What is YOUR Life Purpose?

[TechnoGuyRob]

To live for, with, and in happiness.
To nourish and maintain the happiness of others.
To make it all worthwhile.

[RandomJohn]

My purpose? To help others grow, to help others make their own health and peace, and to enjoy life.

[Smarky]

To create insanely great things.

To experience, express and enrich the world through creation and cause others to do so.

To create insanely great things that express, enrich and cause others to experience life at a greater level.

[andyking]

With a strong, open body, pulse love and forgiveness; sweat for change and understanding.

[RandomGuy101]

I am not 100% sure but I know that my purpose needs to help others in a significant way while utilizing my engineering skills to the fullest.

My dream job is probably something in neuroengineering helping to assist crippled people to move and people with brain stem strokes to function somewhat normally etc. Eventually I believe neuroengineering will help all people to live happier more productive lives, so I would love to be involved. All I need is a PhD from a top university lol...

[Manifesto]

My goal and passion is to help and support others to make their dreams come true. I am so passioned about it that I have developed a software that I just released.

Check it out at:
Dream Manifestation Wizard - Create Abundance & Prosperity in Your Life

May all your dreams come true...

[madgeylou]

the trapeze girl

swinging back and forth
like a bauble on a chain
diamond pink streak sailing
over rainbow clowns, over guess your weight

shut her eyes tight and she grinned
and she dropped inside the wind

she always knew
without asking why
when to hold on tighter
when to trust her gut and fly

and she never lost her nerve
and she learned to leap through fire
how to pump her little legs
how to swing the circle higher

help me swing the circle higher
help me make the circle wider

[Caveman Joe]

To hack the world.
To make every Good Thing in our lives faster, more open, more accessible, more adaptable.
To learn from the great examples of the Bad Things, in order to reverse-engineer them and put them to work for good.
To help spread the thirst for knowledge and creativity.

How this applies to me... well, I've always thought that what the world really needs is not more stuff, but better use of the stuff we already have. To take a very local example, your computer - if you're using it to do something that can be described more easily as "Work" than "Creation," then you're not using it properly. A computer is there waiting for you to tell it what to do, and then to sit there and do it.

I hope to shift people's perceptions of machines in general and computers in specific more towards the viewpoint that work is for machines, and creation is for people, and the two should not cross. Hopefully, that'll inspire better machines, less work, and more time for humans to spend doing things that really matter.

(apologies if that didn't make much sense, it's ten to three in the morning here, and the whole "Becoming an Early Riser" thing is something I'm still struggling with)

[ImamKhalid]

Originally Posted by Brendon Colby

That really strikes a chord with me. Very touching...

As for me, my general purpose is to be a "light worker" (I like that term) but as to the specific application of which I am still unsure.

That's what I'm thinking of, Brendon - "light worker".. but something like what steve pavlina is doing right now is not light I think. Maybe we have to change it to "smart worker", because "light worker" means "light money"

Like steve, he works so positively-but-not-light, but he's like soooo energetic. I was like, how can I be like him? Ughhh...

[annie]

Originally Posted by Manifesto

My goal and passion is to help and support others to make their dreams come true. I am so passioned about it that I have developed a software that I just released.

Check it out at:
Dream Manifestation Wizard - Create Abundance & Prosperity in Your Life

May all your dreams come true...

very cool!!!!

[Love]

I think my purpose is to create joy, and to nurture. I have a fondness for seeing people grow up well.

[Dbarker]

To transcend limiting beliefs, create peace and prosperity for all, and help develop others to do the same.

[pedrotn]

I believe that one's purpose evolves and changes as that person evolves, changes and understands more of themselves.

Right now I believe my purpose to be:

To be a conscious decision maker who leads myself and others to financial and personal success to be used for the betterment of society and of individual lives.

Peter

[cultivategreatness]

Originally Posted by Dave Kaminski

To use my skills as an information liaison to help others improve their happiness, health, wealth and peace of mind.

xD

I like that.

[TeroMiettunen.com]

I'd like to share this from my blog:

My purpose in life:

General purpose:

* Help to discover the meaning of life or become a smart enough being to help define the meaning of life.
* After you’ve discovered it, live accordingly and let others know about it.

Current specific purpose:

* Help the best you can in the creation of smarter than human beings and making the lives of those beings as significant and great as possible.
* Make as much money as possible to help you in your journey and use it the best way you can.
* Become a smarter than human being.
* Live to best serve your purpose.
* If you fail, the least you can do is raise a son and pass this journey onto him.

Feel free to comment.

