I’ve heard, from multiple people, and, I can kind of tell in general from people’s nonverbal behaviors, that finding purpose is a difficult thing to do for most of us; even I have a hard time finding a ‘purpose.’ For me, if you’re interested, I don’t have one purpose. I have many, depending on the time, and where I am. See, about 6 months ago, in October, my purpose was to become better. To grow up. To stop being a child. To not be stupid, and make wise decisions. My goal was to be that guy. And it still is. That purpose involves many little mini purposes, which I won’t get into too much depth. 

You just found your purpose. Or, your 2 or 3 purposes. And once you fulfill these purposes, your life will be fuller and more meaningful, because I’m assuming you have valid purposes. Isn’t that something? Not let’s ask ourselves, what were we feeling? Because I know for a fact, when you were thinking about these purposes, you aren’t a cold, humanoid piece of meat that used mechanisms in your body to rationalize your goals. No. You felt something in you when that one goal you circled crossed your mind. It might’ve been fear, excitement; you treated that goal in a higher sense; above the carnal and earthly materialistic things that surround you. Isn’t that something? 

Well, lets get into the science of your emotions and their mechanisms that influence this reaction, and why using those feeling you felt actually lead you to make the best decisions of your life, including finding your momentary purpose.

But before we do that, keep in mind that this process isn’t fun and games. In fact, you will not like it very much at some times. When people talk about purpose, they always associate it with the idea of passion.

I don’t even like the word ‘passion,’ and the reason for this is because of what Robert Greene, another great author, said; no matter what the goal is, no matter what it is you really want to do, it won’t always be passionate. If you want to get good at sports, for example. It won’t be fun all the time. You will sweat, get tired, be sore, and, when doing the same drills for months, you will also feel boredom. We will always have days when we don’t want to do what we said we wanted to do. But, anyway, back to the concept of non-materialistic entities.

From the research paper: “Affect is a form of cognition: A neurobiological analysis,” by Seth Duncan and Lisa Feldman Barrett, it states: parts of the brain that have traditionally been called “cognitive” participate in instantiating an affective state, not merely regulating that state after it has been established. Furthermore, the parts of the brain that have traditionally been called “affective” participate in cognitive processes. The so-called “affective” brain areas (e.g., the amygdala and brainstem) participate in sensory processing and contribute to consciousness in a manner that meets most definitions of “cognition”.

Now remember, the only way to utilize our emotions is to first identify them. We already have words like happiness, sadness, anger, excitement, gut feeling, and so on and so forth. But there are other ones that you and I definitely know doesn’t have a word for it. So, try to identify it using a series of words, instead of trying to confine this feeling into a catchphrase or one word.

So now you have accomplished three things. 1) finding out your temporary purpose, 2) identifying the emotion you felt with that goal, and 3) learning the fact that emotions don’t hinder your rational mind; they are simply a part of it. In the next part of this video series, we will start to discuss the actual process of accomplishing these goals, and how to most effectively execute them and optimize our life. Thank you watching, and I will see you in the next video with some progress done. Promise me that.