Viktor Frankl's, Man's Search for Meaning, is one of the most intriguing books I've read. The book basically revolves around the idea that humans have an innate, core desire for meaning. In the book, he introduces the concept of the "Sunday neurosis." When people finally pause at the end of the weekend, and have nothing to do, they may experience a sudden sense of meaninglessness. This is a phenomenon that I can relate to.

But what is meaning? That book doesn't go into detail on how exactly one can find meaning in life. And the elephant-in-the-room question is, "What is Viktor Frankl's meaning?" Turns out Viktor Frankl's meaning in life is to help other people find meaning. How convenient.

But I figured out a simple tool that can help approximate a meaningful life. You simply ask your heart, "is this meaningful?" I found it easy to get reliable answers from my heart.

And so I took an inventory of all possible directions I could take my career, and I put a check-mark next to each one that I found, in my heart, seemed meaningful. Afterward, I then started stacking my work-flow with meaningful projects.

So far so good.

But then, there were further questions. There was something lacking in my calculation. What makes something meaningful? All I had was a feeling I could tap internally that evaluated a thumbs-up or thumbs-down on meaning. When is something more meaningful than others? And what if my internal judging mechanism is off a little bit?

These problems came to fore when I had two projects that were both meaningful. I found myself naturally favoring one over the other, but I couldn't tell why. Somehow my meaningfulness-measure lacked predictive power.

But now, I think I figured out the extra sauce that makes meaningfulness more... well... meaningful. The extra sauce is "purpose."

If there's anything I got from The Purpose Driven Life, it's this principle:

There can be no meaning without purpose.

Using Sartre's thought experiment in Existentialism Is a Humanism, let's look at the case of the knife. If you were an alien and discovered a knife floating across the universe, what would you think? You'd notice the ridges, you'd notice that it was sharp, and you'd notice that it was connected to a blunt cylindrical portion. But without knowing what the purpose of the knife is, you wouldn't know the meaning of those features. If you knew the knife's purpose—that it's for cutting—then you'd understand that that the ridges are meant for something. Everything about the knife suddenly makes sense. The handle is meant for gripping. The sharp edge is meant for slicing and dicing.

Likewise, if you know what your purpose is, then you'll know the meaning of all of your features. Everything you do finally gets a context. You'll be able to answer the question, "Why was I born talented in this one area, but not so good at this other thing?"

Focusing on the purpose of what you do re-balances and centers your motivations. Every opportunity we encounter will have a completely different composition. One project may pay better, but doesn't use your motivated talents. Or another project may pay less, have less pleasant co-workers, but is related to some life-long dreams you've had. When the number of dimensions start piling up, you need a device to unify the decision-making process. If you know the "why?" of what you're doing, then it puts everything into context. Why do you need money? Why do you need more money? Why do you need to work in such-and-such field? It all depends on purpose.

In that most important tome of positive psychology, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Mihalyi talks about how athletes get "in the zone" or when workers "lose themselves" into their work. This is being in "flow" and Mihalyi argues that it's possible to live everyday in flow. The idea is to achieve the appropriate balance between challenge and skills. This graphic is key:

In the later chapters, Mihaly extends the concept of flow to the rest of our lives, and believes that happiness comes from leading an entire life in flow. To understand this requires looking at the graphic a little differently:

You know that saying, "follow your fears"? I think that's precisely what this is talking about. While you may be challenging yourself everyday at work (I know I am), if your career as a whole isn't a challenge for you, how can you expect to be growing appropriately?

In the last couple days, I've thought a lot about what I cling to for safety. I've tried to challenge myself and see where I can let go.

One of the most important ideas to be gleaned from that important tome of positive psychology, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, is the importance of doing things for their own sake. I believe that understanding that concept is key to fully pursuing your passions.

Understanding what "doing something for its own sake" means, is tricky though. One strategy involves a simple mental experiment. If you were given the same amount of money to be a teacher versus be a park ranger, what would you pick? But in that simulation, your decision may be influenced by whatever prejudices you have about each position. There's a lot of extrinsic factors to consider. The pursuit of fame or recognition, for example, may distract you on your path to pursuing your passions.

