Finding Your Purpose

The following is summarized from the psycologytoday article linked below. The ideas really resonate with me, and I'd like to put my feelings in writing and document the important points I took away from the article.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-new-resilience/201105/why-its-hard-find-your-life-purpose-in-todays-world

1. Pursue something larger than your ego. Your life's objective should not include superlatives and titles. It should be altruistic. It shouldn't be about optimizing the way your ego feels. Do what you are passionate about and success will follow. Hopefully, if you are working on your passion, your ego wont crave outward success and recognition anyway. 

Think about Apple. They created new markets for music, and entertainment, new products from imacs to ipods to itunes to iphones. They weren't focused on winning. They weren't focused on market share and EPS. They were focused on creating the best product, period. That is purpose. Improving the world by focusing on providing the greatest value you can. Of course they are one of the best managed companies in the world and do indeed maximize market share, and practice strategic obsolescence within product lines, and tightly control costs, but their core, their driving focus was the quality of the product.

2. Don't try to find your purpose. Try to 'learn' it. Try to 'feel' it. Study your life story, your successes and failures and try to determine what they say about you and what you like. People are terrible at deciding what will make them happy, and who they are; the self-help industry is supposedly a 2.5b industry per wikipedia. Make a study of you. Be an unbiased expert in you.

"Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe that your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires courage."- Emerson

"...may suddenly think during the night, "I must go to the north," and in the morning, he sets out on his journey. He does not know why, he does not know what he is to accomplish there, he only knows that he must go. By going there, he finds something that he has to do and sees that it was the hand of destiny pushing him towards the accomplishment of that purpose which inspired him to go to the north." -Hazrat Inayat Khan

http://www.theonion.com/articles/find-the-thing-youre-most-passionate-about-then-do,31742/?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=SocialMarketing&utm_campaign=standard-post:quote:default