I think Steve's "find your purpose in 20 minutes" is a great exercise for discovering some things that are important to you, but I would never advise trying to distill your purpose in life down to a phrase, no matter how touching or poetic it may be.
Words are approximations, and therefore can never be accurate in an absolute sense. No grouping of words can represent your purpose. It is something that must be understood purely through intuition; it is beyond words and beyond thought. The moment you substitute a phrase for this understanding, you have conceptualized it and thus made it into something else.
I would avoid using words to define your purpose. English words are beautiful, subtle instruments, but they are still far too blunt and subjective for this task. Words can point to your purpose, but they cannot define it. |