How do you discover your real purpose in life?
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How do you discover your real purpose in life? I’m not talking about your job, your daily responsibilities, or even your long-term goals. I mean the real reason why you’re here at all — the very reason you exist.
If you want to discover your true purpose in life, you must first empty your mind of all the false purposes you’ve been taught (including the idea that you may have no purpose at all).
At some point during the process (typically after about 50-100 answers), you may want to quit and just can’t see it converging. You may feel the urge to get up and make an excuse to do something else. That’s normal. Push past this resistance, and just keep writing. The feeling of resistance will eventually pass.
At some point during the process (typically after about 50-100 answers), you may want to quit and just can’t see it converging. You may feel the urge to get up and make an excuse to do something else. That’s normal. Push past this resistance, and just keep writing. The feeling of resistance will eventually pass.
When you find your own unique answer to the question of why you’re here, you will feel it resonate with you deeply. The words will seem to have a special energy to you, and you will feel that energy whenever you read them.

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Self-Discipline

Tags: growth, personal-development, steve-pavlina on 2007-08-12 and saved by15 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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What You'll Wish You'd Known

Tags: education, growth, life-purpose, personal-development on 2007-08-09 and saved by18 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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I'll start by telling you something you don't have to know in high
school: what you want to do with your life. People are always
asking you this, so you think you're supposed to have an answer.
But adults ask this mainly as a conversation starter.
I'll start by telling you something you don't have to know in high
school: what you want to do with your life.
but this is a bad way to put it,
because it implies you're supposed to be bound by some plan you
made early on. The computer world has a name for this: premature
optimization. And it is synonymous with disaster.
But if you're
trying to choose between two theories and one gives you an excuse
for being lazy, the other one is probably right.
Upwind

I think the solution is to work in the other direction. Instead
of working back from a goal, work forward from promising situations.
This is what most successful people actually do anyway.
Upwind

I think the solution is to work in the other direction. Instead
of working back from a goal, work forward from promising situations.
This is what most successful people actually do anyway.
I propose instead that you don't commit to anything in the future,
but just look at the options available now, and choose those that
will give you the most promising range of options afterward.
Look for smart people
and hard problems. Smart people tend to clump together, and if you
can find such a clump, it's probably worthwhile to join it.
The best protection is always to be working on hard problems.
Writing novels is hard. Reading novels isn't.
Hard means worry: if you're not worrying that
something you're making will come out badly, or that you won't be
able to understand something you're studying, then it isn't hard
enough. There has to be suspense.
It's that adults take responsibility for
themselves. Making a living is only a small part of it.
Far more important is to take intellectual responsibility for oneself.
That's what you need to do: find a question that makes
the world interesting. People who do great things look at the same
world everyone else does, but notice some odd detail that's
compellingly mysterious.
Now

If it takes years to articulate great questions, what do you do now,
at sixteen? Work toward finding one. Great questions don't appear
suddenly. They gradually congeal in your head. And what makes
them congeal is experience.
The way to get a big idea to appear in your head is not to hunt for
big ideas, but to put in a lot of time on work that interests you,
and in the process keep your mind open enough that a big idea can
take roost.
Put in time how and on what? Just pick a project that seems
interesting: to master some chunk of material, or to make something,
or to answer some question. Choose a project that will take less
than a month, and make it something you have the means to finish.
Do something hard enough to stretch you, but only just, especially
at first. If you're deciding between two projects, choose whichever
seems most fun. If one blows up in your face, start another. Repeat
till, like an internal combustion engine, the process becomes
self-sustaining, and each project generates the next one. (This
could take years.)
Put in time how and on what? Just pick a project that seems
interesting: to master some chunk of material, or to make something,
or to answer some question. Choose a project that will take less
than a month, and make it something you have the means to finish.
Do something hard enough to stretch you, but only just, especially
at first. If you're deciding between two projects, choose whichever
seems most fun. If one blows up in your face, start another. Repeat
till, like an internal combustion engine, the process becomes
self-sustaining, and each project generates the next one. (This
could take years.)
Don't worry if a project doesn't seem to be on the path to some
goal you're supposed to have. Paths can bend a lot more than you
think. So let the path grow out the project. The most important
thing is to be excited about it, because it's by doing that you
learn.
Don't disregard unseemly motivations. One of the most powerful is
the desire to be better than other people at something.
Another powerful motivator is
the desire to do, or know, things you're not supposed to. Closely
related is the desire to do something audacious.
Beware of bad models. Especially when they excuse laziness.
The important thing is to get out there and do stuff. Instead of
waiting to be taught, go out and learn.
You start being an adult when you decide to take
responsibility for your life. You can do that at any age.
The key to wasting time is distraction. Without distractions
it's too obvious to your brain that you're not doing anything with
it, and you start to feel uncomfortable. If you want to measure
how dependent you've become on distractions, try this experiment:
set aside a chunk of time on a weekend and sit alone and think.
You can have a notebook to write your thoughts down in, but nothing
else: no friends, TV, music, phone, IM, email, Web, games, books,
newspapers, or magazines. Within an hour most people will feel a
strong craving for distraction.

