本 · a fit, not a target
The Nature of Water
The clearest statement of purpose as a fit rather than a target. Water adapts itself to its place, reaches the most inaccessible places without strife, and because it does not strive it has no enemies.
The Tao Gives, and Lets Go
Purpose as something given and then let go of. The Tao gives life and makes no claim of ownership, forms things without ruling them, and raises them without owning them.
What Is Well Planted
What a well-founded life does: whoever plants well will not have his work uprooted. It then widens deliberately, and in this order — yourself, your household, your neighbourhood, the state.
Return to the Uncarved Block
Built out of returns rather than advances. Stay in obscurity while you are in the light, stay humble while things are glorious, and you come back to what this translation calls the first essence.
Leaving No Trace
Removes the size test. There is no outcast and nothing valueless, which the verse calls recognising concealed values — and it adds that the good man teaches the bad man, and the bad man is the good man's wealth.
A Journey of a Thousand Li
Where a purpose actually starts. The tree that fills your arms grew from a shoot, the tower of nine storeys from a heap of earth, the thousand-mile journey from one step. It ends by warning against acting from a design.
A guided meditation and a short course for this topic are being written. Leave your email and we will tell you when it is ready.
This adds you to the Institute's mailing list. One click unsubscribes you, from any message we send.
Other people have said useful things about purpose. These talks are theirs, not ours: we did not make them, and we do not agree with every word in them. They are here because a second person explaining the same thing a different way is often what makes it land.
Stop Searching for Your Passion
Terri Trespicio · TEDx Talks
"Find your passion" assumes there is one already out there waiting to be discovered. Trespicio argues that this is the wrong question, because interest comes out of what a person actually does rather than sitting ahead of them waiting to be located. Verse 8 on this page makes the same move in a different image: water adapts itself to the place it is in rather than picking a destination.
What Makes a Good Life? Lessons from the Longest Study on Happiness
Robert Waldinger · TED
This reports a study that followed the same people from their teens into old age for eighty years, and what it found is that the thing most tied to a life going well is not achievement or money but the quality of a person's relationships. Verse 54 widens in that same order — yourself, your household, your neighbourhood — and this is that order with eight decades of records behind it.
What Is Your Ikigai? The Ikigai of Elderly Japanese People
Aki · Samurai Matcha
Ikigai is sold outside Japan as a diagram where four circles overlap. This is a correction to that: a Japanese teacher asks people in his own village, aged sixty to ninety, what theirs is. The answers are small, ordinary, and there are usually several each — a garden, a morning routine, somebody visiting. Verse 27 says there is no outcast and nothing valueless, and this is that claim arriving from people instead of from a text.
The Tao Te Ching has no idea of a calling — nothing you choose, announce, or chase. What it has instead is the idea that everything already has a nature, and that its job is to be that fully. Purpose here is not found. It is uncovered, by clearing away what is standing in the way of it.
Water is the example the book keeps coming back to, and the useful detail is a small one: water has the virtue of adapting itself to its place. It picks no destination. It moves according to what it is and the shape of whatever is around it, and it reaches the most inaccessible places without forcing anything. Purpose described that way is less a target than a fit.
The book is also clear that this cannot be handed to you from outside. Verse 51 says the Tao gives things life and makes no claim of ownership — it forms them without ruling them and raises them without owning them. Applied to a person, that is an argument against the kind of purpose that arrives as an assignment: from a parent, an institution, or an ambition taken on early and never looked at since.
It also removes the size test. Verse 27 says there is no outcast and nothing valueless, and verse 64 puts a thousand-mile journey in the single step rather than in the distance. A purpose does not have to be big to be the right one.