Your Path to Purpose & Clarity →
Reading, Writing, and Running

The 5 AM Miracle Podcast, hosted by Jeff Sanders

Episode #588: Your Path to Purpose & Clarity → Reading, Writing, and Running

Jeff Sanders
Good morning and welcome to The 5 AM Miracle. This is episode #588: Your Path to Purpose & Clarity → Reading, Writing, and Running.

I am Jeff Sanders and you have reached the podcast that is dedicated to dominating your day before breakfast. I am a keynote speaker and corporate trainer. And if you wanna learn more, head over to jeffsanders.com/speaking. Now in the episode this week, I'll break down the three R's of finding purpose and clarity, reading, writing, and running. Why purposeful living takes more courage than time, money, or energy. And why finding your purpose or identifying your calling is often something you only know after the fact. Let's dig in.

So there is something quite significant taking place right now in this moment. And what is happening is that I made a decision that I haven't made in I think 12 years, maybe 15. It's been a long time, which is I decided that I was in desperate need of a break from all caffeine sources. I know, I know. On this podcast, I frequently reference the fact that I have tons of energy and I usually have a little side comment that it was due to coffee. And yes, that is probably the case. But today, today is day one of a break from caffeine for me. My initial plan is 30 days off. I do not know what I actually will end up doing or how long it will last. I will keep you posted. But there is a big backstory that I will go into in more detail on the podcast in a few weeks. But I need to let this simmer first. I need to really dig into it and learn a few more things, do some more research.

There's a lot to dig into in the world of caffeine and addiction and energy and lifestyle choices. There's so much there. And we're gonna get into all of that very soon. But I just wanted to give you the heads up that if I sound tired or if I sound like I'm not myself, well, that is probably the lack of caffeine talking or the excessive amounts of water that I am now drinking. So either way, that's the first note. Second note is that I recently have kind of doubled down on Spotify for this podcast specifically.

And what I really mean by that is, is that of all the major platforms that offer podcasting, Spotify has probably the best platform for comments on individual episodes. And so of course you can leave a review of the show in total, but if you have a question or a comment on an individual episode, you can do that in Spotify. You can simply log into the app and find the episode you wanna play and leave a comment right there. You could do one for this episode right now and have a comment about coffee or whatever you wanna do. But what I love about this is the direct interaction from me to you or back and forth that is tied to an episode specifically and not just a general email. Of course, you can email me directly, jeff@jeffsanders.com, and I will happily answer your questions through there as well. But I find that the direct commentary on an episode is a very, very effective way to have a conversation that is targeted. And I don't know of other major platforms that offer this. Smaller ones I know do. Apple, unfortunately, is terrible at this, even though the majority of my listeners use Apple Podcasts. I know that from the data. If that's you, that's awesome. Just stay there as long as you want. But if you want to leverage the beauty of Spotify comments, and they really are great, then go ahead and do that. Okay, now onto today's main topic, which is your purpose in life.

Well, sort of. What this really is is a commentary from me about different methodologies you have available to clarify difficult questions in your life and to really double down on the systematic habit systems, the lifestyle choices that you will make that the impact of or the effect of those habits is just more clarity in general. And that can be a lifestyle that just adds up to you being healthier and happier and you think better. Or, and/or, it could be leveraged to ask and answer difficult questions, to seek out clarity in areas where you're struggling, whether it's your health, your career, your finances, relationships, whatever it happens to be. We all have areas of our lives where we feel cloudy, where we don't have the clarity we want, where we would love to have the clean, simple answer, and we just don't have it. And one of my biggest questions as someone who teaches productivity and personal growth and who loves to run marathons and really challenge myself personally in thousands of ways, one thing that has always spoke to me is this incessant desire to answer difficult questions, to clarify things that are messy, to clean up physical messes, metaphorical messes, digital messes. I love that process because the before and after is so dramatic. To be able to say, I was here and it was bad, and now I'm here and it's great.

