My brother is a Zen Buddhist. His wife is a Catholic. I believe in the Creator. When the three of us discuss the purpose of life, we have seemingly different ideas. But lately I realized that on a deep level, we share similar understanding of this topic:

• We all have a purpose. We are born to fulfill certain tasks on Earth.
• We may not be consciously aware of our purpose, but at any given moment, we are either serving our life purpose, or not.
• Not being aware of our life purpose doesn’t mean that we are actually not serving it.
• It is important to discover our purpose, otherwise we often get “stuck”, unhappy and disillusioned about life.

I believe that our basic life purpose is to love. Ourselves and others. In addition, each of us has a more specific purpose but always under an umbrella of love. For example, my life purpose is to help others be happy. During my 14 years in the audit firm, I used to question how much this part of my life was fulfilling my life purpose. Teachers, scientists or architects, all seemed to be doing much more important work! But recently I realized that there is another way how to look at my corporate years.

When I started my career, the young Czech Republic was only learning how to keep accounting books according to the international standards. In addition to my regular job, I have educated, in my free time, many chief accountants and their accounting teams in how to keep accounting books and prepare financial statements. It was impossible to ignore how desperate my clients often were and doing them a favor came naturally to me.

Later, as a manger and director, I led many different teams. I did my best to treat everyone with respect and in a fair way. I know I wasn’t perfect all the time, but I probably did something right. When the last day of my audit career came, some of my co-workers were crying as I was saying my good-buy. I see now that my corporate years actually had a purpose.

If you want to know your purpose better, ask yourself the following questions:

What do you love?

What is your biggest contribution to the world?

When are you happiest?