Plan Your Life on Purpose
- Jesse Passafiume
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
Plan Your Life on Purpose
The Method Behind Every Other Framework
The Framework: Purpose → Values → Five Domain Missions → Track
Purpose: To stop drifting through your life and business by accident, and start running both on a written plan you actually revisit.
Summary: A four-part method for building a life plan that survives contact with a real year: write the one purpose statement that doesn't change annually, name the handful of values that govern how you act, translate that purpose into a mission and a short list of disciplines across five life domains, then track it — reviewing at year-end and mid-year so the plan stays a living document instead of a folder you wrote once and never opened again.
About twenty years ago I sat in a room for three days with Daniel Harkavy, the founder of Building Champions, while he walked a group of us through designing our lives on paper. I'd run plenty of business plans by then. I'd never run my own life through the same discipline.
Harkavy's process eventually became a book — Living Forward, co-written with Michael Hyatt — but I didn't have the book that week. I had a blank page and three days to fill it in. My process has changed a lot since then. The plan I run today doesn't look like the one I wrote in that room. But the heart of it hasn't moved: a life, like a business, drifts unless someone decides where it's going and writes it down.
Most people never write it down. They carry a rough sense of what they want — more money, better health, a stronger marriage — but nothing specific enough to act on this Tuesday. A goal like “get healthier” can't tell you what to do this morning. A plan can.
Here's the four-part method, in order.
Define Your Personal Purpose
One sentence. It doesn't change from year to year — if it does, it wasn't your purpose, it was a goal wearing a bigger costume. This is the sentence that has to still be true whether you're having your best year or your worst one.
Mine is: Leave the moment better than I found it.
That's it. It governs a conversation with a loan officer the same way it governs a Tuesday morning with my kids. A purpose statement that only works in one context isn't a purpose — it's a job description.
Clarify Your Values
Three to five words, each with a single line explaining what it actually means when you live it. Not aspirational words picked because they sound like a good person's values — the words that are already true about you on your best days, written down so they're true on your worst ones too.
Mine: Responsibility — own it, all of it. Achievement — do my best and win. Respect — honor myself, my family, my team, my community. Discipline — do what you say. Integrity through action. Promise keeper.
Four words isn't a personality test result. It's a filter. When a decision doesn't fit one of them, that's usually the answer.
Build Five Domain Missions and Disciplines
Purpose and values are the constitution. This is where it becomes governable. Every life splits into a handful of domains that all draw from the same person and the same 24 hours — mind and body, partner, family, work, and recreation, with money tracked separately as a scoreboard rather than treated as a sixth domain, since money is a byproduct of the other five, not a domain of its own.
Each domain gets one mission sentence — what does winning look like here — and two to four disciplines: the specific, repeatable actions that make the mission true. Not “be healthier.” Up by a fixed time, five days a week. Move the body six days a week. Track it daily, even the days you don't want to. Not “be a good partner.” Ten minutes of real connection, every day. A monthly review of the relationship itself — not just the logistics.
This is the part most people skip, because a mission statement feels like enough. It isn't. A mission without disciplines is a wish. This is also exactly what the Five Domains framework is built to walk you through — it's the worksheet version of this exact step, one domain at a time.
Track Frameworks, Goals, and What Matters — All Year
A plan that only gets opened once a year isn't a plan, it's a time capsule. This step is what keeps the other three alive: the frameworks you're running, the business goals attached to this year, the disciplines from step three — all of it gets tracked somewhere you'll actually look at again.
And twice a year, it gets reviewed on purpose: reflect on what the data and the disciplines actually showed, react to what changed since you wrote the plan, redirect what needs to shift for the next six months. That rhythm — reflect, react, redirect — is its own framework, and it's the hinge the whole system turns on. Nothing above survives without it.
Try this week: Write one sentence for your purpose. Not five — one. If you can't get it under a sentence, you haven't found it yet; you've found a paragraph that's still doing the work a sentence should do.
This isn't a framework you finish. It's the operating system every other framework in this system plugs into — the reason a five-step process at work and a discipline at home can come from the same person without contradiction. Build better isn't a slogan sitting on top of your life. It's what happens when the plan underneath it is actually written down.
A note on sourcing: this method traces back to Daniel Harkavy, founder and CEO of Building Champions, and the life-planning process he's taught for decades — later formalized in Living Forward: A Proven Plan to Stop Drifting and Get the Life You Want (Michael Hyatt & Daniel Harkavy, 2016). What's here is my own twenty-years-evolved version of that process, not a summary of the book.