I think of an infomercial, right? Like those black and white people are just like tearing their hair out and life is awful until I had this amazing new toaster and now, oh my gosh. Right, like that feeling, that's what I'm looking for. I want the kind of clarity you get from an infomercial where it goes from black and white to color. Like that's the answer here. So let's have that conversation this week. Let's talk about clarity, talk about ultimately a purposeful living and through these different means that I think are probably the most effective, at least for me, and we'll of course have more opportunity for more ideas as well. But let's begin with purpose itself. What is it? Why are we talking about that this week? Well, the definition of purpose is the reason for which something is done or created or for which something exists. In other words, why you're here and what you're here for. Now here in the metaphorical sense of why you're here on earth, why you're alive, or more specifically, what is the purpose for a specific area you're trying to work on? Your finances, your health, your career, et cetera. So you can really use the purpose definition in a very general sense for your life calling or for a more specific sense. Now, as I said at the top of the show, there is one element of finding your purpose that I think alludes a lot of us.

And then once you realize it, it's really frustrating, which is that to find your purpose or identify your calling or to be very clear on what it is you're doing here. You will often only get that sense of clarity afterwards, when it's done, when it's over, when you have already put in work. Now, I think there's an opportunity here. And the opportunity is, is that you don't have to wait until 20 or 50 years have passed and then look back at your life and say, well, there was the answer. That was it the whole time. I think the better, more practical application of this reality is that what we can do is say, well, things are messy, things are chaotic, things are confusing. I don't know what the answer is. Therefore, I'm going to do something about it. I'm going to take action. And it's in the action itself that you begin to connect the dots. It's while doing work, you begin to figure out what work you should be doing and what this all adds up to. So you don't need this crystal ball to tell you, you know, from the heavens, here's your purpose in life. What you need to do is work.

Like what you need to do is move in a direction that is oriented towards your strengths, your interests, something that says like, this is an area that I see potential in. Okay, great, let's go there. Right, we don't have to have all the answers. And in fact, you probably never will. And anyone who tells you that they know their purpose in life, they might feel confident about that right now. And then that answer might change in a few years and then change again a few years later because that's how life tends to go.

We evolve, we change, we move, we try different things. And our purpose in life is not something that we honestly can answer until we're dead. Like it just, it's not, that will be our story. Someone else will tell about us. But what we will do is react in the moment, respond to what is true now and move forward in that mess and find the clarity in the chaos because that's what life is. So I am not gonna argue that this episode is going to allow you to find your purpose 'cause that's not the point of this episode or I don't think of even our lives in total. We're not trying to find our purpose. We're trying to do great things and help people along the way and achieve amazing goals that inspire us because that's where you really are alive. That's where your life is connected, where the resonance shows up, the chemistry shows up, is you pursuing things that light you up.

That's your purpose, right? That's the point. Do things that make you feel alive. Done, end of story. And when you do those things, you get all the benefits from that. Not only fulfilling your own personal objectives and goals and desires, but also helping others along the way with their goals and desires. Having said that, what I wanna discuss is sort of about your life calling, but it's more about the process we go through to discover clarity and really feel confident on the next actions we're going to take, the next big step we're going to have in our lives. So purpose itself is, it's a personal conversation. It's subjective and it can easily change with circumstances. However, the process to clarify a messy scenario or to make a confident decision about what to do next, that's a fairly tried and true path. That's the kind of repeatable steps you can take regardless of what purpose you're trying to identify in the current season you're in. All that to say, we can do something now about whatever you're facing now. And that to me is very empowering. That to me is where it can really tell the story of our lives of, I saw a challenge and I faced it head on and I took steps to see it through. And though the path was a winding one and it was not linear, it was not a straight A to B, here it is, here's the answer, boom. You might be able to say that after the fact, but in the moment, we're just going to really kind of latch on to the process and be okay with and accepting of the messy complications that that brings about.