How to Do What You Love

Tags: caree, growth, paul-graham, personal-development, purpose on 2007-08-09 and saved by37 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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Incomplete Manifesto of personal growth

Tags: growth, personal-development on 2007-07-31 and saved by28 people -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.brucemaudesign.com

9. Begin anywhere. John Cage tells us that not knowing where to begin is a common form of paralysis. His advice:
begin anywhere.
13. Slow down. Desynchronize from standard time frames and surprising opportunities may present themselves.
15. Ask stupid questions. Growth is fueled by desire and innocence. Assess the answer, not the question. Imagine
learning throughout your life at the rate of an infant.
16. Collaborate. The space between people working together is filled with conflict, friction, strife,
exhilaration, delight, and vast creative potential.
17. ____________________. Intentionally left blank. Allow space for the ideas you haven’t had yet, and for the ideas of
others.
19. Work the metaphor. Every object has the capacity to stand for something other than what is apparent. Work on
what it stands for.
22. Make your own tools. Hybridize your tools in order to build unique things. Even simple tools that are your
own can yield entirely new avenues of exploration. Remember, tools amplify our capacities, so even a small tool can make
a big difference.
28. Make new words. Expand the lexicon. The new conditions demand a new way of thinking. The thinking demands
new forms of expression. The expression generates new conditions.
29. Think with your mind. Forget technology. Creativity is not device-dependent.
34. Make mistakes faster.
35. Imitate. Don’t be shy about it. Try to get as close as you can. You'll never get all the way, and the
separation might be truly remarkable.
42. Remember. Growth is only possible as a product of history. Without memory, innovation is merely novelty.
History gives growth a direction. But a memory is never perfect. Every memory is a degraded or composite image of a
previous moment or event. That’s what makes us aware of its quality as a past and not a present. It means that every
memory is new, a partial construct different from its source, and, as such, a potential for growth itself.

Steve Pavlina’s Personal Development Blog

Tags: growth, personal-development, steve-pavlina on 2007-06-14 and saved by38 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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No Impact Man: The truth about happiness

Tags: growth, hapiness, personal-development on 2007-06-07 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Scott H Young » Double Your Reading Rate

Tags: learning, personal-development, productivity, reading, speed-reading on 2007-05-20 and saved by31 people -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.scotthyoung.com

Over a year ago I picked up the book, Breakthrough Rapid Reading by Peter Kump,
1) Remember, Reading is Not Linear
The beauty of text is that it is non-linear.
Most people read a book as if it were given to them as a speech. They listen to the author and follow along with what he is saying in a purely sequential manner. In order to reach faster rates of comprehension you have to learn to abandon this tactic. You can start this by not subvocalizing.
2) Stop Subvocalizing
To move to a new level you need to stop sounding the words inside your head or subvocalizing. Subvocalizing takes time, more time than is necessary to comprehend the words you are reading.
4) Use a Pointer
Use your index finger to mark where you are on the page at all times. It should follow along with the word you are currently reading, slowly scrolling across each line and then back down one. It may feel awkward at first and it may even temporarily slow your reading rate as you adjust, but using a pointer is critical if you want to improve your reading skill.
The way to remove internal distractions comes from clearly identifying a purpose and a motivation.
6) Find Your Motivation

If there was one piece of advice I would offer to improve your reading rate it would be simply to engross yourself in the material you are studying. If you can connect what you are reading to a deeply held motivation, and determine your specific purpose for reading you can maintain a very alert and focused state.
You can find a general motivation for reading any book if you are creative enough, so don’t tell me you can’t figure out one.

