Live a Purposeful and Meaningful Life

The three key elements -- specialized knowledge, self esteem, and intuition -- detail specific personal experiences and illustrate how one can pursue a purposeful and meaningful life.

It is noteworthy that behind all great ideas is specialized knowledge, and this is especially important to know when taking on a new venture. Smart and successful people rarely stop developing their specialized knowledge related to their major purposes, professions, or businesses.

There is a very real and definite source of all the unwanted feelings and emotions that you experience. As you go through life, you accumulate negative experiences in your mind. For instance, can you remember a time when someone strongly affected your self-esteem? The more closely connected you are with that person, such as a parent or spouse, the more it will affect you, even if he or she meant well.

Whatever you think is wrong with you was most likely told to you at an earlier period. That’s one reason why children tend to be free-spirited: they haven’t been told to feel otherwise. Sometimes people will say, “Some of the people in my life who were associated with painful memories lost the power to hurt me and affect my self-esteem. That’s a big deal!”

Evaluating your self-esteem makes it possible for you to compare your real self, which is how you are, with your ideal self, which is how you would like to be. Evaluating your level of self-esteem is important because you are then able to assess what you know or do not know about yourself and what you would like to know. You then come to know your strengths and weaknesses and can set goals that you know you can attain with the new knowledge.

Intuition is a gift that you may ignore even as you pursue a purposeful and meaningful life. Yet when life throws you challenges that you cannot work through logically, you find a friend in intuition.

Intuition is based on patterns and shapes in things and looks at the meaning behind and relationships between things. When people using intuition take in new information, they often look for different patterns and will think, How does this idea relate to other ideas? People using intuition will seek possibilities and patterns when given new information and will ask, “How can we use this down the road?” Intuition, as gut feelings based on experience, has been useful for business and professional leaders in making judgments about people, culture, and strategy. Even factual-type individuals have the potential to develop their intuition.