Day 19: Identify Your Purpose

Today you will learn what path to purpose is, what the hero's journey is, why you would want to take your path to purpose, and how to start walking your own path to purpose.

Summary

What is the path to 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.

• Victor Frankel said that man transcends himself either toward another human being or toward meaning.
• Love in his view was the capacity which enables a man to grasp the other human being in his very unique.
• Consciousness is the capacity which empowers him to seize the meaning of a situation in its very uniqueness.
• Purpose combines both of these.

The path to purpose is also known as the Hero's Journey, an archetypical path dozens of others have walked before and have commonality in their journey.

• The Hero's Journey is about a lonely hero trying to find himself and embarks on unexpected journey, promising adventure and peril, a test of character, strength and skill, an ultimate battle that solves the heroes resolve and a triumphant return home.
• The Hero's Journey can serve as a template for your life. Be the hero of your own life. Walk your own path.

Why take the path to purpose?

Once you uptake a purposeful quest, your personality begins to be transformed by the activities and events of the quest.

• You acquire such capacities as resourcefulness, persistence, knowhow, and tolerance of risk and temporary setbacks. And these capacities, of course compromise many of the makings of other successful people in life.
• Character virtues such as diligence, responsibility, confidence, and humility get a major boost from the experience of making a commitment to a challenging purpose and seeing it through.
• Your perspective on what is possible in the world changes. The potential as well as the limits of ambition matures as a result of the exposure to inevitable mix of success and failures that will be produced along your journey.
• The journey empowers your sense of confidence and your potential to make a difference in the world.
• It encourages you to take on difficult tasks while at the same time preparing you for when frustration or even defeat comes on some occasions  

The path to purpose is also less risky because of how much we made it fit in with our lives and who we are.

How to walk your path to purpose

Imagine there are only two paths to travel:

• One is the path of reason and certainty. It's well trodden, well mapped, and is a path of averages, average pleasure, average pain, average joy, and average average results. Along this road, you are certain to experience an aggregate blend a mean the middle of what's possible.
• Then there's the second path, which is your path springing from within and obeying your heart's compass. It is unique to you. Your path isn't devoid of reason and certainty, but it's also not trapped by them. It's not average because there's no data set to even establish an average. It's just you.  

The world's going to push you onto the first path because it's easier for everyone else to understand. It's produced to be standardized, to consistently put out average results no matter who walks it.

But by contrast, you are going to design the second path as you go, creating a life only you are capable of living, which is going to lead to a much wider and richer range of possibilities.

And to follow this path, you simply have to hear the call and start walking toward it. All you're deciding to do here is to give it a try. Do whatever you can with what you have right now. It's never gonna feel like the right time to start. You will never be ready.  Avoid preparing too much.

This is one of the biggest secrets of the most creative, happy and successful people. You just have to get started.

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Activity

Just fully identify and state your purpose from all the work that we've done in the last lessons and just get started.

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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.