Day 12: Exploration

Today you will learn about what exploration is on the path to discovering your purpose, why exploration of interests are important for developing your purpose, how we foster exploration at Plato University, and how you can begin exploring interests in low investment, low risk ways.

Summary

What is Exploration?

Exploration is the process of testing our interests to gain a better understanding of ourselves, how we fit in the world, and what our strengths are for contributing to it.

The results of exploration include:

• Learning About Yourself: By exploring new topics you start to discover your strengths, weaknesses, behaviors, & values. This helps open a window to passions and self awareness.
• Learning How To Learn: Have you ever been taught how to learn, not just what to learn? Exploration gives a chance for learners to develop healthy learning habits, resourcefulness, & skills for self directed learning.
• Learning The Landscape: How can you truly know what you want to do in life if you don't know all that is available to you? Exploration allows you to get your feet wet in multiple topics to find the ones that call to you most.

Why is Exploration important to purpose?

You cannot bypass the process of discovering your purpose, or imagine that it will simply come to you naturally.

Experimenting with different interests, with skills and options related to your personality, and inclinations is not only the single most essential step in developing a high sense of purpose., it is perhaps the most important step in life in general.

It allows you to know in a deep way who you are, your uniqueness, will make it that much easier to avoid all of the other pitfalls of human nature.

How does Plato University foster Exploration?

At Plato University we make all our curriculum & content freely available to the public. Learners can explore ALL our courses BEFORE they commit.

Once students start building interests in particular skillsets or fields, they can apply to Plato University to engage in our specially designed process of turning those passions into purpose.

As a result, students are more confident, engaged, and motivated to learn leading to more fulfilling lives and careers after education.

How to go through the process of Exploration

Here is the process for exploring your interests to see if they are passions for you.

Step One: Play in the Intersections of Interests

• Begin engaging in research or activities, like reading books or listening to podcasts, that combine two or more interests and incorporate you values, strengths and weaknesses, and dreams and aspirations.
• As you test out these interests, remember to pay attention to how you are judging them. This will help you to further reveal your motives.

Step Two: Engage in Low Investment, Low Risk Activities

• After researching an interest, you will eventually need to engage in experiences within that field or skillset to get a real feel for it.
• Look for small activities with small investment and minimal risk in time, money, and other resources. At this stage, you're trying to get creative and find a way that you can actually experience what you're interested in without doing the full blown thing.
• These experiences will reveal if you actually enjoy the work required to pursue this interest, and more importantly, your particular strengths and weaknesses that will be needed to be trained in order to reach mastery in this field.

Step Three: Find a Mentor

• As you engage in experiences, some will be more satisfying than others. For the ones that are lighting you up more, begin to surround yourself with other purposeful people working in this field, including mentors who have mastered it.
• These people will show you the rules of the field, but more importantly, the value structures underlying it, where you can begin to identify if your values actually align with these fields that you're interested in.

Step Four: Analyze Your Experiences

• As you further explore certain fields in more detail, understanding the value structures and who you would need to become in order to succeed in this field, you can start to analyze that path with the dreams and aspirations you have for yourself.
• Look at how you will need to update your plan or ways you will need to deviate from the path to mastery in order to incorporate the person you want to become.
• Finally, which of these interests, encapsulating all the previous elements from the discovery of yourself, is most aligned with your why the motivating factor behind your life.
• Over the course of this exploration, you should receive some clear signals to the passions of your life and even begin to get a hint of how those might be turned into a purpose.

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Activity

Go back to your list of interests created in Day 5 and start searching for some ways that you can test out these interests with a small investment and minimal risk.

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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.