The only way to find your purpose or true self is to shed your social conditioning to look to others for affirmation.
Once you enjoy something without needing to share it, you are on the right track.
It is a paradox of giving up trying and getting lost, which allows you to find.
Tag: purpose
- Theme: Self
Getting lost to find yourself
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1–2 minutes - Theme: Growth
When we Win
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1–2 minutesWinning looks like an event, but it is a process. Winners win and must keep on winning to remain winners.
The horizon of achievement will always stretch beyond, deferring "when" into infinity.
You can always choose now and win a different game. - Theme: Self
Awareness v Attention
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1–2 minutesAttention is a flashlight we point to direct focus, often leaving us blind to the rest of our surroundings.
Awareness is an eternally vigilant, always present state of consciousness, often drowned out by the rationalizing mind attempting to achieve some purpose. - Theme: Growth
finding your purpose is submission
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1–2 minutesFinding purpose so we can live a meaningful existence is a crutch. Life is already meaningful: we are looking for additional security.
It is easier to glorify a singular principle (i.e., goodness, justice, God) and then submit to its precepts than to exist in an original state of chaos and confusion.
This universal submission may be for the net good, but it is slavery to a social ideal.
- Theme: Self
Feeling the good life
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1–2 minutesThere is a difference between knowing life could be better and feeling you have lived better.
Recalling a moment of joy, peace, and contentment so profound it haunts you can vibrantly displace the folly of knowing and redirect our striving. - Theme: Growth
Without purpose, you lose yourself
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1–2 minutesLoss of purpose reduces the ability to think well of yourself. Once a vital goal is lost, every decision is reactive rather than proactive: we either defer indefinitely or attack ideas as enemies.
Another way to say it: When you lose where you are going, you lose who you are. You may retain power, but your decision-making is compromised and reactive, so the decisions of others move you. - Theme: Growth
Good days require perspective: purpose/meaning
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1–2 minutesKnowing what you care about is another way to keep events in perspective: everything else falls away when you have one shiny goal. Truly knowing your purpose does not mean harmonization and balance but passionate pursuit and upheaval in your life as you bend your heart towards your desire.
- Theme: Growth
Locomotive Ambition
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1–2 minutesMotion, that is, movement or locomotion, is necessary to perceive our environment. Thinking evolved from mapping out space: finding what the environment affords and pursuing goals based on your previous location.
The reversal is when we think we move: if anxious or neurotic, we compulsively fidget.We are (mostly) not coerced to move for survival. Instead, we have internalized the threat of expulsion and channeled it into ambitious energy, productivity, and discontent… often marked by a compulsive twitchiness.
- Theme: Growth
Urgent vs Important
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1–2 minutesThe urgent is almost never important, but if we put off the ‘important’ (because it is more difficult or divisive) it will eventually become both important and urgent. This is when chaos ensues.
The difficulty is prioritizing: there is an appeal in urgent (easy/short-term/immediate) problem-solving, while work on the important (difficult/long-term/meaningful) problems sets the values that prevent cascading collapses of all things becoming chaotically urgent.
Paraphrase of "the 7 habits of highly effective people" and the Eisenhower Matrix. - Theme: Self
Death Transference Objects
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1–2 minutesWe all have transferrence objects to make our life meaningful when faced with the inevitability of death.
This can be your shoe collection, religion, or culture. We transfer our insecurity into external stabilizers and signifiers, proclaiming loudly our significance against the inevitable.
- Denial of Death from Ernest Becker