If I had to sum up my entire philosophy on life in a single point, it would be this:  Live life on purpose.  This life is yours, and you can do whatever you want with it, so why should you waste it going through the motions and wasting your time.  Live your life on purpose.

I made a decision early in my life that I was not going to wake up one day at 50 or 60 years old and wonder where my life went, and why it didn’t look the way I used to hope it would.  I decided that the only way to achieve this goal was to live my life on purpose; to make the decisions in my life based on whether or not they fit into what I wanted my life to look like long term.

In my twenties, I was in a job that didn’t allow me to see my baby daughter, so I quit that job and started a business, which I designed in such a way as to give me family time.  I realized that having television in my life did not actually contribute to the quality of my life, so I got rid of tv.  In my thirties, I faced the difficult truth that my marriage was not, had never been, and was never going to be fulfilling.  I went through the long and difficult process of divorce.

Every day we are faced with decisions.  Some of them are small, but some are significant.  Sometimes we can tell the big ones when they happen, but sometimes you can’t tell that a decision you made was life-altering until years later.  For this reason, I believe that every decision you make in life has to be made with the end in mind.  What kind of person do you want to be?  What really matters to you in life?  What do you want your life to look like long-term?  All of these should factor into the choices that you make.

Don’t go through the motions of your life.   Don’t wait for other people to make things happen for you.  Don’t live out the dreams of someone else.  This is your life.  Make it the life that you want it to be.  Live it on purpose.