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What You'll Wish You'd Known

Tags: education, growth, high-school, paul-graham, personal-development, research, science on 2007-04-09 and saved by8 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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You
don't need to be in a rush to choose your life's work. What you
need to do is discover what you like. You have to work on stuff
you like if you want to be good at what you do.
So I'm going to tell you what we all wish
someone had told us.
But there are other jobs you can't learn about, because no one is
doing them yet.
The world changes fast,
and the rate at which it changes is itself speeding up. In such a
world it's not a good idea to have fixed plans.
The computer world has a name for this: premature
optimization. And it is synonymous with disaster.
What they really mean is, don't get demoralized. Don't think that
you can't do what other people can. And I agree you shouldn't
underestimate your potential.
If they were just like us, then
they had to work very hard to do what they did. And that's one
reason we like to believe in genius. It gives us an excuse for
being lazy. If these guys were able to do what they did only because
of some magic Shakespeareness or Einsteinness, then it's not our
fault if we can't do something as good.
if you're
trying to choose between two theories and one gives you an excuse
for being lazy, the other one is probably right.
Upwind

I think the solution is to work in the other direction. Instead
of working back from a goal, work forward from promising situations.
This is what most successful people actually do anyway.
It's not so important what you work on, so long as you're not wasting
your time. Work on things that interest you and increase your
options, and worry later about which you'll take.
Look for smart people
and hard problems. Smart people tend to clump together, and if you
can find such a clump, it's probably worthwhile to join it.
This may seem a
scandalous proposition, but it has been experimentally verified,
in the famous Social Text affair. Suspecting that the papers
published by literary theorists were often just intellectual-sounding
nonsense, a physicist deliberately wrote a paper full of
intellectual-sounding nonsense, and submitted it to a literary
theory journal, which published it.
The best protection is always to be working on hard problems.
If you'd asked me in high school what the difference was between
high school kids and adults, I'd have said it was that adults had
to earn a living. Wrong. It's that adults take responsibility for
themselves. Making a living is only a small part of it.
Far more important is to take intellectual responsibility for oneself.
Working at something
as a day job doesn't mean doing it badly. It means not being defined
by it.
When I ask people what they regret most about high school, they
nearly all say the same thing: that they wasted so much time. If
you're wondering what you're doing now that you'll regret most
later, that's probably it.
So what do you do? What you should not do is rebel.
Rebellion is almost as stupid as obedience. In either case you let
yourself be defined by what they tell you to do. The best plan, I
think, is to step onto an orthogonal vector. Don't just do what
they tell you, and don't just refuse to. Instead treat school as
a day job. As day jobs go, it's pretty sweet. You're done at 3
o'clock, and you can even work on your own stuff while you're there.
Curiosity

And what's your real job supposed to be? Unless you're Mozart,
your first task is to figure that out. What are the great things
to work on? Where are the imaginative people? And most importantly,
what are you interested in? The word "aptitude" is misleading,
because it implies something innate. The most powerful sort of
aptitude is a consuming interest in some question, and such interests
are often acquired tastes.
And passion
is a bad word for it. A better name would be curiosity.
It has to: you can't get anything done if you're always
asking why about everything. But in ambitious adults, instead of
drying up, curiosity becomes narrow and deep.
So I was surprised when, early
in college, I read a quote by Wittgenstein saying that he had no
self-discipline and had never been able to deny himself anything,
not even a cup of coffee.
Now I know a number of people who do great work, and it's the same
with all of them. They have little discipline. They're all terrible
procrastinators and find it almost impossible to make themselves
do anything they're not interested in.
If you want to do good work, what you need is a great curiosity
about a promising question.
That's what you need to do: find a question that makes
the world interesting. People who do great things look at the same
world everyone else does, but notice some odd detail that's
compellingly mysterious.
The way to get a big idea to appear in your head is not to hunt for
big ideas, but to put in a lot of time on work that interests you,
and in the process keep your mind open enough that a big idea can
take roost.
Put in time how and on what? Just pick a project that seems
interesting: to master some chunk of material, or to make something,
or to answer some question. Choose a project that will take less
than a month, and make it something you have the means to finish.
Do something hard enough to stretch you, but only just, especially
at first. If you're deciding between two projects, choose whichever
seems most fun. If one blows up in your face, start another. Repeat
till, like an internal combustion engine, the process becomes
self-sustaining, and each project generates the next one. (This
could take years.)
Don't worry if a project doesn't seem to be on the path to some
goal you're supposed to have. Paths can bend a lot more than you
think. So let the path grow out the project. The most important
thing is to be excited about it, because it's by doing that you
learn.
The important thing is to get out there and do stuff. Instead of
waiting to be taught, go out and learn.
You start being an adult when you decide to take
responsibility for your life. You can do that at any age. [10]
Well, most adults labor under restrictions
just as cumbersome, and they manage to get things done. If you
think it's restrictive being a kid, imagine having kids.
[3] A day job is one you take to pay the bills so you can do what
you really want, like play in a band, or invent relativity.
[5] The key to wasting time is distraction. Without distractions
it's too obvious to your brain that you're not doing anything with
it, and you start to feel uncomfortable. If you want to measure
how dependent you've become on distractions, try this experiment:
set aside a chunk of time on a weekend and sit alone and think.
You can have a notebook to write your thoughts down in, but nothing
else: no friends, TV, music, phone, IM, email, Web, games, books,
newspapers, or magazines. Within an hour most people will feel a
strong craving for distraction.
Why does society foul you? Indifference, mainly. There are
simply no outside forces pushing high school to be good.

