Instead of your Life’s Purpose
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Highlights
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Rather than struggle to discover a purpose or vocation, we become people who can recognize and exploit opportunities to create meaning as they arise β resourceful and audacious people who live adventurous lives.
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The kind of meaning Iβm talking about is the kind that relieves a certain kind of despair β the despair that comes from knowing that we must suffer and die and wondering if anything can be worthwhile in the face of these facts.
- I am not going to tell you that this never works β there are people who have been personally fulfilled from devoting their life to a cause. For many of us, however, it does not work β our noble causes run into moral complexities on the ground, or are mirages based on a distorted vision of the world. They may leave us open to manipulation by careerist sociopaths, who know that we will chase any projected image that offers a shred of meaning, like a cat chasing a laser dot.
- Instead of imagining yourself as the hero of a Hollywood movie, imagine yourself as a particularly hearty ancestor that you might brag about when drunk: the one who rode bareback, founded a town, fought a grizzly bear, raised 10 kids, saved her sonβs life by drinking the governor under the table, and went to the frontier to stay one step ahead of the hangman and her gambling debtors.
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If our lives are rich in opportunities for meaning, rather than defined by a singular narrative arc, we can act decisively at particularly important moments rather than imagining that every moment is equally meaningful.
- Instead of looking for a cause to devote your life to, you might try to become someone who is useful and level-headed in a crisis, who is well connected and makes friends easily, or who regularly has good ideas.
- interests represent low-hanging fruits of reward-to-effort payoff: when you are pursuing an interest, rather than an obligation, you are able to use the energy you would otherwise need to browbeat yourself into actually doing things.
- Your heroes became what they were by breaking genuinely new ground - doing things that those before them thought were unthinkable or impossible. To be like them you must surf the void at the frontiers of meaning β and discover meaning where no one else thought it would be, transforming harsh barrens into lush gardens.
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Instead of selflessness, you should strive for integrity β when you create, it should be things that you think are good β that honestly portray your inner and outer world as best you are able. When you are honestly pursuing your own values and vision β and not subordinating them β you are more likely to generate meaning than if you are navigating a maze of compromises with some ultimate goal in mind.
- But the non-linear approach to meaning is about becoming a certain kind of person, the person who will, when given a chance, act effectively to realize their values in this world, even if those values are not articulable except as a felt sense of meaning. It requires us to become developed along multiple axes of development: capable of risking it all in a dangerous, uncertain and beautiful world full of hazard and opportunity.