Wandering Into Purpose
The First Shift to Discover Your True Mission (Part 1 of 4)
If you’d prefer to listen, click below for the audio version:
A Note from Andrew
Last week I wrote about a question that was on my mind. And I was surprised by how many of you seemed to resonate with it as well. Am I doing busy work or my life’s work?
From the response, what became clear is that while awareness is a critical first step, what most of us are hungry for is the how. What are the actual, practical shifts that move us out of awareness and into action. So that’s what I’m focusing on this week.
This is such an important topic that I've decided to create a four-part series to really dive deep into these transformative shifts. Today, we'll begin by examining the signs that you're stuck in motion without mission and explore the first fundamental shift that can realign your daily actions with your real purpose. Over the next three weeks, we'll unpack the remaining shifts and culminate with a practical challenge to integrate all of them into your life.
I want to be up front by saying I’m not immune to this problem. Just this week, I have been caught up in other people’s agendas, chasing last minute calendar changes and fighting for the time I need to determine what my true priorities are. So I’ve doubled down on my thinking about this topic this week. And this newsletter is the result of that thinking.
Let me be very clear: I’m not here to tell you to add more to your already full plate. What I want to ensure is that what’s on your plate actually nourishes you and gives you the energy that you need to move forward.
The revelation I talked about last week (thanks again to Brendon Burchard) has been with me in the midst of the turmoil this week. An unlived life isn’t just disappointing. It’s corrosive. If you lean into that corrosion, it will destroy you. If you stay in that job, keep maintaining that toxic relationship, keep holding back in your life for fear of stepping out of the box that was outlined for you as “safe” and “appropriate” when you were growing up, it will slowly eat away at everything about you that is you. Yet with just a few intentional shifts, you can transform corrosion into creation.
So let's get practical. Today, we'll start with the first and most fundamental shift on our journey from motion to mission.
How to Know You’re Moving Without Mission
Ok, so first, let’s talk about how you can know that you’re caught in a cycle of passive motion instead of agency-driven momentum. Here are five signs that I’ve seen in my own experience, as well as in my work with my clients:
The Blur Effect
Do your days blend together in an indistinguishable haze? This is the first way that I know that I’m shifting out of mission mode and into motion mode. Monday feels like Wednesday feels like Friday. Thursday gets here, and I’m not sure where the first part of the week went. Even achievements don’t register. At the end of every day, it’s hard to list even the small wins that I accomplished that day. One of my clients described it like this: “I look back at my calendar and see it full, but I can’t tell you what actually happened or why it mattered. It’s just a solid block of stuff that was really important at the time.”
The blur isn’t just about busyness. It’s about disconnection from meaning. When your actions link directly to your mission, you wake up with clarity. When they don’t, you wake up with a to-do list. If getting to the end of that to-do list is what drives you through the day, you’re probably not connecting to your mission.
Perpetual Behind-ness
Do you constantly feel like you’re running to catch up, no matter how productive you are? Do you feel more like you’re treading water than swimming? This perpetual behind-ness is a definite symptom of movement without mission.
Way back when I worked as a manager for Best Buy, I would often work 70-hour weeks and never feel “caught up.” Why? Because without a clear mission guiding my activity, everything felt equally urgent. When you give into that level of urgency, it’s impossible to set priorities. It wasn’t until many years later when I figured out my core purpose that I could tell the difference between what needed my attention and what could wait. Or, quite frankly, what I simply did not need to do.
Exhaustion Without Fulfillment
You collapse at the end of the day, completely drained. But if someone asks you what progress you made, you struggle to answer.
The difference between work and mission-aligned work is that while the latter is still tiring, it leaves you with a distinct sense of fulfillment that charges your emotional and spiritual batteries. Some days I work for 12 hours and feel like I could run a marathon. Other days I work 6 hours and have nothing left in the tank. The difference isn’t the hours I put in. It’s whether those hours connect to what’s most important to me.
Success That Feels Hollow
This one catches a lot of high-achievers by surprise. You hit the targets. You receive the recognition. Maybe you even get the promotion or hit the revenue milestone. And you feel completely empty.
I’ve sat in rooms full of people celebrating the great work that we’re doing and felt nothing. I’ve hit major goals that should have felt huge and applauded numbly. When the goals I achieve are disconnected from my deeper mission (often because they’re other people’s goals, not mine), I really struggle to enjoy them. Because success without significance is ultimately unsatisfying.
