Day 4: Interests, Passions, Purpose

Today you will learn what is means to have a meaningful career and why it's important, and you will identify the interests and passions you have that can be turned into a career of purpose.

Summary

What is a Meaningful Career?

A meaningful career is one that helps us to develop our interests and passions into a purpose by putting our skills in service of other people.

• You need to know the moral compass or spiritual values by which you want to guide your life and the overall goal that inspires you,
• This may help you pick out the kinds of organizations or companies you'd like to work for if you find ones that are serving the same mission as yours.

As defined at Plato University, purpose is an ultimate goal that is meaningful to the self and consequential to the world. Basically taking your interests and building skills to put that interest into service of other people. This is what Plato University exists to do.

The process for developing your purpose is covered extensively in our “How to Find Your Purpose” course. But quickly the process looks like this:

• Step 1 - Curiosity: Start with your interests, curiosities, your micro motives, the things you find yourself doing that nobody tells you to do.
• Step 2 - Exploration: You become intrinsically motivated to begin learning about this subject and get better at it.
• Step 3 - Passion: You spend so much time learning, practicing, and engaging in the world of this thing, you set goals for yourself to get better, you're passionate about it.
• Step 4 - Purpose: You become fulfilled by what you’re doing, but know that you could do more. You expand beyond yourself and put this passion into service for others.
• Step 5 - Practice & Mastery: You realize to actually use your skills to help others, you are going to have to master them fully. You dedicate yourself, with grit and resilience to mastering skills that have utility and can solve problems. You begin putting those skills into practice, continually trying to solve the problem and improve yourself, eventually reaching a point of creativity, where you are able to create novel solutions, new ways of doing things, which actually fulfill your purpose.

Why is Purpose Necessary?

The benefits of having a purpose include:

• Providing reason behind the immediate goals and motives that drive most of our daily behavior.
• Studies have shown that where no larger purpose exists, short term goals and motives usually lead nowhere and soon lead to being lost with no direction.
• Helps a person to express commitment to action, and usually to make some progress toward accomplishing their goals.
• Organizing an entire life, imparting not only meaning and exhilaration, but also motivation for learning and achievement.
• Neurobiologically, purpose alters the brain for less stress, greater resilience, increased motivation, greater perception, decreased depression, and correlates with a significant number of wellbeing measures.
• Acts as a rallying call, inspiring others and attracting them to your cause providing financial, physical, intellectual, creative, or emotional support

How to Take a Self Inventory of Interests & Passions

In the activity below you will take the following steps:

• Creating a list
• Engaging in self reflection
• Deconstructing past experiences
• Prioritizing your interests into passions
• Aligning those passions with possible career options
• Conducting informational interviews with those working in those careers

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Activity

Download today's worksheet and complete the exercises inside of the worksheet.

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Skill Lesson Mastered

Demonstrate mastery of the knowledge and skills presented in this lesson by applying it to the above activity. If, and only if, you have a full understanding and have mastered the knowledge and skills presented in this lesson, select the next lesson in the navigation.