How to Find Purpose Through Story
Ever since my uncle died when I was in college, I’ve been looking for purpose.
I’ve written about his death and it’s impact a lot, but—quickly—when he was dying, we all gathered at his house, when it was my turn to go into his darkened room, he opened his eyes and said, “Carrie, I’m throwing down the gauntlet. Will you pick it up?”
There was only one answer.
“Yes,” I told him. “Yes.”
It was the last thing he said to me. He fell asleep again. We left for home. I left for college. And since then, I have spent years trying to figure out how to make my words to my uncle not be a lie. How to meet the challenge of his life so well lived. This was a man who desegregated a fraternity system, a man who rose from poverty to chair the board at UNH, run an international legal society. To just make such a huge and positive impact in the world, right?
How do you lift up the gauntlet that he had thrown down?
It’s hard.
And I often think that anything I do doesn’t matter because compared to the great and amazing things he did? My impact is so small.
PEOPLE AND PURPOSE
Recently, researchers Michael Mask and Steven Heine of the University of British Columbia have a new study that’s all about people and purpose. They looked at multiple cultures and found that people’s purpose, everywhere, has a lot of commonalities.
This is pretty cool.
We’ve talked here before about having purpose helps your health, lowers stress when stress is happening. It is typically considered a really big part of being a happy person.
Mask and Heine weren’t really looking at the impact of having a purposeful life but asked people what made them feel like they did.
They came up with categories after talking to 200 Americans.
They tested American and people in India, Poland, and Japan.
What they found?
People were similar when it came to where they found purpose and how they ranked or prioritized each of those 16 categories.
Every country had “happiness,” “self-sufficiency,” and “family” in the top five. Every country had “religion” and “recognition” in the bottom five.
There were also some differences. For the Japanese people surveyed, they thought occupation was pretty important to quality of life.
“Though the goal of our paper was to highlight many sources of purpose, our take-home message is that having any kind of purpose is key to having a good life,” says Heine told the Greater Good.
WRITING THE STORY OF YOUR LIFE
Heine, who teaches at the University of British Columbia has a new book, Start Making Sense: How Existential Psychology Can Help Us Build Meaningful Lives in Absurd Times.
One of the things he also writes about is that we tell stories so that we can make sense of what’s happening. Almost all my novels are about me trying to wrap my head around something (this is obviously not the most efficient way to use stories to make sense).
The Next Big Idea Club writes it like this:
“Our lives only feel meaningful when they seem to make sense. But the key challenge is that life often doesn’t seem coherent. For example, we may seem like quite different people in different situations. We might act silly with friends, but on our daily commute, we may be short-tempered, and then at work, we become ambitious and responsible. Which persona is the real self?
“Or we might struggle to identify a common thread connecting the different chapters of our lives. We might realize that the person we were in high school shares little in common with how we now think of ourselves. How can we weave all the different threads of our self together? We accomplish this by telling stories.
“We create stories with our self as the central character, going on a journey where we confront all the experiences and challenges in our lives. These stories help us organize our understanding of who we are, what we are doing, and why we are doing it. It lays the foundation of self.
“Stories integrate those inconsistent facets of ourselves because they allow us to focus on particular episodes and edit out parts that don’t quite fit.”
“Importantly, the stories we tell are not typically literal accounts of what happened but improvised tellings that make our lives feel sensible. Stories integrate those inconsistent facets of ourselves because they allow us to focus on particular episodes and edit out parts that don’t quite fit. When we tell our stories well, we feel that our lives make sense.
“While each story we tell about ourselves is unique in certain respects, it often shares features in common with stories told by others. Many of our stories share common themes, such as redemption, when our story highlights how we conquered a challenge, or a theme of contamination, when our story explains how our life suddenly went off a cliff.
“Also, our stories rest upon simple but extremely important premises that guide how we experience the events in our lives. Our stories might be built around key premises such as ‘I am good’ or ‘People get what they deserve.’ These premises serve as a lens through which we see how our life unfolds. Part of leading a meaningful life is learning how to narrate the events in our lives through a compelling and sensible story.”
HOW YOU WRITE THE STORY OF YOUR LIFE RELATES TO FINDING PURPOSE
And maybe that’s the secret. The story of our lives isn’t just something that happens to us—it’s something we’re co-writing every day, whether we realize it or not. The themes we return to, the metaphors we choose, the way we frame your setbacks and triumphs—these are all narrative decisions, even if they’re unconscious ones.
Mine is all about that gauntlet, right? And also having a muppet voice. :)
When we begin to write our stories with intention—to shape it like we would a novel or memoir—we also begin to glimpse our purpose more clearly, I think.
That’s because purpose isn’t always a lightning strike and a grand epiphany.
Sometimes purpose is a thread running through the chapters, waiting for us to trace it back. And once we do, everything starts to make a little more sense.
So maybe the question isn’t just “What is my purpose?”
Maybe the better question is: “What kind of story do I want to tell with this life—and how can I start telling it on purpose?”
Journaling Prompts for Writing Your Life with Purpose
If my life were a book, what would the title of this chapter be—and why?
(What themes or questions are showing up right now?)What story do I keep telling myself about who I am?
(Is it empowering? Limiting? Outdated? Ready for revision?)What moments in my life have felt the most meaningful or alive?
(What patterns or values connect those experiences?)Who have I become through the hardest chapters of my life?
(What strengths or shifts emerged that I might not have seen at the time?)If I imagined a future “me” reading this story—what kind of ending would they want to see?
(What would make the journey feel worthwhile?)What is one small way I can rewrite my story this week, even just a sentence at a time?
(A choice, a shift in mindset, a new narrative thread.)
EXTRA INFO:
This link from the Greater Good is all about that—about finding your purpose. Hopefully, it might help you if you’re looking!
This is a recent post that talks more fully about my time with Uncle Dick and the gauntlet.
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