Distraction Vulnerability
When you’re not anchored by purpose, every new idea, opportunity or trend can pull you off course. I see this organizationally a lot. There is no shortage of new projects, strategies or focuses for a lot of businesses. But they’re often burning the candle at both ends, making huge progress in the short term but setting nothing up for long term sustainability. Worse, they often jump to these new shiny priorities without properly finishing what they started. Maybe you’re guilty of doing the same thing in your personal growth (I know I have been).
It’s not just a question of poor focus. It’s a symptom of misalignment. When you’re clear on your purpose, you naturally develop a level of filtration that helps you quickly determine what deserves your attention and what doesn’t.
The underlying truth connecting these five signs is this: burnout doesn’t come from overwork. It comes from misalignment. When our daily activities disconnect from our deeper purpose (or when we haven’t taken the time to really work out what that deep purpose is), even moderate workloads will be unsustainable. But when you’re locked into your mission, you just get more done with less strain.
Before moving on, take a moment to reflect. How many of these signs feel like where you are right now? Recognizing that is a valuable first step, but we can’t stop there. Next, let’s talk about what this misalignment actually costs us.
The Cost of Directionless Movement
Brendon Burchard’s words are still bouncing around in my head. “An unlived life is corrosive.” The word corrosive is what has stayed with me. When I’m not living out my mission, I’m not just wasting my time. I am passively watching the erosion of my potential, my relationships and my wellbeing.
It happens gradually, almost imperceptibly. You don’t usually just wake up one day and realize you’ve been misaligned for years. The cost silently builds up in the background until you look up and wonder where the past five years (or more) of your life went.
When I have worked with people who have spent significant time in directionless movement, I have heard countless variations of the same justifications:
“I’ll reconnect with my mission when I have more time.” This kind of ongoing postponement assumes that at some point in the future you will have more time. You won’t. Don’t get me wrong, you can certainly reclaim time from meaningless activity, but without intentional changes, you won’t. You will just continue to fill your schedule with more stuff and increase the amount of distraction you use to medicate yourself against the emptiness that follows.
“I just need to get myself into the right head space first.” Mental clarity is valuable. But waiting for the perfect conditions before realigning with your mission creates a chicken-and-egg dilemma. Many times, it’s the very act of mission-aligned work that creates the mental clarity you’re looking for.
“I don’t know if I’m ready yet.” A fear-based hesitance assumes that there is some perfect preparation to pursue your mission. But in reality, the mission develops through trial and error, failure and success, not through waiting for everything to line up perfectly before you jump in.
All of these excuses seem perfectly reasonable to us, in the moment. But they all mask the compounding damage of spending days, months, years moving without meaning. Here is what is really at stake:
The work that you were meant to do remains unrealized. The people you were meant to help go unserved. The growth you were meant to experience doesn’t happen. The joy of living every day knowing that you are doing what you were made to do is out of your reach.
Maybe worst of all, you lose trust in yourself. When there’s a continuous gap between what you know matters and where you spend your time, there’s a kind of sense of self-betrayal. This breaks down the relationship you have with yourself, which is the foundation for all of your other successes.
I found myself in this moment just a few years ago, before leaving a successful career in banking. My job was profitable and practical. And completely disconnected from the things that are most important to me. The real cost wasn’t the wasted time. It was that along the way I stopped believing that I would ever do something that really mattered in the world. I lost faith in myself.
But the good news is that this corrosion is reversible. As soon as you start realigning with your mission, even through those first small, halting steps, the restoration begins. And it can happen way faster than you might expect.
That’s why the three shifts I’m about to explore aren’t just nice-to-have improvements. They’re essential recalibrations that transform corrosion into creation, motion into mission and busy work into your life’s work.
First Shift: Reaction to Intention
The first shift that we have to make on the journey from motion to mission is moving from a reactive posture to an intentional one. This is foundational, because without this shift, our environments will continually pull us back into misalignment as we simply react to the agenda of everyone and everything around us, pursuing our own purpose second, if at all.
Your environment is custom-designed to keep you reactive. From notification systems engineered by teams of psychologists to social and professional expectations that prioritize instant responsiveness (how many times a day to do you check your email?), the default setting of life as we live it today is reaction, not intention.
But when we’re constantly reacting, we come to confuse the method with the mission. We confuse the ability respond to immediate demands for what we’re supposed to do to get to the best version of ourselves. Reactive living keeps us focused on what seems urgent instead of what causes our souls to thrive.