[Radical]

Live, love, learn, leave a legacy.

[dmauder]

Originally Posted by 7thStranger

To love all, to cherish every moment.

For some reason, this really resonated with me! In fact, I felt this strange surge of emotion when I read it. I even came back to it after reading everything else and I still caused the same weird feeling for me.

I'm not sure if this is really my own purpose or not, but there's something about it that feels right.

Now, here's my thing... I've always wanted to be a full time investor/trader. I'd like to treat stock trading as a business, and would love to do this more than any other type of business I've tried. I'm certainly not ready for this yet because I have a lot of learning to do before I would be able to.

But, how does one reconcile the desire to be a stock trader with having a life purpose that really adds value and helps other people? I want to do those things, but I'm not sure how that fits with trading the markets. For a trader to make money, someone else loses money.

Gemini4X

[Radical]

"A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty." - Albert Einstein

We are only human, so just do the best you can.

[RT Wolf]

I want to help and entertain others. Right now, I'm focussing on entertaining people by writing and filmmaking and so on.

[madgeylou]

Originally Posted by Radical

"A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty." - Albert Einstein

We are only human, so just do the best you can.

the end of that einstein quote is where i got the last 2 lines of my song posted above. that's my life purpose -- to swing the circle higher, and make it wider, so evenutally no one is outside looking in.

[qufighter]

This world seems inherently broken, chaotic, disorganized. My purpose is to make sense of everything, and organize the world. I strive to remove artificial limitations from peoples imaginations.

[Living2xcess]

My purpose is to become an economist and make economic policy for the country or world that may help hundreds, thousands, or millions of people. I also want to be a true friend and be surrounded by many loved ones throughout my life.

[Jeremy Bennett]

Hey all! did Steve's excercise, and I narrowed things down to the following:

My Life's Purpose:
To help people find connectedness with themselves, others, and the universe, through my presence, my creativity (of all kinds) and contributing strategically to organizations who are working towards the above in a way that is congruent with how the world should be.

For those of you who haven't yet - log off this forum, (and turn off your computer), and quiet yourself to find the answers within!

Power on!

Jeremy

[Jeremy Bennett]

Originally Posted by Gemini4X

For some reason, this really resonated with me! In fact, I felt this strange surge of emotion when I read it. I even came back to it after reading everything else and I still caused the same weird feeling for me.

I'm not sure if this is really my own purpose or not, but there's something about it that feels right.

Now, here's my thing... I've always wanted to be a full time investor/trader. I'd like to treat stock trading as a business, and would love to do this more than any other type of business I've tried. I'm certainly not ready for this yet because I have a lot of learning to do before I would be able to.

But, how does one reconcile the desire to be a stock trader with having a life purpose that really adds value and helps other people? I want to do those things, but I'm not sure how that fits with trading the markets. For a trader to make money, someone else loses money.

Gemini4X

Gemini,
What about green investing? - I can't remember the bank in Europe which specifically invests in social concious activities (art galleries, organic farms, etc.) (Read in a copy of "Ode" magazine, earlier this year)

also there's trading weather bonds/futures (don't know the right term)
which basically mitigates the risk for those businesses whose businesses are dependent not the weather (if there's more snow then ski resorts win in the winter, or farmers (where more rain is better ) vs. event planners (where you want no rain) - like a hedge fund (i think) that way the risk is balanced out... please let me know and I can dig further for things (I heard this last on e on NPR)

Power on!

[wjw]

Originally Posted by Gemini4X

But, how does one reconcile the desire to be a stock trader with having a life purpose that really adds value and helps other people? I want to do those things, but I'm not sure how that fits with trading the markets. For a trader to make money, someone else loses money.

Hi Gemini4X,

This isn't necessarily true. People sell stock because they want the money more than they want the potential upside. People buy stock because they want the potential upside more than they want the money. It isn't necessarily zero-sum. (If it was, the overall market would never go up).

My answer to your direct question is: if you learn how to trade well, and once you've learnt that skill you pass it on to others, then you're doing good. Sometimes it's necessary to spend time focusing on your own skills before you can help others. Skills that you enjoy exercising are the ones you're most likely to get good at.

[Trina]

My life purpose is to be happy. :P

[CHill]

My purposes are to see as much of the world as I can, rock climb a whole lot, make lots of friends, raise a family and live as sustainably as possible.

That's at age 22. Who knows what I'll want next year?

CHill

[Scott Lipton]

I've been thinking about this one for a while now. I've tried Steve's exercise, and of course came up with a hodge-podge of the various answers you see in this thread, help others, consciousness, etc, but I wanted to try thinking a little bit deeper about this.

