Quotes About Purpose

channeling our best hours into first-order objectives, and that means being a nonconformist in the best sense. "Everyone" might say finishing Harvard should be the most important task for a young Bill Gates. Instead, he aligned his efforts with his mission, despite any disapproving glances from well-meaning people.

Nietzsche: "He who has a 'why' can live with any 'what.'" Dr. Frankl hypothesized that we have three parts to our nature: our body, our mind, and our spirit. But his deepest conviction is that most—not all—diseases originate in the spirit. That is, in a sense of meaninglessness, a sense of hollowness, a sense of purposelessness. No mission. No vision.

Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least. GOETHE

Mission statements are also vital to successful organizations.

mental and emotional illnesses are really symptoms of an underlying sense of meaninglessness or emptiness. Logotherapy eliminates that emptiness by helping the individual to detect his unique meaning, his mission in life. Once you have that sense of mission, you have the essence of your own proactivity.

What difference would a clear vision of my principles, values, and ultimate objectives make in the way I spend my time? How would I feel about my life if I knew what was ultimately important for me? Would a written statement of my life's purpose be valuable to me? Would it affect the way I spend my time and energy? How would a weekly reconnection to such a statement affect the things I choose to do during the week?

We need to move beyond time management to life leadership

If you don't have a mission statement, spend a few moments connecting with your inner compass and thinking about what really matters most in your life.

Be Proactive; Begin with the End in Mind).

Third, what you choose to do contributes to your ultimate values in life. Staying at work to get the edge on someone at the office is an entirely different evening in your life from staying because you value your boss's effectiveness and you genuinely want to contribute to the company's welfare. The experiences you have as you carry out your decisions take on quality and meaning in the context of your life as a whole.

whether you are a mailman, a hairdresser, an insurance salesman, a housewife—whatever. As long as you feel you are serving others, you do the job well. When you are concerned only with helping yourself, you do it less well—a law as inexorable as gravity.

If you carefully consider what you wanted to be said of you in the funeral experience, you will find your definition of success. It

The key to the ability to change is a changeless sense of who you are, what you are about and what you value.

Your vision is the end, the destination. Principles are the means, like the flight plan. Vision is who you really are and what you could become. Principles are those unalterable truths you feel so strongly about that you are willing to accept them as your own set of values.

focusing on what, not how; results, not methods.

It's much more a matter of what you do and why you do it, than how fast you get it done.

deals with both vision and principle-based values. It's not enough to have values without vision—you want to be good, but you want to be good for something. On the other hand, vision without values can create a Hitler.

our conviction well: "Search your own heart with all diligence for out of it flow the issues of life.

To live, to love, to learn, to leave a legacy.

I can't spend my whole life just sitting on my hands and wondering when I'm going to fade. I can't. That's worse than doing something wrong. Isn't it?

The purpose of life, Cirrus Kindwind had once assured him, is to choose, and to act upon the choice.

we live, and strive, and seek to define the sense of our being. And it is good, for though we compose a scant blink across the eyes of eternity, yet while the blink lasts we choose what we will, create what we may, and share ourselves with each other as the stars did ere they were bereaved.

Are you alive?" "Perhaps. While I have purpose, I move and speak. My eyes behold. Is this life?

Service enables service. Hope came from the power and value of what was served, not from the one who served it.