How to find your purpose!

How to Find Your Purpose

If you want to find your purpose in this life and your specific mission and calling, here is a step-by-step process.

Step One: Be Self-Aware

You have to be self-aware. You have to try different things. Test yourself and find what are the unique qualities and skills that you find in yourself that nobody else has around you.

Step Two: Find Your Flow State

Test yourself until you find something called flow state, which is when you find time passes and you don't even realize it's passing. You're enjoying yourself so much.

What you are doing in this state is what Allah created you to do. By the evidence of the Prophet ﷺ, when he said, do try different things, you will find easy the things Allah created you to do. You'll just find it natural to you.

("Do deeds, for everyone will be facilitated towards that for which he was created." — Sahih al-Bukhari, Hadith 4949; Sahih Muslim, Hadith 2647)

Step Three: Master Your Craft

Once you find the thing that you are most inclined towards, comes most natural to you, comes most easy to you — now you have to hone and develop the skill. Invest in it with time, with money, with experience, with mentors, with apprentices, until you get to the level of mastering the skill. And never accept anything less than mastery.

The Prophet ﷺ said, Allah prescribed mastery and perfection in everything.

("Indeed, Allah has prescribed excellence (ihsan) in all things." — Sahih Muslim, Hadith 1955)

If you're a slaughterer, if you're a butcher, be a master butcher. Everybody should have a craft and be a master of your craft. Don't try to do what somebody else is good at. You do you. And if you're trying to do something you're terrible at and you're not made for, you're going to cause more harm than good.

Just like Abu Dharr when he wanted to be a leader, the Prophet ﷺ said, no, you're not made for leadership. You do that thing instead, please. The Prophet ﷺ developed his Sahabah to be masters at what they did — he never ever allowed them to do something halfway.

Step Four: Identify the Gaps Around You

Now that I've mastered this thing — or even while I'm mastering it — you have to look at the gaps around you and think: my skill, what gaps can it solve?

You're into education? We need Muslim schools. You read people, you understand people well? We need family therapists. You're good with working with young people? We need to take young people off the streets — create a boxing or MMA gym, get them off the streets, clean up the streets, get them into the gym, and get them off the knife crime. You have OCD, you like cleaning things? Clean up your street.

You have to look for a problem that you are naturally inclined to solve, and go and solve it.

Your Work Is Worship

While you're doing that, realize something — you are in the worship of Allah. We define worship as Salah, as ritual only. No. The greatest form of worship is to live every breath and every moment of your day knowing: this is what Allah created me for, and I am serving Him through this.

The Ummah Must Wake Up

The Muslim community is not short of skills. We have people well-versed in engineering, and science, and maths, and cleaning, and butchery, and plumbing, and everything — but are they using it for a greater purpose, a greater vision, to raise لَا إِلَٰهَ إِلَّا اللَّهُ, to solve the problems of society?

Many of us know we are on survival mode. We need to pay the bills, the economy is bad, gas and electric — man needs to make a living. And we are not thinking about the greater vision that we're here for. We are on autopilot. We are zombies.

But we need to snap out of it and wake up. Because if we don't wake up now and live the life of purpose, and serve the greater causes, and build the institutions that the Prophet ﷺ built — the masajid, the schools, places of activity, the places of tarbiyah — if we don't build, you know what's going to happen?

We are only going to wake up the day that we die. And then it will be too late.