All that to say, let's make this easier. So step number one, the process this week for you to help clarify your life and your goals and your next season, your next actions. Step one is reading. Now this term reading, I'm going to use in a more broad sense it really means learning or consuming. And what you're looking for here is a very specific strategy that you can leverage either in a morning routine where you read a great book, it could be a podcast you hear on your way to work, it could be a conference that you attend, whatever the case is, the goal here is to fill our minds with intelligent information from many different sources to help give us the tools we need that we're then going to work with later to actually go do the work itself. So there's a lot of people in the world of, we'll say entrepreneurship is very common or health and wellness definitely. This tendency to wanna learn, learn, learn all the time as an avoidance tactic, a procrastination tactic to never do the work itself. And you might think that the activity, the busyness of learning is work itself.

And then people get trapped in that. They get really stuck in this sense of, well, I'm learning all the time. I'm always reading new books. And I love that. I love the reading, I love the consuming. But it's just the first step of the process. It's not the whole story. And in fact, most people who are doing the best work will limit how much they consume. This is the first step, but it's a very compartmentalized step. We're gonna do, let's say an 80/20 rule. 80% of your work is gonna be the action itself and the 20% will be the knowledge gaining, the reading, the learning, right? It might be only 20%. Now it's a very important 20%. It's the first step, it's necessary. And it needs to be a part of the process the whole way through. But my kind of take on personal growth is that you can easily have too much. You can easily drown yourself in too many books, too many podcasts, too much knowledge. And where does that leave you? Paralysis by analysis. You wind up doing nothing because you have no idea what to do because there's too many ideas, too many checklists, too many books.

It's exhausting. It is exhausting. And that's in no way the intention I have here. My goal with my own personal daily habits, that's a good example. Just recently, I shifted to bringing back reading as part of my morning routine. For a long time it wasn't and I read later in the day, but it's now part of one of the very first activities I have in my morning. And what that has done is reestablished a key habit for me that I had 15 years ago, before this podcast even launched, that was really the beginning for me of the 5 a.m. miracle concept, was I wanted my mornings to be about two things, either working out or reading a great book. And so to me, that embodies a phenomenal morning. And mostly because when you read a great book first thing in the day, you are filling your mind with those phenomenal new concepts you can then think about as the day progresses and in many cases, apply lessons you've learned throughout the day as well. And from that perspective, you're not gonna read all day. You're just gonna read as part of your routine for 30 minutes, 45 at most, let's say, like just enough time to dig into something, have some things to chew on mentally and think about.

And then later on, we'll do some more. Tomorrow we'll come back and do it again and again and again. And over the course of, let's say two weeks, you can get through an entire book. Over the course of a month, you might read two or three books and the process just continues from there. You're able to actually consume quite a bit. And from that information, you are gaining immense knowledge that you can then use to answer your difficult questions. And one of the most fascinating things for me, I'll use my home renovation projects I had recently in my house where everything fell apart, had to rebuild everything. And it was this massive six months of work. The first part was the crews that we hired to come in and fix a lot of the big stuff. And then all the work that I did afterwards to polish the rest of the house up. And then this entire process, I leveraged YouTube more than I ever have in my life. I've seen more YouTube videos on how to drywall something than you could possibly imagine. And I learned so much. But the drywalling was done by me. The learning was done in bite-sized chunks. And so I would watch a video, I would learn a skill and I would go apply it right away.

I would watch another video, learn another skill, apply it right away. And it was this back and forth process of learn a new skill, go do it. Learn something new, go do it. And what happened was that over the course of about four months of me doing the work myself, I gained a lot of new skills. I can do things now I couldn't do before. I have knowledge now I didn't have before. I have tools now I didn't own before. I have resources now I didn't have before. The before and after is dramatic. The infomercial is real. It actually took place because now I have DIY skills I did not have. And in some ways my skills are better than the pros, my personal take. But that's just how this goes is that you can improve. You can take something difficult and complicated and brand new to you and make it familiar and make it comfortable and have the skillset and become that pro. And all of a sudden it's not a fear-based problem. It's not a confusing mess. It's just boom, here's the answer.

