Purpose - part 1

During my second year of a rigorous graduate program in the Krannert School of Management at Purdue University in late 70s, making my way through numerous contentious jousting with my fellow students while presenting cases, working on various projects, studying, taking exams, and feeling all the ups of triumphs and downs of defeats which left me feeling mostly empty, I started questioning it all with a fundamental question, what is life, and followed by even more significant question, what is the purpose of my life.

The struggles of my daily graduate student life just did not make sense to me since they only lead to more such struggles to follow during my supposed career after graduation. When I questioned the borderline brutal treatment encouraged and dished out by the faculty, I was told that it is in preparation for the "reality out there." Well, I thought I did not like that "reality out there." I just was not getting a stable satisfaction of doing what I liked to do as I thought I should. Stress seemed to be a prevalent state of being.

Thus those questions of life and my purpose in it were pushing themselves front and center, beckoning for attention. I started asking around, reading, thinking, discussing my nascent ideas with others. But, central to that process was a conviction that I must come to answers to those questions on my own, without subscribing to any existing ideology or theology, as a result of going as far and as deep as I can go with derivative questions, making sure that my conclusions maintain inner integrity and self-consistency, until such time I came to a place where I could not develop further answers. I was continuously pushing that boundary and testing my evolving system against new information.

The results are quite simple. My purpose in life is to discover and develop my distinguishing abilities to their maximum, apply them in my daily life and experience the process. Quite simple. Coincidentally, I believe that all life has that same purpose.

Now, I can take a U-turn and touch the first question – what is life.