This means not waiting to find your story arc, but rather recognizing that there are stories that pop up which you can opt into if you recognize them and have the right skills and virtues. It is about being prepared for the call to adventure, and cultivating the ability to recognize it, rather than believing we can direct our lives from the perspective of some knowable, ultimate mission.
This approach to the problem of meaning recognizes that, rather than trying to discern a mission, it is better to become a certain kind of person – a person who is capable of acting on and recognizing opportunities to make meaning when they are seen.
I see this as a superior guide to finding or defining purpose rather than a guide to a different kind of purpose. Most people host a caricature of purpose because the result of executing the author's advice looks like someone following a mission. I haven't thought clear enough to describe finding purpose this way, but I think this is the only way to describe it, as in: being the fullest version of you, making meaning and deploying virtue in your unique way, is the purpose.
Where my thinking might differ is I tend to think a mission emerges from this process if it's pursued long enough.
(I have a meeting, but I'll come back to say more after.)
this territory is moderated
(I have a meeting, but I'll come back to say more after.)
You and your meetings.
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Carrying on ...
I think a mission emerges from this process if it's pursued long enough. It's like a mission is just your later-stage life's purpose. You might never find a mission, but the author describes the best way to find it even if he implies mission and purpose don't always intersect. If one makes meaning and deploys virtue long enough, it will eventually lead them to powerful, undiscovered levers (in some N-dimensional meaning-virtue space) and their mission becomes pulling them.
I suspect this is true even if the person doesn't have a Thing, because not having a Thing is a Thing, and it leads them somewhere in meaning-virtue space, somewhere more exotic than where people with a Thing end up (the magnitude of their vector may be smaller, but it's dense where vectors of recognizable Things are sparse). Maybe it's harder to find big levers wherever non-Thing people end up, but I imagine, naively, in this hallucination I'm having, they'd have a talent in pulling a symphony of small levers where Thing-people are stuck yanking on a stubborn few.
I'm a Thing-person so I'll never compose a lever-pulling orchestra, but if I were a non-Thing person I suspect that'd be my mission, whatever that practically looks like, assuming I wanted a mission.
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