I've got this, I've nailed it, I've mastered it. Now, some things take longer than others to master. Some processes are much more complicated, but there are many examples in life of just go get the information. Don't sit around and just assume you can't or don't sit around and assume the problem is too difficult to solve. Take action in small bite-sized chunks where you learn something new and then you apply that information as quickly as possible. And that is, at the end of the day, that is personal growth. From my experience, that's what all this really adds up to. This first step is the most important because it's the thing that causes the snowball to move. You read, you learn, you then execute and apply that knowledge, get the results, go learn more and then do more. And the learning and the doing is that rhythm of back and forth, the yin and the yang. And that just keeps chipping away over time and you tackle new problems, learn more, apply more. So in a nutshell, that's the process to gaining new knowledge and new skills and applying them. And that is the first step to clarifying difficult, complicated things is the chipping away bit by bit, day by day of knowledge gaining.

Now that leads us up to the second step in this process, which is writing or thinking critically. And yes, writing is the second of the three Rs and I know the W there. But thinking critically or writing is the process that is essential for following up the reading. It is a form of action, but in a different sense. And I'll break that down in a second. But one thing I will note at the top of this section is that writing for me has been indispensable in my career. I began my career as a podcaster, public speaker, author, doing a lot of blogging. Blogging was where it all started. I wanted to get my voice onto the internet in some capacity. And this began right after college. You know, I have a degree in theater, but I didn't do a lot of writing in college aside from what I was forced to in class.

But then when I was on my own after school, I found a real love of being able to get my thoughts out of my head onto paper and to share those with others. So blogging was the beginning that then led to me doing my first book. And then later on, it was coaching and speaking and podcasting and all of this work that I do ultimately comes down to me writing something down and then sharing what I've written with others.

Now, I wrote a script for this episode for you right now. I spend time every week writing things. And what writing has done is the GTD philosophy of get your ideas out of your head and onto paper to clarify them because, and this is the critical thing, your brain is filled with a lot of stuff, but they're not connected well. Writing connects the dots. Writing gives you the chance to actually formalize what it is you think and why you think it and what that leads to down the road. Writing is a process that is so fundamental to knowledge gaining, to application of the knowledge you have, to be able to clarify your stance on various topics. It is an absolutely critical step and a skill to be gained over time. And if you talk to the best authors in the world, yes, the best authors write a lot, but they will argue that the reading is what led to their best writing because these two things come together.

When you read a lot and you write a lot, you can read more and write more, read better, write better. The skill sets improve over time. And what ends up happening is that the output of your writing is clarifying. This is the most, I think, beautiful part here is that when you brainstorm, when you journal, when you record a podcast, when you write a blog or a book or publish a video on YouTube, when you are thinking critically about your life or difficult topics in your life, you get amazing new breakthroughs. You discover things you did not know were true before. And that leads you to more breakthroughs down the road because the process of writing and brainstorming and getting thoughts out of your head and literally physically onto paper or digital paper is an amazingly effective process.

The power of writing when done in a very direct targeted manner is such an effective tool. And you can start with kind of just regular general journaling of how your day went, and then it can move into more important topics like how am I going to lose weight or gain more money or improve my marriage. You can really target what it is you're doing and then begin to apply what you've read to your writing and formalize plans. And to me, this is when the whole thing begins to come together. Because one of the key things that I teach here about productivity is task management and project management. Well, project management specifically is nothing more than a list of your tasks. And all of this combined is just you spelling out step by step, here's what the first step is for this project and the second and the third and the fourth. But it's you being able to think critically about what it would take to get you from point A to point B and here are all the steps in the process. And then the evolution of those steps as the process takes place. But all of that is writing.

