PurposeFor as long as humans have pondered their own existence, we have wrestled with the question of purpose. It has been argued that this question is the key that sets humans apart from all other life forms. Like all life, we exist, live, survive and thrive; but unlike all other creatures, rather than simply living, we are prone to ask why. “Why am I here?” Ultimately, this question tends to draw us into concepts beyond our own existence. We begin to think about a universe bigger than our own experiences. We begin to wonder if perhaps there is some kind of intelligent or ordered “something” greater than our self. OK this is starting to sound kind of spiritual, right? Not that there’s anything wrong with that; we’ll get more into that later, but I don’t want to get bogged down by a lot of conjecture, and I absolutely will not tolerate dogma, so I want to be careful not to get sidetracked here, but there is one particular point I need to make which is related to this idea of something beyond our self. It is the difference between “self Help” and Personal Effectiveness. Being effective is not about helping your Self. It means that you care about something beyond your own personal self-interest and realize that your Purpose involves others in some way. So let’s start looking directly at Purpose. What is it? How do you identify it? What do you do with it? If you are already familiar with the levelgrinding core process, you’ll recognize that we need to start this investigation with a bit of analysis. I have thought about this a lot, analyzing purpose from a lot of different angles and have come up with what seems to be a decent model. It identifies components we can use to synthesize an integrated model of Purpose. Here it is: Your purpose is revealed at the intersection of your Passions, Talents, Values, and Connections.
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