Here's a trick. This will help isolate the relevant intrinsic factors in any potential career.

Let's say you're considering a new job, like being a medical software programmer. First, break the job down into its core tasks:

medical software programmer:
- meetings to discuss specs
- coding
- emailing back and forth about feature details

And then, underneath each of those bullet points, you write down, in as much detail as possible, what the task will feel like. The trick is to get as specific as possible. Will your shoulders be tense during the task? Do you imagine yourself squirming the whole time? Or will it be a smooth, pleasant experience? Will any parts of it feel inspiring and stimulating? Will anything feel like pulling teeth? Or do you not know yet, and is it your goal to find out?

The point is to get away from opinions and focus on predicting experience. Our opinions can often be clouded by too many extrinsic factors. You may believe, for example, that being a doctor is more respectable, when in fact being a pharmacist would be more enjoyable to you. Everybody has their own biases. Personally, I find that I commonly over-emphasize how much a job will fulfill my ideal of becoming an artist.

When you're doing what you enjoy, you find that your talents are singing. The whole process energizes and uplifts you. That, to me, makes you one step closer to pursuing your passions full-time.

I got this e-mail newsletter from MAPP, a career-counseling service. The ideas have been echoing in my mind ever since I got it. In particular, the bolded section:

________

Hydrogen and oxygen are distinctly different elements, but sometimes they combine to form water. Something similar is true for motivation and talent.

Motivation is what we LIKE to do naturally. Talent is what we DO well naturally. They can exist independently, but when they combine, they create something special. They create motivated talents.

People often are naturally good at something (talented), but it just doesn't turn them on. For example, Heather is good with numbers, but she doesn't go out of her way to find tasks calling for that talent. Most people have such talents. But then there are those talents that we really enjoy using. These are the motivated talents, and this is where the magic is

We use motivated talents every chance we get. Most of the time we don't even think about it. For example, Larry has a motivated talent for conversation, and he naturally engages both friends and strangers in dialog. He doesn't consciously determine to do so; it just happens. It's natural and unforced. He enjoys it, and he's good at it. That's the hallmark of a motivated talent.

Motivated talents tend to be irrepressible. They find expression. In fact, if you've ever tried to stifle a motivated talent (either yours or someone else's) it probably felt like you were trying to hold two dozen ping pong balls under water at the same time. Motivated talents pop out, even if no one else is asking for them. And doesn't that make sense? After all, it's what we do well AND enjoy.

Well then, wouldn't the ideal job be one where you can use your motivated talents daily and get paid for it? Absolutely! But more on that later.

What are your natural motivations? Shouldn't your boss know?

________

I recommend taking the MAPP Assessment test. The questions are really interesting and the results are filled with meaningful words. I've taken a lot out of it since the test.

"There's more to my life than purpose."

That was a quieter mantra that rang in my head as I was going through the mania of The Purpose-Driven Life. In reading that book, I felt I was buckling under the weight of a giant orb, dominating 95% of my thoughts with "this is what I was meant to do."

But really, regardless of what your purpose in life is, I think it's common sense that there's more to life than your mission. Happiness and feeling good are important ends, in of themselves. And so spending my whole Sunday reading Twilight instead of doing something useful for the world, is a good thing.

I think it's just interesting that a statement like "there's more to my life than purpose," would actually have an impact to someone in the throes of The Purpose-Driven Life. I feel that some purpose-driven diehards might even react negatively to that sentence, maybe even rebutting, "like what??"

The past five days (from Wednesday, until now, Sunday) have been extraordinarily intense. I feel like I've been on pseudoephedrine (an anti-histamine amphetamine) for five days. What happened is that on Wednesday, I wrote down what my purpose in life is. Here's what it is: change people's lives, inspire people, open eyes, awaken people, move them, create epiphanies.... to the best of my abilities. Since then, I've seen everything in my life through the lens of that idea. What's mainly been affected is my approach to this site, and feeling like this is going to be, at last, my magnum opus. I know how it sounds: like crazy zealotry and self-aggrandizement. I think the best metaphor to explain my feeling is like being a conspiracy theorist. Everything I see, even in extremely convoluted ways, implies that my conspiracy is true. For me, all sort of minutiae contribute to a sense that "At last, I am on my mission!" For example, I was playing Team Fortress 2 and I was "inspiring" my team of 16 over the voice chat. I was getting the whole team hyped up through indirect cheerleading and praise. It took us about an hour, but eventually we won thanks to my leadership. Now, I've never thought of myself as a leader. The thought of managing people makes me cringe because I feel like I'm so bad at it. But when I demonstrated these charismatic leader-like chops in an online multiplayer game, I concluded that by focusing in on my purpose, I am able to unlock a whole new world of skills.

