Quotes About Purpose

The art of mission, we can conclude, asks us to suppress the most grandiose of our work instincts and instead adopt the patience

First Facebook, then the iPhone: compulsive communicating and connecting—supported by mysterious, almost magical innovations in radio modulation and fiber-optic routing—swept our culture before anyone had the presence of mind to step back and re-ask Thoreau's fundamental question: To what end?

To summarize, I've presented two different ways people think about their working life. The first is the craftsman mindset, which focuses on what you can offer the world. The second is the passion mindset, which instead focuses on what the world can offer you. The craftsman mindset offers clarity, while the passion mindset offers a swamp of ambiguous and unanswerable questions.

I'll choose my targets with care… then give them my rapt attention. In short, I'll live the focused life, because it's the best kind there is.

I love what I do for a living. I'm also confident that as I continue my commitment to the ideas discovered in my quest, this love will only deepen. Thomas feels the same way about his work. So do most of the people I profiled in the book. I

So next time you start to question whether you're missing out on some dream job waiting for you to muster the courage to pursue it, conjure up a pair of images. First, recall passion-obsessed Thomas, heartbroken and sobbing on the forest floor. Then replace this with the image of the smiling, confident, value-focused man who ten years later joined me for coffee—the version of Thomas who looked at me at one point in our conversation and remarked, without irony, "Life is good.

I'll live the focused life, because it's the best kind there is.

Identifying what matters most in your life,

just because you really want to organize your work around a mission doesn't mean that you can easily make it happen.

depth and meaning.

Professional Goal: To craft well-written, narrative-driven stories that change the way people understand the world. Key Activities Supporting This Goal: • Research patiently and deeply. • Write carefully and with purpose.

Digital minimalists see new technologies as tools to be used to support things they deeply value—not as sources of value themselves.

When it comes to creating work you love, following your passion is not particularly useful advice.

Men of genius themselves were great only by bringing all their power to bear on the point on which they had decided to show their full measure.

You see how few things you have to do to live a satisfying and reverent life?

I earlier quoted Winifred Gallagher, the converted disciple of depth, saying, "I'll live the focused life, because it's the best kind there is.

After running my tough experiment [with cancer]… I have a plan for living the rest of my life," Gallagher concludes in her book. "I'll choose my targets with care… then give them my rapt attention. In short, I'll live the focused life, because it's the best kind there is." We'd be wise to follow her lead.

The more we focused on loving what we do, the less we ended up loving it.

something more fundamental to human flourishing: the sense of meaning that comes from acting with intention.

her mission provides her a sense of purpose and energy, traits that have helped her avoid becoming a cynical academic and instead embrace her work with enthusiasm. Her mission is the foundation on which she builds love for what she does, and therefore it's a career strategy we need to better understand.

Craftsmen like Furrer tackle professional challenges that are simple to define but difficult to execute—a useful imbalance when seeking purpose. Knowledge work exchanges this clarity for ambiguity. It can be hard to define exactly what a given knowledge worker does and how it differs from another: On our worst days, it can seem that all knowledge work boils down to the same exhausting roil of e-mails and PowerPoint,

I am not asking Antonio a style question I could find searching Google for 10 minutes.

When deciding whether to follow an appealing pursuit that will introduce more control into your work life, ask yourself whether people are willing to pay you for it. If so, continue. If not, move on.

It's just that we don't know what that passion is. If you ask someone, they'll tell you what they think they're passionate about, but they probably have it wrong." In other words, she believes that having passion for your work is vital, but she also believes that it's a fool's errand to try to figure out in advance what work will lead to this passion.