Shane Hipps - Cats Dont Bark: A Guide to Knowing Who You Are, Accepting Who You Are Not, and Living Your Unique Purpose

You carry

All the ingredients

To turn your life into a nightmare

Dont mix them!

You have all the genius

To build a swing in your backyard

For God.

That sounds

Like a hell of a lot more fun.

Lets start laughing, drawing blueprints,

Gathering our talented friends

You carry all the ingredients

To turn your existence into joy,

Mix them, mix

Them!

Hafiz

A gorgeous thirty-foot midnight blue touring boat with a stunning profile and an unusual deck clad entirely in mahogany with maple inlays sat in the water before me. It wasnt flashy, but it was utterly arresting. There I stood, feeling out of place, on a private dock at a party thrown by a very wealthy man on his sprawling estate. I was there by chance. On the other side of the dock behind me sat an enormous three-story yacht, but for some reason I couldnt take my eyes off the smaller touring boat. Just then the host walked up to greet me. I turned casually to make conversation and hopefully appear to belong.

Ive never seen a boat like this, I said. Its beautiful.

Thanks. Yeah, I really love the way it sits in the water. Nothing quite like it.

He mentioned a few other unique attributes that were lost on me, but he didnt seem interested in bragging. Then he politely thanked me for coming and continued making his rounds with the other guests.

Later I was talking to one of the guests at the party and I asked if he had seen that particular boat.

Amazing, isnt it? he replied. Do you know how much that thing costs?

I guessed around $150,000 (an inflated estimate, I reasoned).

Not even close. Thats a Riva! He laughed.

This meant nothing to me.

He could see that. Its an Italian-made boat. There are only three of these in the country and only about a hundred made each year. A Riva like this would cost at least a million dollars.

My jaw dropped. It was certainly a work of art, and clearly well crafted, but I would have never guessed it. This was a simple lesson in economics. In this case, much of the value was determined by a limited supply. The price was derived not just from craftsmanship and materials, but from the boats rarity. I felt somehow special to be in the presence of something so valuable and so rare.

Then again, it was just a boat, even if it was one in a hundred. By contrast, an estimated seven billion people are living on the earth today. Thats a lot of people. Of all those billions of people, not onenot a single oneis like you. That means you are one in seven billiona true one of a kind. In other words, a Riva has nothing on you. Its an impressive stat. But lets go back in time for a moment and consider all of human history. From this perspective the number looks a little different. By some estimates nearly 160 billion people have lived on this earth since the beginning of human history. In all that time, in all those people, no one has ever been like you. And in all the billions of people who have yet to be born, not a single one will ever be like you. No one sees the world the way you do, tastes food the way you do, laughs like you, speaks like you, is shaped like you, appreciates music like you, plays like you, creates like you, or wants exactly what you want in life.

You are completely, utterly, and incalculably unique. And here you arewalking, talking, thinking, feeling, and doing. Right now you are. I am. And one day we wont be, not like this. While you walk the earth, you are worth more than all the wealth in the world. You are a genuine miracle, and yet most of the time we are oblivious to this fact. But every once in a while something peeks into our mundane activities and we recognize it. We have a keen awareness that this life is an extraordinary moment. We know somehoweven when life is difficultweve been given a precious gift. It is the reason that everyone at some point is compelled to ask that primordial questionWhy am I here?

Beneath our conscious awareness, we can feel there must be something more to our being here. There must be a reason for the extravagant gift of existence. It cant all be just a cosmic accident. And so we search for the purpose that pulses beneath the surface.

The question can be posed in terms that are detached and philosophical or studied and existential. But my interest is only in the personal nature of the question: Why am I, [INSERT YOUR NAME], here right now? What am I supposed to be doing with this life? These are the most important questions we can ask in our lifetime.

You will find no shortage of answers to these questions. Scores of books have been written on the subject. If you are a religious person, your religious leaders and sacred texts will gladly offer a set of answers to you. Then we have our parents, spouses, partners, friends, children, teachers, advertisers, employers, and cultures, all of whom will eagerly give direction and advice. Most of the answers offered by others remove ambiguity from the search. They answer the questions for us. At first, this may seem to be a great relief, but sooner or later most of us come to realize a very important truth: in reality, no one can answer these questions for you. The reason is that the answers do not come in words from the outside, but rather as an experience, an intuition, a gut sense from within.