give because it is your responsibility to contribute and to create a better world.

Even in giving, you need to be responsible. In some cases, giving may create dependency and at the end, it just to make other people more helpless. In that case, it is truly not responsible to give.

It is does not matter whether what you will accomplish are great things or mere ordinary things. Not everyone have a chance to become the president of a great country or become a top executive in multinational companies. Nevertheless, every man has the right to have a meaningful life. One will never know the meaningful story of one’s life until he or she dies. The history of your life is not completed yet. As long as you still alive, there is still time to change it. As long as you are still alive, you still have time to do something to achieve what you need to do. Anyone who is among the living has hope – even a live dog is better off than a dead lion. Let me give the story of two persons that I have encountered in my childhood.

His name is not so important. People call him “Pak Si”. He was dark, tall and full of muscles. He talked little and worked a lot. He was a low income worker in my neighbor’s logistics company. His main job was to carry and transfer the boxes of goods from one truck to another truck, or the warehouse. Since he has no education, he could only afford to have that part time job. To cover his and his family’s needs, he had to wake up very early in the morning and sell clean water as his additional income. Water was a very rare resource in that neighborhood; people need to carry it from the deep well to the house. After that he would use his muscle to do his work in the logistics company until evening. His work demands him 7 days a week and only a few days holiday a year to meet his family in another village. Such kind of job has no security, no insurance and no pension or welfare. The company could stop his work anytime, and if he got sick, no one can support him. He did that for more than 20 years until his death. What is beautiful in his life can be seen from his struggle to support his children’s education. He knew that he could not do more than what he was doing, but he has hope that his children will have a better life than his. He had accomplished something through his life.

Another person was a young man. Apparently, his parents spoil him. He got almost everything he wanted, but what he did was only to upset his parents and become a trouble maker. He joined a gang of youth in the neighborhood and became the neighborhood bully by asking money and hit people if they don’t give. One day, he drove his car too fast and hit a big tree. He died without any accomplishment, not even for his own parent.

From the life story of these two persons, I hope you understand what I mean by accomplishment and life purpose. If you want to put some meaning in your life, you should set the purpose of your life. It does not matter whether you can reach your own life purpose or not. The life purpose is a kind of barometer to measure how far you are from your own life’s target.

Parents often ask their children “What is your dream? What do you want to do when you grow up?” The children may answer that they want to become a doctor, engineer, lawyer, trader, baker, fire fighter, teacher, or any listed professional and so on. They want the children to be useful people for the society.

You may said, “Okay, I realize that I need to have my life purpose – The problem is how to set my life purpose?” Your life purpose is unique. Nobody can dictate you what you want to accomplish in your life.

What you need to think is to write down what kind of contribution you are willing to give that may be useful for many people? The contribution is not always money. It can be your time, your effort, your writing, even your word of encouragement. The target and influence is not always worldwide. It can be a simple target as your family and children, or relative or neighborhood. You can help your village or school or the company where you work. It is better, however, if you can enlarge your circle of influence beyond your immediate border.

Life motivation can be summarized in one word: improvement. The key point is what you can do to improve your life to be a better person and to enhance your society to be a better place to live in.  You need to improve yourself in many things. You need to grow personally to be more mature. You need to improve yourself to be wiser. You need to learn to have more knowledge and to use it for your practical life. You need to improve your finances to be richer. No one wants to stay poor. You need to educate your children so that the next generation will be better than yours. You need to improve your position in your job or career to give more contribution. With continuous improvement, you can achieve many things beyond your expectation. Things are possible if you want to do it and if you have a strong willingness to achieve it. Without improvement, you will satisfy with current situation and then do nothing.

To set your life purpose, you need some level of maturity. Some people need more time to decide their own purpose of life. Others seem to know what they are doing even when they are very young. Your life purpose can change dynamically as you grow older and knowing what have accomplished in your life give you a kind of satisfaction. At least, you have done something. What I am today is better than what I was yesterday. The improvement may not be in just one day but it may take several years. This purpose of life is quite dynamic. You can always improve yourselves until you die. With improvement life style, you can learn to produce more for others so that our future generation will sustain.

God always prepares you uniquely, different from any other person, to be His blessing channel for His Glory

Ecclesiastes 4:9

Discuss this article