I briefly perused your article and site, and note that we have much in common, and much not in common.

Let me suggest that you have set up a “straw man” in the first few paragraphs of this article and go on to defeat him admirably.

I come at the task of purpose development as a Reformed Christian (a branch of Christianity of which you appear to be unaware of). Your opening salvo, “You just sit down one day and write a mission statement and trust that what comes out of you will be the guiding force for the rest of your life,” is pure nonsense from a Christian perspective. Thus, I agree with you about that. But I must note that all purpose emanates from the God of the Bible. He is the Author of life.

But this does not mean that reason has no role to play. Far from it! It is most reasonable to ground one’s values in the most objective source. And Scripture will actually hold up, support and/or stand up to the most stringent demands of reason, which bring me to a second point.

You appear to have the current trend of positing two different kinds of reason: emotional and rational. In doing so you (and the Emotional Intelligence crowd) pit intellect and feelings against one another at the foundation of your epistemology. Such an epistemology lacks both consistency and integrity. Alan Watts (no friend of Christianity) described the interaction of these two things as “prickles and goo.”

‘Nuff said. Perhaps you will visit my site and we can discuss some of these things further.

Phil

Elsewhere, Steve Pavlina asks Do You Have A Pre-Encoded Purpose? The impossible is often t [...]

You make decisions based on your current map of reality, not reality itself. Many people mistake their mental model of reality for the real thing, but there are always inaccuracies because our ability to perceive reality accurately is limited.

A lack of willpower is a lack of belief. When you believe in something wholeheartedly, such as gravity, you don’t need willpower to follow your beliefs — compliance is automatic. The role of willpower is to shift your beliefs. People are not weak — they simply have beliefs that don’t fit their intentions. For example, if you desire to get up at 5AM but don’t follow through, the problem is in your belief about getting up at 5AM. Your actions reflect the truth — that deep down you believe it’s OK to sleep in, or you believe that getting up at 5AM is too hard, or that it’s not really that important. By the application of willpower, you can shift both your actions and your beliefs, such that you adopt new beliefs: getting up at 5AM is mandatory, I will get up at 5AM no matter what, I can get up at 5AM and feel refreshed.

Since this new problem is just as difficult as the one you try to solve, the article (for me) accomplishes almost nothing.

Also I don’t understand very clearly what you mean by context. Context means the role you see yourself having in the universe?

What if the context is very bad, but you decide to fight it, set goals, and succeed in spite of the context? This was my philosophy for many years and it helped me a lot.

My context sucked. I live in a VERY poor country in East Europe. I have inexistent social skills. I am fat and have bad health. My parents didn’t teach me a lot of things about how to live.

However, I decided to BEAT the context. I set some goals (oriented towards beating the context), and I succeeded.

Now I still live in a poor country, but I own a very successful small business. I have built myself some social skills. I have a girlfriend. Etc.

So.. your article seems almost nonsense to me. This is strange because I enjoyed your other articles tremendously. I’m sure that from your point of view, your article makes sense, but I can’t understand the point of view you had when writting this article.

It took me a long time to come up with my mission statement. I used FranklinCovey’s Mission Statement Builder to get me started. I also figured out my roles and values. Once I came up with those, it was fairly simple to draft my mission statement.

One thing you mention is that many times people claim to believe one set of values and follow another. You say this is due to incongruencies in their beliefs. While this might be true, couldn’t one also blame the fallibility of humans. We might [b]want[/b] to follow one set of values but our lack of self discipline or other character traits prevent us from achieving this.

So if you don’t volunteer or give money to the poor, perhaps it is more a lack of the willpower to do these things than an actual false belief that these are good ideals?