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

Why 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 and improve the lives of others can be a mission. Goals have finish lines. A mission tells those goals what they are for. Drawing on 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 gives your life direction and coherence • Cicero's insight that your particular gifts, abilities, experiences, and circumstances matter when deciding how you should live • Why "follow your passion" is not enough • How to discover where your abilities meet genuine human needs • Aquinas's principle bonum diffusivum sui: goodness tends to communicate itself • Why a mission can make you more resilient when life becomes painful • Aristotle's virtue of magnanimity, or greatness of soul • Why deliberately living beneath your genuine potential is not humility • Why you don't need to change the world: change your part of it • A practical three-step method for discovering your mission: Discover, Develop, Diffuse One of the central ideas of this episode is simple: The good 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. 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. So: Discover. Find the good that is particularly yours to do. Develop. Become capable of doing 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. 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. Become as good as you reasonably can, 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 Theologiae The 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 #LifePurpose #Mission #Philosophy #Aristotle #Cicero #ThomasAquinas #Virtue #SelfImprovement #Wisdom #TheExaminedLife