On Finding Your Purpose

They key to happiness may just be finding a purpose you believe in, and dedicating yourself to it, in whatever form that may take. Some words of wisdom from inspiring minds may be useful along this journey:

In his 2006 article entitled: How to Do What You Love, Paul Graham offered some fantastic advice on how to figure out just what it is you love:

“What you should not do, I think, is worry about the opinion of anyone beyond your friends. You shouldn’t worry about prestige. Prestige is the opinion of the rest of the world. […] Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like.”

Once you’ve defined what it is you love, it may be time to re-evaluate what it means to be successful at it, and Alain de Botton's inspiring 2009 Ted talk may be of some help:

“One of the interesting things about success is that we think we know what it means. A lot of the time our ideas about what it would mean to live successfully are not our own. They’re sucked in from other people. And we also suck in messages from everything from the television to advertising to marketing, etcetera. These are hugely powerful forces that define what we want and how we view ourselves. What I want to argue for is not that we should give up on our ideas of success, but that we should make sure that they are our own. We should focus in on our ideas and make sure that we own them, that we’re truly the authors of our own ambitions. Because it’s bad enough not getting what you want, but it’s even worse to have an idea of what it is you want and find out at the end of the journey that it isn’t, in fact, what you wanted all along.”

With any luck these two great minds will help serve as guides on your journey to finding your purpose.

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