I am currently a graduate student in applied mathematics at UT Austin, and being biasedly of a scientific mind, couldn't find a clear answer that I was satisfied with. You see, I feel it is easy to watch movies and hear stories and listen to people tell you what's truly right and what's truly wrong, and give you feelings inside that make you say "Yea, this is so right, I can feel it.", and stop questioning whether it really is. However, we all know that different feelings can be created in people by different effects, and people can be heavily persuaded by appealing to emotions and creating those very same effects. Hence the selling power of lawyers, marketers, politicians, comic books, and astrology charts.

Anyway, I will get to my point. In mathematics modeling problems, as professional researchers we start with two things: a general description of the physical problem, and the objective. For example, we may have a well-theorized decsription of fluid flow in the ocean, and our objective is to better predict weather patterns. Or we know how strong titanium and other materials are and how materials break different stresses and our objective is to make sure the space shuttle stays in one piece. Once you get used to this process at the professional level, it really helps clarify your thinking in other areas. So when confronting the question "What is my purpose in life?", I thought my highest priority should be "Well I want to do what is most good for the world. Period." Ok, so then what? I asked the tougher question ,"What is the most good for the world?". What can we define as good? I'm sure there's probably several of Steve's articles on the subject that I will be quickly referred to after this, but nevertheless, I ask. Now of course, there are quick and simple answers , most of which are slightly less fuzzy in nature, such as peace for everyone, happiness for everyone, consciousness for everyone, etc.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm definitely into personal improvement and will take any step I feel in my heart is in the right direction. For now, I try to bring happriness to all of the people I know and am becoming stronger and creating research which I think will have a massive impact on the world, but in the back of my mind I still stray from absolute satisfaction and clarity with this fuzzy notion of just helping others and making them feel good as a permanent life's goal.

For example, although it may seem ridiculous, why do we choose to help other humans rather than making, say, ants and flies be happy? Well, of course, they're just flies and ants, right. This is classical evoolutionary psychology(of which I am a biasedly huge fan) but all of this help other people stuff and basically all drives and motives and morals we have seem to all just come down to life's self-programmed "objective" of continuing life, and for us ,more specifically, continuing the species of humans. Even wanting to help others seems like an evolutionary mandate because if you help other people, they will usually help you. Agian, I'm not suggested this is bad or stupid, but rather that there is some internal drive telling us it's a good thing becuase it's beneficial for us and the whole species rather than some absolute good that exists within it.

I know this was a long jumbled writing, and I should organize my thoughts better in the future, but please let me know what you think. For now, I use those same "purposes" that many of you have, primarily happiness for others, but I'm also searching for more. If I found something I could truly believe in all the way, then I could commit my heart and sould to it.

Thoughts? Questions? Criticisms?

[yossarian]

Originally Posted by wjw

Hi Gemini4X,

This isn't necessarily true. People sell stock because they want the money more than they want the potential upside. People buy stock because they want the potential upside more than they want the money. It isn't necessarily zero-sum. (If it was, the overall market would never go up).

My answer to your direct question is: if you learn how to trade well, and once you've learnt that skill you pass it on to others, then you're doing good. Sometimes it's necessary to spend time focusing on your own skills before you can help others. Skills that you enjoy exercising are the ones you're most likely to get good at.

Technically it's not zero-sum, but functionally it is.

When a person trades stocks through a stock broker, only the broker makes money. Brokers do NOT trade their own money either.

Basically, the sad fact about 99% of brokers who deal with other people's money is that they don't make their clients any money on the whole. If you trade with a broker your expected return will be below the return on the market as a whole.

Also, trading your own money unless you have specific "insider"ish information will net you nothing that you can live on, unless you are starting with millions and investing long term.

Gemini, you might want to examine WHY you want to trade stocks. Is it because you romanticise the social position and the image that a stock trader has? Is it because you enjoy the work itself? It's worth exploring to find the core value that makes you want to trade, and maybe you can use that value to do something similar but more beneficial.

I mean, ultimately, you can do what a guy like Warren Buffet does. It would be wrong to call him a trader and he's certainly not a typical investor. He's sort of a researcher who identifies exceptional companies, buys them up entirely and ensures they succeed. THAT is certainly a social benefit. And look - now that Buffet has 40 billion he is donating all of it to charity.

So there is definitely good that can be done in the financial sector. However it won't be through typical brokeraging or "day trading". At least I strongly strongly doubt it.

[Dan.Linehan]

Mine is to protect others from harm.