This has to do with reading The Purpose-Driven Life. If anything, Rick Warren will be remembered as the king of life-changing rhetoric. His wording is soo good, and his imagery so compelling, that you feel swept up off your feet on every page. This kind of imagery is affecting (afflicting) me, right now:

The power of focusing can be seen in light. Diffused light has little power or impact, but you can concentrate its energy by focusing it. With a magnifying glass, the rays of the sun can be focused to set grass or paper on fire. When light is focused even more as a laser beam, it can cut through steel.

Half of the idea is just riding a placebo effect. I honestly just feel inspired after reading passages like that. After writing down my purpose, I felt like I was a laser beam. I really felt intoxicated with power. And I still feel that way right now.

Although I've been drowning in ecstasy, the days have been extremely unpleasant. I feel like shit. I'm simultaneously hyper and tired. I can't take care of the normal things in my life because I'm so focused on my grand mission. I've been sneezing like crazy, which while usually attributed to my allergies, can be explained by my immune system weakening due my heightened state.

Throughout the whole time, I've been aware of what was happening to me physically. I've been ill-at-ease ever since I started huffing-and-puffing, growing larger each hour with an increasing sense of purpose. But I really couldn't snap out of it. I tried really hard to just relax. I tried to read fiction. I tried going out and socializing. I tried setting boundaries, like, "okay, don't do anything related to your purpose for the next 24 hours," and nothing worked.

And then finally, it just occurred to me, what if I deleted my purpose.

I have a document where I keep my all my plans. I opened it up and deleted the line that contains my purpose.

Just as you can make a commitment by writing it down, you can also reverse that commitment by erasing the text. And I believe that deleting that bit of text that says, "this is my purpose," will help fix things.

At the same time, it's a little bit of a game, because I wholly intend to re-write my purpose down in a couple weeks (or maybe a month) from now, when I feel like I'm ready. In the mean time, I just have a verbal commitment to purpose. The result, in my estimation, is that this will halve the intensity of my purpose-drive. I may be able to sleep soundly and do other normal things.

I'm writing this out because I think that the whole process of life-change is interesting. Life-change is a dragon I've been riding since I was fourteen, and I have all sorts of experience with the nuance of that world.

One way that I've learned to manage my journey through self-programming, is to pay attention to what I write. I used to have these neuroses inspired by me writing down my ideas on how I wanted to move my life forward. The intense missionitis I described above is just a sample of something that has occurred to me 50-100 times throughout my life. I eventually connected a big part of the problem with writing down too much in my journals. Writing is commitment. It's that simple. You already know the phrase, "commit it to writing." I was committing myself to too many ideas, which give how literally I process the world, had too much of a sweeping impact on me. And so, that's how I came to the idea of deleting my purpose.

Although, now, a thought just occurred to me, that half of the power of writing and deleting is a placebo effect. When you commit something to writing, you may just feel like that's what you really intend. More so that your own stream-of-conscious thoughts.

Update: 8 hours later or so, I do feel half as hyped up, while still feeling purpose-driven

Some definitions are in order:

infatuation - A foolish, unreasoning, or extravagant passion or attraction

love - A deep, tender, ineffable feeling of affection and solicitude

(phil's usage of) angst - A feeling of anxiety or apprehension based on an intense desire to do something.

my personal story

I was lying on the floor, frustrated, and pestering myself with the question, "what am I going to do with myself? why should I work? why should I do anything?" This was the beginning of last week, but I've been in that floor-angst zone many times. There are three cases that I want to cover here: once in April of last year, once this past July after I graduated, and once at the beginning of this week.