The Mission Ritual
The most powerful antidote I’ve found to this reactive pattern is creating a mission ritual. The idea here is that you protect your highest leverage time (whatever that happens to be for you) for mission-aligned action before the reactive demands of the day take over. For many of us, this means we need to get things done in the morning. Popping back to Brendon Burchard, he has a principle called “Done By One.” This, he says, means that you are done with your major contribution to the day by 1 PM. That means:
No scrolling.
No consuming.
No watching.
While your target time may vary to some degree, the key here is that you protect your purpose by actively pursuing it before anything else is allowed to get in the way. Here’s a mission ritual that might help:
Identify your mission time. If it’s not Done By One, when is it? The key is both to find a window of peak mental clarity and create forward motion toward what is most important before any other demands can get in your way.
Set up your environment. Create a sacred space. Physically and digitally separate yourself from reactive triggers during this time. When I was writing my book, I would shut my phone off and relocate it to another room. It might mean doing your purpose work in a different space than your other daily work. Set apart not only the time but the space.
Start with mission connection. Take 5-10 minutes. Review your mission statement, if you have one. If not, ask yourself, “What’s the most important contribution I can make today toward what matters most?”
Take one mission-aligned action. No matter how small, complete one task that directly serves your deeper purpose before switching into reactive mode.
This shift requires boundaries, with others and with yourself. It means saying “not yet” to emails, messages and requests. This isn’t selfish. It’s necessary for you to make your most meaningful contribution. You can react all day to minor issues or you can create space to solve the major ones. You were made to tackle the big stuff. You can do it, when you create time and space to do it.
The beauty of this shift is simplicity. You don’t need to overhaul your entire schedule all at once. Start with 20-30 minutes of protected mission time. You will set in motion a powerful transformation from reactive living to intentional impact on the world around you. You don’t even know how powerful you are. This is the beginning of unlocking that power.
Your First Step to Movement With Meaning
The essential shift from reaction to intention serves as the foundation for all meaningful change. Without intention, you can create all the systems and disciplines and behaviors in the world, but you will not experience transformation or impact.
Creating a mission ritual like the one we looked at today may seem simple. But the result can be life changing. Even small changes in how you structure your day can create ripple effects that change how you experience your work and life.
Experiment with this first shift over the coming week. Start small. 20 minutes of protected mission time. Bring awareness to not just what happens to your productivity, but to your purpose and fulfillment as well.
Next week, we’ll build on this foundation by exploring the second shift: moving from scattered to focused. We’ll talk about how to identify the most meaningful activities and develop that “mission filtration,” that helps quickly determine what deserves attention and what doesn’t.
I would love to hear how you implement this first shift. What mission ritual are you going to commit to? What questions do you have? Shoot me a reply or comment on this post to share with the community. Your experience is very likely exactly what someone else needs to hear to give them the courage to begin their own shift.
Remember that the journey from motion to mission isn’t about dramatic overnight transformation. It’s about consistent realignment. It’s about returning again and again to what matters most and what will propel you toward your best future, even when you temporarily drift off course.
Thanks for joining me on this journey. Here’s to your first step toward movement with meaning.
Now go be great.
P.S. If you found value in today's newsletter, I'd be grateful if you'd share it with someone who might benefit. This is the first part of a four-part series on moving from motion to mission, so it's the perfect time to invite others along for the journey.
For Paid Subscribers
Thank you for your continued support through your paid subscription. Your investment allows me to create deeper resources like this newsletter series and build our community of mission-driven individuals.
As a token of my appreciation, I've created exclusive resources to help you implement this first shift from reaction to intention:
The Mission Ritual Implementation Guide
This comprehensive workbook takes the mission ritual concept and adds:
A personalized assessment to identify your optimal mission time
Templates for different mission ritual formats (15-min, 30-min, and 60-min versions)
Troubleshooting guide for common obstacles to implementation
Environmental setup checklist to maximize focus and minimize distractions
Video Workshop: Building Unbreakable Intention
In this 20-minute workshop, I walk through:
The science behind intention-setting and habit formation
Three advanced techniques to strengthen your boundary-setting muscles
How to communicate your mission time boundaries to colleagues, family, and friends
A simple method to track your progress and celebrate small wins
I'm deeply grateful for your support and commitment to living a mission-aligned life. Your presence in this community enriches our collective journey through all four parts of this transformation series.