I’m devoting a bit of time tonight and in the nights to come to studying and thinking about how I can develop a coalesced statement of purpose which can serve as an integrating guide for my actions and investments. I spend a lot of time doing a lot of things. And many of them are worth doing. But I feel that the products of my efforts are a bit scattered and I would be interested do see what might happen if I can apply some focus.
So… how am I to begin? Well, I have studied Objectvism a lot, and thus I’ve read a lot of writings by others who have worked through some of the same curiosities questions I have had. This has yielded interesting writers such as John Drake and Burgess Laughlin.
I’ve also been following the work of some bloggers and podcasters who focus on personal development and who are not obviously readers of Rand. Steever Robbins, who blogs and podcasts at Get it Done Guy, and Steve Pavlina.
These are some of the tour guides I have selected to try to find my way through how to get started with what feels like asking oneself an enormously huge question, which understandably risks causing a sudden onset of writer’s block.
I have started tonight by re-reading Burgess Laughlin’s piece on what is a central purpose in life.
This is a concept that comes directly from Ayn Rand in her discussions of her own relationship to her work, which she documents in The Romantic Manifesto, and Laughlin does some interesting treatment of it in this post to break it down and identify what a CPL is and what it is not. My sense of it after re-reading is that a CPL is a broad and abstract personal statement of action describing what ambitious but achievable thing you wish to do. As a further note, this should be a joy to do and hopefully can be a source of income, though that is not always feasible.
Laughlin does a lot of follow-up in the comments section of his blog to expand on this discussion including treatment of how a person might approach discovering his own CPL statement. This, I think will be quite valuable to me. The basic version was described as: what have you done, what are you doing, what do you want to do? The more complex version was broken down into observation, abstraction, and testing/experimentation.
I’ve run out of time for the night but I’ll definitely be looking to spend some time itemizing for myself what I have been doing in professional life and in my personal time. I would invite any of you are interested to chat about this with me to reach out to me because I’d certainly be glad to have smart people to toss ideas back and forth with on this matter.
-Franco
(photo credit: Ready, Set, Go! by Prescott Pym via Flickr)