All of that is thinking critically. All of that is applying the knowledge and experience you have in a very tangible way. And with a solid plan in place, well, then you're able to actually go take the action in a way that produces better results than ever. And you gain clarity in the entire process of learning, of writing and brainstorming, of building out these amazing project management lists. And then of course, acting upon those lists, seeing the results you get, going back to the drawing board, do it all over again. It's a fun process, honestly. It may sound like a lot of work and all of this, but the reality is is that when you live this out, when you learn new things and apply what you learned and you can free your mind of your thoughts and then see results from your work, it's such a beautiful thing. That's where progress shows up. Goals are achieved here. Productivity is improved here.

Clarity is achieved here. Purpose can be sought out in this process. And so if you're looking for a way to tangibly apply reading, you could say, well, in the morning, I may have a habit where I read for 20 or 30 minutes. And then writing could be done in that same block if you want to and say, my day will start at 5 a.m. and I'll read for 30 minutes and then I'll write for 15 minutes. Or later on in the day, at the end of the day, to reflect on how the day went. You spend 10 minutes and you write down some thoughts on how the day went. Or it goes so far as to become an author yourself and write your own book.

But the reality is is that you can and should apply writing at some point in your day to really solidify this skill set of writing and the ability to take what you've learned and apply it in a very direct manner. You will find so much clarifying epiphanies and aha moments from this process. Writing is very powerful. Now, speaking of aha moments and epiphanies, the third step in this process, the third R is running. Nothing has brought more epiphanies in my life than running. Now, I'm not going to say that running is the answer. It's actually more of a bigger concept. It is stress reducing creativity. It is exercise. It is health. The third category is you finding time to rhythmically move your body, get yourself out of your norms and let the stress go. This third step is really all about freeing your mind to just be. You go for a long walk, you go for a run on the trail, you meditate, you take a nap, you just chill. And the reason why just chilling is so critical here, even though it's the opposite of doing work, right? It's the opposite of productivity.

We're not doing tasks here. We're just sitting still, just letting our mind rest. What happens in those moments is the cortisol will decrease. Your stress hormone will decrease and creativity will begin to show up. Connections will happen, breakthroughs, epiphanies, aha moments, amazing potential shows up when you stop trying so hard. It's kind of amazing how true that is, which when we stop, that our brain has the chance to actually connect dots that we were not gonna be able to do on our own. There's a strategy that I heard of years ago that I did toy with a bit, but I may go back to, which is to end your day with a brainstorming session where you would write down some thoughts that you have on, here's a big question I have, here's a stressor that I have, here's a problem I wanna solve tomorrow. And you write these things down and then go to bed. And then in the morning, look at that list again and ask yourself, do you have more clarity on those questions? Do you feel better about it? And what tends to be true is you will have some thoughts and you will have a little bit of clarity. You will feel better about it. And you'll feel better because you gave your brain the chance to really think through those thoughts while you were sleeping. Your subconscious mind was able to connect dots you couldn't do while you were consciously stressed out and busy.

What we're going for here is a lifestyle that allows you to crunch and release. This is a concept that I talked about years ago in the podcast and one that I have leveraged since college basically. In college, I call it the work hard, play hard model. So I would work hard in class and study for tests and write papers. And then I would play hard where I would literally go out and party. That was it. Well, as an adult, the party hard part kind of died away, but the work hard part really amped up. What the problem was is that I was working a lot harder, but not giving myself the breaks that I desperately needed.

I didn't have those meditative moments, those long walks on a trail. I didn't have the chance to sleep in and really ponder big thoughts. I was just doing stuff. And if you're always doing stuff, your activity level is high, your productivity is high. Go, go, go all the time, nonstop. Number one, you're gonna have a burnout. You're gonna kill yourself in the process. But more importantly, in this conversation, you're gonna miss out on the epiphanies. You're gonna miss those moments of those breakthroughs. You're gonna miss the chance for your brain to do the hard work for you and connect those dots.

