Have you ever had million dollars? This blog post is being written by a person whose answer to this question is “no”. So, if you also answered “no”, then this post might potentially interest you. Let’s keep fantasizing a little more. Have you ever thought about having a million dollars? Have you ever thought about how you would earn that much money? Have you ever thought about what you would do with that much money?

Have you ever truly wondered what it would take to get a million dollars for once in your life? If not, take a moment and think about it. I’ll wait. No, do not keep reading, just think about it for 1 minute at least…

Did your brain tingle while you were thinking about potential feasible pathway(s) to your first million dollars? If not, then you should have kept thinking harder until it did. Sometimes the reason you do not feel excited while thinking about your future plans is just because you don’t believe it enough, or in other words, you don’t live your imagination. What I have discovered is that you can train yourself to dream about something while you are awake and not be able to tell the difference between what you are imagining up in your head and what your eyes are seeing or what your ears are hearing from the “real” world you are living awaken. You can dream so hard to the extent that your imagination becomes the same as the dreams you have in your sleeps – the ones that you cannot tell the difference apart from the “actual reality”. Okay, you ask, but where am I going with all this..?

Well, it happens to be the case that most people out there do not know what their purpose is in the grand scheme of things called life. Maybe it is a curse, maybe it is a blessing, maybe it is neither, and maybe it is both. When something is claimed to be a curse or a blessing, usually the words “curse” and “blessing” do the heavy lifting in the gym of semantics. So, I am not going to claim anything like this. However, if you are a kind of person who would like to find a purpose, then what I will say is, in my experience, maybe finding a purpose is not something that just transcends out the blue, but rather something that is discovered. How could it be discovered, you ask. By consistently following a process. What process?! Any process. Even if you don’t think you’d enjoy the process you are going to follow. The thing is that if you already knew the process that you’d enjoy consistently following, then you would have already had a purpose – whether it be small or big, it may be better than nothing. You feel you lack your life’s purpose because you don’t know what process to follow in the first place… and it turns out that it doesn’t matter: how you find a purpose is not very much about the process that you follow, rarther more about you following something.

As you keep following a process, you will find out whether you enjoy following it or not. Even deeply being aware of the fact that you do not enjoy this process any longer is highly likely going to be joyful for you. However, here is the tricky part: you cannot really understand whether or not you’d enjoy the process you are currently following in the long run, you should be willing to keep following it until some moment of satisfaction hits you. It may sound a strange concept, but let me illustrate it very simply.

Say, you start to work on your drawing skills. After an hour, you feel like it is not the right path for you to be in and that you don’t enjoy drawing pictures. You feel like drawing is just not your thing, but at the same time you feel confused about what you need to be doing now and the feeling of hopelessness knocks your door again. Here’s what needs to happen in this case: you should keep drawing even though you haven’t found any joy doing it. You should keep drawing so many pictures until the point you feel like all you need to do right now is to stop drawing because you are $\propto$<!-- -->{=html}99.999999…% sure that you hate it. Even though you may not know what is the next thing that you’d try, even the act of stopping to draw one more thing would bring joy to your life for a moment. If you get depressed afterwards because you find yourself in the same emptiness of not knowing what to do next, then go back to drawing pictures again. Do this process in cycle until you decide to substitute drawing pictures for a different activity. Basically, the formula is not too hard to comprehend: get back to doing the same X as long as you start feeling no excitement little after you stop doing X, and replace X with the next thing that you wouldn’t be able to wait for replacing X with as your new deafult activity, then repeat. At some point in this process, you may pick an activity that you would truly enjoy doing and in this case you would just keep doing it because you wouldn’t feel the need to replace it with another activity. The rule in giving up on something is that you must have no better alternative for replacing it.

Let me get back to the title of the blog post. The title of the post is about one’s realization that what’s worth million dollars is not the million dollars itself, but the journey that it takes one to get there. So, the million-dollar journey within is what makes you a million dollar even if you fail to earn it physically. Obviously, million dollars is just being used as an example here and one may use any other such desire that seems beyond oneself at the first glance.