From Reopen to Reinvent. Michael B. Horn

13. The notion of purpose can feel like a grand exercise in self-importance and the stuff people talk only about in Ivory Towers, uppity cocktail parties, and professional sports. But it does not have to be abstract, grand, or erudite (yes, we just used that word). The point is to understand what you want to prioritize and make sure you will not live in violation of any deeply held values. This will also help you know what to prioritize when you need to make trade-offs between the things that you want more of in your life that you identified. Purpose can also be dynamic and a combination of one's goals and how one achieves those goals, which can evolve over time as circumstances change. Victor Frankl, a neurologist, psychiatrist, Holocaust survivor, and the founder of logotherapy (a form of therapy based on the idea that people live in order to find meaning in life), wrote a famous book, Man's Search for Meaning, that addresses the topic of one's purpose as well. Frankl suggests that a person's purpose changes over time as a result of one's circumstances, and that we can discover our purpose at a given point in time in three different ways: “(1) by creating a work or doing a deed; (2) by experiencing something or encountering someone; and (3) by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering.” For high schools, there is an entire course built around helping students create and clarify their current purpose that IDEO built. Called the Purpose Project (https://thepurposeproject.org), the course helps students clarify their purpose by focusing on a few questions. These questions derive from the earlier exercises we suggest in this section. What are you doing today? What do you like doing? What can you do so that you can get more clarity around what drives you, what you like, and what you don't? Action, in other words, and not talk, clarifies one's purpose. This overlaps with the first way that Frankl says people can discover their purpose.