We desperately need the chance to slow down. We are desperate for it because the busier you are, the more high achieving you are, the more you have on your plate and the more you have on your shoulders to carry around, the more you need this. And so I would argue the busier you are, the more important it is for you to build in this time. I heard a long time ago about meditation. That's if you, this is a phrase I need to look up, but essentially the concept was, if you don't have time to meditate for 10 minutes, meditate for an hour. Very counterintuitive advice, right? Like that does not sound possible. It sounds ridiculous, but that's the whole point. If you don't have time for 10 minutes, then you are in desperate need of a full hour. You are in desperate need of more time to let this stuff sit.

And one of the best epiphanies that I get in these moments where I take time out is the realization of all the things I'm doing that are nonsense. All the things that I'm doing that I could cut and let go of and the amazing part there is it then frees up time for more time on the trail, more time for a long walk, more time to meditate or sleep in or be stress-free, more time for creativity, more time for social time, more time for the things that feed my soul so I can then bring my best self to the work I'm going to do tomorrow. All of this is about the connections that you make in these processes. And if you wanna have clarity on your biggest, most difficult challenges, you're gonna need time to just chill because that's when you're going to be able to see things more clearly because you really can't see it when you're in the mess. You've gotta step back, get a big picture of you, and then we dive back in tomorrow. And that back and forth, that rhythm, that crunch and release, that's the process and it's highly effective. Now there's one final concept that I alluded to at the top of the show about courage and the courage to choose.

I read an article recently in Psychology Today from a man named Dr. Jordan Grumet. He is a hospice physician so he works with dying patients. And what he argues in this article he wrote was that purposeful living takes more courage than time, money, or energy. In fact, in the article he goes through and he lists out all the excuses we make about we have no time, we have no money, we have no energy, therefore we can't do all of these amazing bucket list goals in our life. And his argument is that to live with purpose and to be able to achieve your grandest goals, you have to have the courage to say yes anyway.

Yes in the face of time constraints. Yes in the face of a lack of a budget. Yes in the face of, but I'm tired all the time. And the courage to choose the things that you love and the things that you want to see happen is what brings about more of the life you want to live and then you gain clarity in this process because you're actually doing the thing you said you wanted to do and you learn more about yourself in that process than you would by ignoring it yet again or putting it off yet again. You know, often the biggest regrets in life is not what we choose to do, but what we fail to have the courage to attempt. This is the lesson. We fail to have the courage to attempt the thing we wanted to do, therefore the regret eats us alive. Now you can read and write and run all day long, but at some point you have to make a decision and then act on that decision. Once again, like I said before, you can have personal growth be a procrastination technique to the action itself.

You can read forever, but never take the advice of the things you've read, which is not the point. We have to make a decision and then act on that decision. Clarity comes from action. Purpose comes in hindsight. Yes, but wading through the murky waters is the process for all of this. We have to ask tough questions we don't have clear answers to because that's the part of the process that needs us to be actively involved is asking and attempting to answer. Asking yet again and attempting to answer. And that process is, it requires courage. It requires courage to ask and answer difficult questions, but that is what puts you in the driver's seat. So have the courage to act now, despite and because of the fear, confusion, and lack of clarity you may have now, because that's your path forward.

As for that action step this week, add one clarifying habit to your weekly rhythm. Reading, writing, running, you choose, but pick a habit that historically has been helpful for you and bring it back to life. Find new ways to consume intelligent content. Think critically about what you learned and then let your creative juices kick in while you care for your mind and body. The process is simple, it's wildly effective, and all it takes is a little courage to step in. Now, of course, subscribe to this podcast in your favorite podcast app or head over to 5ammiraclepremium.com for the VIP ad-free experience. That's all I've got for you here on The 5 AM Miracle podcast this week. Until next time, you have the power to change your life and all that fun begins bright and early.

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