Imagine waking up every morning with a taste of fresh, pure air lightly blowing through the window. Imagine being able to decide when to wake up, where to wake up, and to get ready for a day that is yours to shape. A wonderful landscape in front of your eyes, reminding you how beautiful and simple life can be. Maybe even all the money in the world, as if it’d make any difference. This is what financial freedom looks like, and what most of us dream of. And if you’re wondering if I’m financially free, well, I’m not. But what is a life without dreams and goals. But would you believe that without a simple missing piece of the puzzle, all of this would still make you unhappy? I know it may sound almost impossible to some of you, and for a long time I thought the same. But today, while watching the sun go down on a beautiful day in Italy, I found out what this missing piece of the puzzle is, and I want to share my thoughts with you. While my hands are typing on the keyboard, I feel I have an ocean of words I want to tell you. If you’ll allow me, I want to take you through a journey of ever changing thoughts about happiness, and I hope I can inspire some of you to fight for what really makes you happy, because for way too many years I’ve been looking in the wrong direction.
If you could define what makes you happy, what would it be? Is it the place? The people? Knowledge? Money? What if none of them would be enough, without a missing piece?
I come from a beautiful island named Sardinia, populated by the nicest people you could ever meet. For most people there, life is hard and you have to struggle to make a living. But still, Sardinians are one of the happiest folks I know. They live a simple life, eat healthy and always have a huge smile on their face.
When I started university in my 20s, I thought happiness comes from a career. To achieve my dream, I studied hard only to find myself forced to leave Sardinia in search of a better career opportunity in Germany. After almost 10 years trying to build up a career, I still felt unhappy. Was leaving my island the right choice? Should I have stayed and tried to build up something there? For a while, I thought that the most beautiful life was that one. The life of peace and simplicity, with the sun caressing your face every day, even in winter.
It was a huge step forward in my idea of happiness, but I wasn’t quite there yet.
My job wasn’t fulfilling me, I felt part of a machine that I couldn’t control, heading towards a direction that I wouldn’t want to take. But even leaving my job in Germany to go to a paradise like Italy where I would have had to struggle to pay rent and to afford the needs of my family wouldn’t have made me happy. So I started adding up all the pieces of the puzzle that I collected with my past experiences, a puzzle named happiness. And I found out that the biggest piece of this puzzle is purpose. Not as a means to earn a living, but as a means to make the world better by doing something you enjoy. Even on a small scale.
There are many ways to make the world better. Your purpose might be having a family, and growing your children with values and love so that they will be better adults for a better world. It might be to create something that helps people in need. For some people it might be contributing to the success of a company they don’t own.
Find the center of your puzzle. Find your purpose, and you’ll be able to fulfill the rest of the puzzle with thousands of small pieces that will make your life wonderful. But miss the big piece of the puzzle, the continuous fulfillment of your purpose, and the whole picture will collapse. There is no beautiful landscape, no culture, no food, no company that can make you happy if you are not fueled by a purpose that makes you feel you matter to the world. So my message to you is: find your purpose. Make yourself useful helping the world by doing something you truly enjoy, and you’ll have found the key to a happy life.
Don’t waste any time. Don’t let yourself fall into the trap of a life of routines, where you’re forced to have a job you don’t enjoy for a salary you need to spend. Find whatever you profoundly enjoy that can be useful for people, and work incessantly on making it the sustaining factor of your living.
Time passes by inesorabile and every second lived is a second you’ll never get back.
Life runs faster than the wind, and you have the power, now, to shape it and make a better future for yourself. Don’t settle for an employment that doesn’t fulfill you, find something that you’d do every day of your life even without a cent in return, and that can be valuable to others, and you’ll have found your purpose. Work on it with persistence and without ever giving up, help people with it, and soon enough you’ll be able to sustain yourself with it.
So think about it: what is your purpose? I can’t tell you how long it will take you, or under what circumstances, but I can tell you that only after you’ve found your purpose you’ll be able to truly enjoy all the other pieces of your puzzle. My puzzle is still a work in progress, but I’m glad I’ve already found my biggest piece, my purpose. With this channel I want to try to help as many people as possible by sharing what I’m learning on my journey of trying to become a better self, personally and financially. Financial freedom plays a big role in being able to do what you love, that’s why everybody should be able to achieve it.. I believe that real freedom comes from improving yourself and working on your own purpose. This is my purpose, and this is what I want to do with this channel.
One day, I hope I’ll be able to crown it with all the small things that my soul craves: I will live in Italy, I will enjoy the beautiful sun and the wonderful water of our seas, but only if I’ll be able to keep fulfilling my purpose of helping people.
