Today I posed a new YouTube Video: “Passion Versus Purpose: The Mixup That is Holding us Back from (What I believe) Our True Purpose Is. (Linked below.) I believe that every human on this planet has the same purpose, to become the best version of themselves: whatever that may look like. For so long I, wrongfully, believed my purpose was about what I was doing for work because I was passionate about my work. I believe that social media has misconstrued “passions” for “purpose” and that we ultimately hold ourselves back from our “purpose” by putting ourselves into a “passionate” box. I hope to open your eyes to the rhetoric change I believe needs to happen on the topics of “passion” and “purpose”!
If you would prefer to read my thoughts, instead of watching the YouTube video, please scroll down for the dialogue from the video.
My name is Jackie and today I’m going to talk about our Purpose Versus our Passions and this kind of, like, grey line that has formed in between the two. And I know about this grey line because I’ve lived on that grey line for a while.
And I’m going to start off by saying what I believe our purpose is. And I believe that every human on the planet has the same purpose and that is to become the best versions of themselves. And, thats where it will start to deviate and that will look a little but different for everyone because we are all individuals. We’re all unique. We’re all our own person.
So, whatever the best version of myself is, is going to look different from the best version of yourself, or himself, or herself, or theyself. Everybody’s version of themselves is going to look different.
I believe that our passions make up part of that, of who we are, of who we will become. But, the age of social media has created this ~weird~ dialogue that, “we need to find our purpose” and that ‘our purpose’ is something that’s outside of ourselves.
That is something I was tricked into believing for a really long time. And it actually held me back from finding myself. From becoming a better version of myself. Because, I believed my “purpose” was to travel and to inspire other people to travel. That was something that I believed because of social media because everyone is out here, you know, posting “this is my purpose”, “this is my purpose”, “this is my purpose” and that’s what I was doing at the time so of course it has to be, “my purpose”.
And maybe it was the purpose of that stage of my life but in the grandeur scheme of my life it wasn’t my purpose, “in life”. My purpose in life was to become a better version of myself than I was back then. This idea that my purpose was to travel and to inspire people to travel, actually held me back from my real purpose to better myself because I clung on to that… I held on to “travel” even when it wasn’t resonating with me anymore, even when I didn’t really enjoy it anymore.. I held onto it because I was like, “oh, no, this is my purpose…this is what I’m supposed to be doing.”
It wasn’t my purpose.
It was my purpose for that time but clinging onto it when it wasn’t something that I was supposed to be doing anymore or not acknowledging that, like, “hey, I’m not passionate about this anymore”…really hurt me. And it held me back.
Ultimately, I don’t believe there is such thing.. I believe that we are always at the right place at the right place at the right time. I know that I learned lessons from that, so, I don’t believe that it really “held me back”. But, if I had the knowledge that I have now and I have the ideas that I have now, the beliefs that I have now – I would’ve been able to put that down a lot sooner. I stayed in it for about two and a half years longer than I even wanted to.
You know, we have things in our lives that we are passionate about. For me, I’m passionate about travel – I still am really passionate about travel. I’m passionate about food, and health, and organics, and I’m passionate about living and life and all these things are things that make up who I am. But, we often, especially because we have to post about it and then once we post about it – you have to stay in it because, “I just told a bunch of people about this so this is my purpose”.
And it makes it harder to put down things that we’re no longer passionate about and move on from them because we’ve made grand declarations of who we are and what we’re doing and what our purpose is and what we’re passionate about.
I think that the big problem that we have right now with “passion versus purpose” is that we have misconstrued our passions for our purpose.
We believe that the things that we’re activists about, the things that we believe in, the things that we are passionate about are our purpose. And they are.. a part of our purpose. Because, ultimately, the things that light you up, the things that make you want to make a change, the things that make you just excited about life.. the things that fire you up.. those a part of you.
And thats where our individual purposes will all start to deviate.. with our passions. But, our passions aren’t our purpose. They are a part of our purpose but they aren’t our purpose.
I think that there needs to be a big change around the rhetoric about what our purpose is, how we’re living our purpose, how we’re thriving in our purpose. As I said in the beginning, I believe that our purpose is to just better ourselves. To become a better version.
Our purpose isn’t to have a good job, or to make a bunch of money or to make changes or to start a fundraiser or to start, you know, whatever it is. To paint, to do art… those are passions, they are not purposes. They are part of your purpose. They add up to a purpose.
But, we have come to an age where we are put into a box and then once you’re in that box you can not be any where outside of this box, outside of that box. You can’t be a little bit in that box and a little bit in this box. You are in this box and that is the box that you are in.
And we limit ourselves by saying our purpose is one of our passions because then we put ourselves in this box and now we are in this box and it gets very difficult to get out of that box. I have been in that box. I have suffered in that box.
And, you know, I’m in this box but I’m also in this box, and this box, and that box, and that box, and that box. I’m in a bunch of boxes. And I have a bunch of passions. I have so many passions that I don’t even know where to start. But none of them are in the same box. They all have their own unique box. And when we say that our purpose is this passion, in this box, we limit ourselves to that box. And how can we grow out of that box if I believe this box to be my purpose.
My purpose on this planet.
That is ridiculous.
And I can’t believe for so long that I held myself back believing that this passion of mine, this instantaneous passion.. it was a passion of mine for a little bit. It’s no longer a huge passion of mine. I am still passionate about traveling but not sharing it, not inspiring others to travel, you find your own way to travel, you find your own, you know, journey, thats not my business anymore.
But, for so long I held myself back believing that to be my purpose. And I believe that we have to start to change the rhetoric around passion versus purpose a little bit. And, you know, start realizing that maybe my purpose on this planet isn’t to be fully involved in A, B, C or D.
It’s to be fully involved with myself, to better myself. And, that in bettering myself these passions and getting involved with A, B, C, and D will add up and will start to accumulate and they become pieces of my purpose. They become an equation let’s say, a math equation, that when you add A passion, B passion, C passion and D passion you get E purpose.
I have so many passions and they are all going to be things I talk about here which I believe is part of my purpose. Right? So, if I limited myself to discussing just one of my passions or just one of the things that I’m passionate about… it would be pulling me away from my ultimate greater purpose. If that makes sense.
So, I hope to add a little bit of pondering to your Friday afternoon. My name is Jackie you can find me on social media @jackieisalive on everything. On Instagram I like to share all the beautiful things that I come into contact with, the beautiful things that I see, the beautiful things that I create. On Twitter, I like to share a little bit more about my day to day life. I go into more philosophical, even some stupid or humorous things, like, nonsensical topics. On TikTok I like to share a little bit more about the practices that I use whether it’s affirmations or just ideologies that I have, beliefs that I have and when you put them all together you can find different parts of me on different aspects of social media.
Again, my name is Jackie, thank you for coming back to my channel. I post new videos every week so don’t forget to click subscribe and I’ll see you next week.
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