You are already basing your life, even determining much of your day today, according to your answer to the “Purpose” question. Best to know how solid your investment is. However, because you may not be entirely aware of your answer, and most of us even have two contradictory answers—the one we claim, and the one we actually base our lives on—let’s make this concrete for you:

  • First, we must look at what the options are for purposes of our life, and then use a THOUGHT EXPERIMENT to know more about you
  • Second, we will create a GRAPH OF YOU (you just have to add in your list of purposes & priorities)
  • Finally, using the graph we can display the LIKELIHOOD OF YOUR HOPE being realized, or your hope being falsified

 

An Experiment

Step 1. What are the 5 most important potential purposes for your life?

A way to come up with your list would be to think what will impact you in the highest quantity and quality of ways, what things are most important to you. Be honest, as this is for you and about you, and will be less able to correctly predict your future if you are not genuine. List these below, and place them in order of importance:

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

If you need some options to choose from, here is a list I give to help audiences begin: career, children, education, entertainment, friends, finances, health, intelligence, spouse, spiritual or worldview understanding. Also, a chart below summarizes audience discussions regarding common examples given for purposes of life.

Step 2. Graph your Purposes & Priorities

Here is where the thought experiment comes in: imagine yourself before you were born, and in a position to invest into your life. If you were given exactly 100 diamonds, and told these diamonds are investments, which will bring a level of future success in life to whatever area of life you place them in. How would you divide up these diamonds among your top 5 purposes listed above? Divide the gemstones based on the importance, or how much each purpose means to you compared to the other purposes. The more diamonds you invest into a purpose, the more likely you will have what you hoped for in that purpose, but you only have 100 total to invest into those five purposes in your life.

Here are a few examples to look at before you fill in your investments. The first two simply asked audiences to rank 10 most important things in life on a scale of 1 – 100 in both how often this thing would impact your life (Quantity; shown in blue), and how deeply this area of life would impact you (Quality; in red). The first graph shows audience ranking assuming atheism is true (no God exists), and the second graph shows the rankings if Christianity were true.

This last example is from one audience member, and is the graph you will make for yourself after downloading the spreadsheet.

  1. In column a, list your 5 purposes in order of importance.
  2. In column b, divide up your 100 diamonds between the 5 purposes.
  3. In column c, provide the fraction of your free time you invest into each purpose.

When you think of your “free time,” one of the most important commodities in your life, this is the time after all your school, work, family, eating, sleeping, and any things you have to do are done, and you get to choose what to invest your time into. What fraction of that time do you invest into the 5 purposes you claim are most important in your life? This is what tells what is actually most important to you.

For example, as a teenager, if I had 4 hours each weekday, and 7 hours on both weekend days, but I only chose to invest 1/2 hour each day of my free time on activities to develop my relationship with God. Then out of 34 hours of free time per week, I spent 3.5 hours with God, meaning 3.5 / 14 = 10% is what I would enter in column c for relationship with God.

  1. In column d, the difference is automatically calculated between the fraction of diamonds you want to invest and the fraction of time you actually

If I gave God a 40 in column b, as my top purpose in life, but only gave 10% in column c, then there will be a negative difference in column d, meaning while I SAY God is most important, in PRACTICE I have other things more important. Negative numbers represent decreased likelihood of reaching my best goals or purpose. Positive numbers indicate in practice you care more about the specific purpose than you thought in theory.

  1. In column e, fill in the actual rank of your most important purposes in life, based on the values in column b.
  2. Predict your future with the GRAPH of your HOPES.

This is obviously not a comprehensive study, it does not account for all the factors that life may bring to you. However, it does account for what is within your control, and the closer you get to the correct fraction of free time values, the more accurate your answers will be.

Results:

  • The blue cones show the relative IMPORTANCE you place on your top PURPOSES in life, and what your top Purpose in life is.
  • The red cones show the relative INVESTMENT you make, which shows your current ACTUAL PURPOSES in life.
  • The difference between column b and column c display the difference between what you claim is most important & what you live as most important. The greater the negative number, the more you sacrifice that purpose for other things.
  • The actual rank or height of each purpose compared to the others, combined with the height difference you see between the blue and red cone for each specific purpose, provide a visual representation of the reliability, or likelihood of your hope or desired expectations being met.
  • Your turn: it is up to you to make your life results match your goals. What can be done (problem-solving)?