Day 1: What is Purpose?

Today you will learn the formula for purpose, why it is crucially important to have purpose in your life, the five step process of developing a purpose, and how you can rapidly start developing one for yourself.

Summary

What is Purpose?

Purpose is a stable and generalized intention to accomplish something that is at the same time meaningful to the self and consequential to the world, as defined by William Damon, a leading scholar of human development.

• Purpose is a goal of sorts, but it's more far reaching and more stable than common lower level goals.
• Purpose may play a part in one's personal search for meaning, but it goes beyond personal meaning and therefore is not strictly synonymous with it. Purpose reaches to the world beyond the self. It implies a desire to make a difference in the world.

A purpose can be complex and ambitious, like I want to help nations of Africa find ways to stop the spread of malaria. Or they can be more modest and familiar, like I want to have a nice family and take care of my children.

Purpose can often change over time as a person may add new ones or extend their purpose over the years.

‍Purpose may not be achievable in one's lifetime. An extremely ambitious goal like that is not necessarily naivety. It's a practical source of intense motivation.

A true purpose is an ultimate concern, an end in itself. It's the final answer to the question of why?

Why is Purpose Important?

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 Develop a Purpose

Where can you find your purpose? Here's the secret: You don't find your purpose. You develop it.

Steps to develop your purpose:

• 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, that actually fulfill your purpose.

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Activity

Continue you with the rest of the course to get a deep dive into the process of developing a purpose.

However if you are only going to take one lesson, then use the following process to rapidly start developing a purpose:

• Make a list of 25 interests your curious about; be as specific as possible about the description of these interests
• Hunt for intersections of 2 or more interests and explore them through books, podcasts, videos
• Play in these intersections by engaging small activities practicing your interests
• Go public by telling others what you are learning and get feedback about your ideas
• Turn your interests into a purpose by creating another list of 15 major problems in the world and how these interests could be applied to those problems

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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.