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bunch of words like life force and destiny. I’d pull out a few of those reverse sentences motivational speakers like me love: “Don’t just dare to dream—dream to dare!” I’d get some sort of signature look, maybe a suit coat with a hood inexplicably sewn on the back and a watch you can only get in southern Norway. And then I’d go on some sort of “power up” tour around the country where I’d offer self-help advice like the back of a shampoo bottle.
    Find your truepurpose.
    Be your truepurpose.
    Live yourpurpose.
    Repeat asnecessary.
    And I’m not above that—let’s be perfectly clear about that right now. I love books like that. They’re not messy. And I tried to write that book telling you how to find your purpose, but I kept running into one big problem.
    I didn’t find my mine. I wish I had. As I mentioned, I went to Vietnam once, and that would have been pretty dramatic, especially because it’s not one of the three big “find yourself in Europe countries” (Italy, England, France). But I didn’t find it there.
    My wife and I raised $60,000 to build two kindergartens there with help from the readers of my blog. When the schools were finished, we visited them. One hot afternoon in November, after the aforementioned run-in with the French motorcyclists, we stepped out of an old Land Cruiser into the front courtyard of a kindergarten.
    There were hundreds of giggling children, dozens of parents, and a few chickens gathered for the opening ceremony. The local minister of education was there and promptly told me I looked like Prince William. He probably meant “skinny and pale,” but my Vietnamese is no good so I’m going to assume he meant “tall and regal.”
    Before we went through the gates of the school, I stopped in the driveway and looked at the building. There were six classrooms, a separate kitchen building, and a bathroom. I resisted the urge to immediately say, “In America, $30,000 wouldn’t even buy you a nice Toyota Sequoia.”
    Instead I just stood there, in awe that a group of strangers on a blog had helped make this possible. I was content to leave it at that, to just cherish that moment like a Successories poster.
    But out of nowhere, five words popped into my head. And they were the words that would forever ruin my ability to tell you how to find your perfect purpose in life:
    How did I get here?
    The truth is, I didn’t know.
    I could look back on the years leading up to the kindergartens and explain them in 20/20 hindsight, but the overwhelming reality was that I didn’t know how I had come to be standing on a mountain in Vietnam.
    I didn’t know how blog readers had come together to change an entire village they’d never even heard of.
    I didn’t know how I’d landed halfway around the world to sit at a table while schoolchildren sang songs of celebration about finally having a school they could attend.
    I didn’t figure out my purpose and then execute it. I didn’t write “Vietnam” on a whiteboard in Atlanta, scribble down “Nashville and Dave Ramsey,” add “Write three books,” then proceed to take deliberate steps to my very crystal clear finish line, finally crossing it exactly the way I planned all along.
    It didn’t happen that way. Not for me. And truly, not for most of us if we are honest. But when we talk about “finding our purpose,” we think it will happen like clockwork, because most of us believe these lies about purpose:
    Everyone but you knows exactly what his is.
    I don’t know exactly what mine is. I have a rough sense of a handful of things I think are awesome, but I don’t know my perfect purpose. There. Disproved that one. (I hope the rest are this easy.)
    You’ll only have one.
    I blame any romantic movie where someone is running in an airport for this belief. This is the “soulmate” concept of finding your purpose. You get one, and you’ll just “know it when you know it.” That and the amount of fireworks that will go off