The Power of Purpose – 1 – Day 1 Introduction

The people over at the ManKind project put on a online summit called the Power of purpose. See here: http://otp.mkp.org/powerofpurposesummit/

The Premise of Purpose

I decided to go over some takeaways that I took from listening to the summit. In the introduction Chris Kyle and George Daranyi ask some poignant questions about purpose. They set up he basic premise:

That people are born with an innate purpose or reason for their existence. Nothing happens by accident and we all are here because we have something to give to the world.

Regardless whether or not you believe in this premise, this must be true for us to set out and discover our purpose. Now some may think this is narcissistic or overly grandiose but what the heck?A little narcissim is normal for everyone. Only when it goes crazy and becomes a personality disorder do you need to be worried. Also, believing that your gift to the world is teaching others or helping lift others up or some kind of benevolent giving action isn’t a bad thing.

Finding Purpose

George and Chris set up two questions that are to be answered:

Have you answered your inner call to your purpose? In this question it is assumed that we all have some inner drive to accomplish something or do something and finding what that something is may or may not be easy and may or may not be something that we have done yet.
If you have found your purpose, what have you done to fulfill it? The idea being that many people may have found their purpose, but in the interest of dealing with the minutiae of life, they relegate their purpose to a hobby in the workshop in the basement. This is especially true for men.

This next song is about putting your dreams on hold and doing whatever it takes to pay the rent.

The next point they made was about the different types of purpose:

Collective Purpose and Individual Purpose

Some people find purpose in a collective way such as in a religion (The Pope), or political group (The President), or some other group working toward a higher purpose.

Some people find purpose in an individual way such as a painter (Thomas Kinkade), sculpture (Michelangelo), writer (Stephen King) , computer programmer (Richard Stallman).

For more information go to the ManKind Project: http://mankindproject.org

You can also find out more about Chris Kyle from : http://www.ascendantcompany.com/

and George Daranyi from: http://www.georgedaranyi.com/