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Richard Hamming: You and Your Research

Tags: career, growth, paul-graham, personal-development, research, richard-hamming, science on 2007-04-09 and saved by10 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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Why shouldn't you do significant things in this one life, however you define significant?
You don't have to tell other people, but shouldn't you say to yourself, ``Yes, I would like to do something significant.''
That is the characteristic of great scientists; they have courage. They will go forward under incredible circumstances; they think and continue to think.
What appears to be a fault, often, by a change of viewpoint, turns out to be one of the greatest assets you can have.
You have to neglect things if you intend to get what you want done.
Most people like to believe something is or is not true. Great scientists tolerate ambiguity very well. They believe the theory enough to go ahead; they doubt it enough to notice the errors and faults so they can step forward and create the new replacement theory.
When you find apparent flaws you've got to be sensitive and keep track of those things, and keep an eye out for how they can be explained or how the theory can be changed to fit them. Those are often the great contributions.
Most great scientists are completely committed to their problem. Those who don't become committed seldom produce outstanding, first-class work.
If you are deeply immersed and committed to a topic, day after day after day, your subconscious has nothing to do but work on your problem. And so you wake up one morning, or on some afternoon, and there's the answer.
``If what you are doing is not important, and if you don't think it is going to lead to something important, why are you at Bell Labs working on it?''
They were unable to ask themselves, ``What are the important problems in my field?''
If you do not work on an important problem, it's unlikely you'll do important work.
You should do your job in such a fashion that others can build on top of it, so they will indeed say, ``Yes, I've stood on so and so's shoulders and I saw further.'' The essence of science is cumulative.
I suggest that by altering the problem, by looking at the thing differently, you can make a great deal of difference in your final productivity because you can either do it in such a fashion that people can indeed build on what you've done, or you can do it in such a fashion that the next person has to essentially duplicate again what you've done.
it is not sufficient to do a job, you have to sell it.
There are three things you have to do in selling. You have to learn to write clearly and well so that people will read it, you must learn to give reasonably formal talks, and you also must learn to give informal talks.
The technical person wants to give a highly limited technical talk. Most of the time the audience wants a broad general talk and wants much more survey and background than the speaker is willing to give.
The technical person wants to give a highly limited technical talk. Most of the time the audience wants a broad general talk and wants much more survey and background than the speaker is willing to give.
> As a result, many talks are ineffective.
`Is the effort to be a great scientist worth it?''
I think it is very definitely worth the struggle to try and do first-class work because the truth is, the value is in the struggle more than it is in the result. The struggle to make something of yourself seems to be worthwhile in itself. The success and fame are sort of dividends, in my opinion.
Why do so many of the people who have great promise, fail?

Well, one of the reasons is drive and commitment.
And, he never went any further. He had his personality defect of wanting total control and was not willing to recognize that you need the support of the system.
It has a lot, if you learn how to use it. It takes patience, but you can learn how to use the system pretty well, and you can learn how to get around it.
If you want to do something, don't ask, do it. Present him with an accomplished fact. Don't give him a chance to tell you `No'.
I didn't say you should conform; I said ``The appearance of conforming gets you a long way.'' If you chose to assert your ego in any number of ways, ``I am going to do it my way,'' you pay a small steady price throughout the whole of your professional career. And this, over a whole lifetime, adds up to an enormous amount of needless trouble.
By realizing you have to use the system and studying how to get the system to do your work, you learn how to adapt the system to your desires. Or you can fight it steadily, as a small undeclared war, for the whole of your life.