『How to Find Your Purpose: Aquinas on Why Goodness Must Overflow | Episode 8』のカバーアート

How to Find Your Purpose: Aquinas on Why Goodness Must Overflow | Episode 8

How to Find Your Purpose: Aquinas on Why Goodness Must Overflow | Episode 8

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Send us Fan MailWhy are you here?What is your life ultimately for?And when your life is over, will some part of the world be better because you were here?We all want our lives to matter. We want to know that our years amounted to more than consuming things, accumulating possessions, entertaining ourselves, and making ourselves comfortable.We want our lives to mean something.In this episode of The Examined Life, Dr. Scott M. Sullivan explores what it means to have a mission in life: an overarching purpose that organizes your goals, develops your potential, and directs your abilities toward something greater than yourself.A mission is not simply another goal.Writing a book is a goal. Devoting your life to communicating truths that make people wiser can be a mission.Building a company is a goal. Using your abilities to create genuine value, develop people, support families, and serve others can be a mission.Having children is one thing. Devoting yourself to forming good human beings who will carry goodness into another generation is something greater.Goals have finish lines.A mission tells those goals what they are for.Drawing on the wisdom of Cicero, Aristotle, and Thomas Aquinas, this episode develops a classical philosophy of purpose centered around one question:What good is particularly yours to do?In this episode you'll discover:• The difference between a goal and a mission• Why a mission can give your entire life direction and coherence• Cicero's insight that your particular abilities, personality, experiences, circumstances, and opportunities matter when deciding how you should live• Why "follow your passion" is not enough• How to find the intersection between what you love, what you can become good at, and what other people genuinely need• Aquinas's principle bonum diffusivum sui: goodness tends to communicate itself• Why developing yourself should ultimately make you more capable of benefiting others• How a mission gives life significance, focus, and direction• Why having something greater than comfort to live for can make you more resilient during suffering• Aristotle's virtue of magnanimity, or greatness of soul, and why deliberately living beneath your genuine potential is not humility• Why having a meaningful life also places demands upon you• Why you don't need to change the world: change your part of it• A practical three-step method for discovering and pursuing your mission:Discover, Develop, DiffuseOne of the central ideas of this episode comes from the classical principle:Bonum diffusivum sui.The good tends to diffuse itself.As you become better, stronger, wiser, and more capable, the good you acquire does not have to terminate in you.Your knowledge can become someone else's education.Your courage can become someone else's protection.Your wealth can become someone else's opportunity.Your experience can become someone else's shortcut.Your character can become your children's inheritance.Even your suffering can become wisdom that helps another person endure suffering better.The measure of a good life is not merely how much good you possess.It is how much good passes through you into the lives of others.And that gives us a simple framework for developing a mission:Discover.Find the good that is particularly yours to do.Develop.Build the knowledge, skills, resources, discipline, virtue, and character necessary to do it exceptionally well.Diffuse.Turn what you have developed outward. Teach it. Build with it. Create with it. Lead with it. Raise children with it. Serve people with it.Find the good you can do.Become capable of doing it.Then give it away.Your mission does not have to be famous.You do not need to change the world.Change your part of it.Leave your family better.Your children better.Your profession better.Your community better.Build something worth inheriting.Teach someone what took you thirty years to learn.Help someone carry a burden they could not carry alone.Become as good as you reasonably can, and then spread that goodness as far as your abilities allow.How far is that?I don't know.Neither do you.Find out.Recommended Reading• Cicero: On Duties (De Officiis)• Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics• Thomas Aquinas: Summa TheologiaeThe Examined Life takes the timeless wisdom of the world's greatest philosophers and transforms it into practical tools for living a happier, stronger, wiser, and more flourishing life.Vita Examinata.#Purpose #MeaningOfLife #Mission #LifePurpose #Philosophy #Aristotle #Cicero #ThomasAquinas #Virtue #Meaning #PersonalGrowth #SelfImprovement #Wisdom #TheExaminedLifeWatch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@DrScottMSullivan Follow on X: https://x.com/DrScotMSullivan
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