At the beginning of last year, I could have sworn I was going to be a painter. I had painted intensely thirty or so abstract acrylics. Since the act of creating each painting energized my spirits, I figured I was "pursuing my passions." To me, this is what I was meant to do.

My motivation for painting came to a halt when I considered exhibiting my work. I started out aggressive. On one day, I met about 20 gallery owners, and then the next day I started making brochures of my paintings. But after a week, something started chewing at me. I kept asking myself, "is this what I really want to do?" and "do I really care about painting?" I was so stressed by this confusion and all the effort I was putting into marketing that I caught a cold. I then gave up and started looking for other things to do.

A few months later, I then thought I was going to be a writer! How did I go from painting to writing? Well, my logic was that maybe painting wasn't my true passion. So, I asked my heart, "what moves you," and it drew me into blogging and writing essays. Boom, I went all aggressive into writing like I did with painting and put out maybe 300 articles. Writing did to me what painting did, which was send me to energetic highs. My emotions were so intense that I thought, "yes, this MUST be what I want to do, look how it moves me, look how it engages me!"

So I decided to become a professional writer. I had an idea for a short-story and a novel, and I started brainstorming. After a few days though, all my energy fell flat. I felt similar to how I felt with trying to exhibit my paintings. When it came to doing my art for reasons other than a personal high, my angst would return and my motivation would evaporate.

This last week, I was hit again with a similar impasse, but this time I took a different approach. I analyzed myself and came to the idea that maybe the "pursuit of passion" may not be enough to satisfy my angst. Maybe, in addition to me enjoying a project, the project needs to create a sense of meaning in me. So, for example, while I enjoy being in the throes of creative inspiration while painting or writing, I don't really care about painting in general. I enjoy paintings in museums, sure, but I don't walk up to them and think to myself, "yes, this matters." So my understanding is that painting and writing are purely infatuations to me. They can give me all the symptoms of love without truly setting me "in love." And the difference between being in love and having an infatuation is that love combines passion with solicitude or a caring. When you love something, it not only inspires and moves you, but it compells you to give and nurture.

So, if you are trying to find meaningful projects by simply pursuing what turns you on, you may not find yourself deeply satisfied and fulfilled. Meaning or purpose in life can only come when you have something you love.

Theory behind this

Purpose and meaning in life are emotions that indicate that we are needed for tomorrow. When you love something or someone and you care about how it or they fare in the future, then you automatically take on a role where you are needed.

PS

What is it that I care about? Well, I'm still pinning that down. I have a project I'm working on, and I want to see if it can sustain a sense of purpose in me.

In order to effectively engage in an activity, you have to care about the activity for its own sake.

If you are working to make money, if you are writing a book to become famous, or if you are blogging because you want attention, then you will not truly squeeze the passion out of that process.

I learned this in 1997 when I entered a web design contest just to win. I lost the competition, but I also wasted my time because I didn't learn any new skills nor did I enjoy what I was doing. In 1998, I re-entered the same competition, but this time with the idea that I was doing it to learn and have a good time. By the time I was finished with my project, I already felt satisfied, and because I was so passionate about the process, I ended up winning the contest anyways.

I think Bob Ryskamp referred to this process as "autotelic," whereby you do the activity for "its own sake." auto = self, telic = teleos end, result, but more like intent.

I came to this idea when I found myself unable to blog. I realized that I was blogging for many other reasons, such as ego, but not for the activity's primary usage: to journal. If I elect "to journal" as the prime motivation, then blogging will come more fluidly.

Is what you are doing, autotelic?

To put true passion behind my pen. To put out only when there is something within that feels heavy, weighted down with juicy energy, worth sharing.

and then taking that, seeing if there is some pubic component, i.e. "desire to inspire" "desire to invent" and pump that. That = public passion; = way to become a paid artist.

The true test of a passion or "love" is to see what happens after an excessive splurge. A real passion can never reach a true excess such that it lost. Maybe that's why it's called making love, not enjoying love. Every time you go at it, you try to tap an excessive spike of carnal passion. If after the man falls asleep, wakes up, and encounters his groggy-eyed partner semi-awake and cuddling, if then, there is still love, then a "true" love has been made.