Find Your Purpose Using Science - Gleb Tsipursky

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What is the meaning and purpose of life for you? Please take a moment to reflect on this question. Whether you have asked yourself this question before or not, it is very helpful to check in from time to time, and ask yourself, with an open heart and open mind, once again. After all, your answer may shift over time, including by reading this book, which lays out a science-based path to help you find a deep sense of meaning and purpose in life. Using science to address life’s meaning and purpose may seem surprising to many. After all, the traditional mainstream approach believes that science can’t answer big life questions –
that’s the job of religion. Well, actually there’s been a wave of recent research in psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and other disciplines on how we can find a rich sense of meaning and purpose in life. The workbook combines an engaging narrative, academic research, and stories from people’s everyday lives, and provides a set of exercises to help you figure out your personal sense of meaning and purpose. In writing this, I drew on my own scholarship on meaning and
purpose, and my experience in giving workshops, teaching classes, creating videos, and writing blog posts that translate such research into practical strategies for finding life meaning and purpose.

Now, many people who come to my workshops and classes are looking for a simple, clear,and straightforward answer to what life is all about. They want certainty about life’s meaning and purpose. Well, I’d love to address life’s meaning and purpose for all people and for all time, but I can’t give the absolute right answer to the big question of “what is the meaning of life.” I don’t deal in sound bites and dogmas.

What I can do in this book is provide you some clear and practical research-based strategies for figuring out a personal sense of life’s meaning and purpose. In other words, I offer the answer to the question “what is the meaning of life for you?” Those who attended my workshops and classes on this topic found these techniques very helpful. One participant stated in an anonymous feedback form that s/he gained “a better understanding of what it means to search for meaning, with the research basis especially greatly contributing to my comprehension.” A second noted that after attending the workshop, “I have a much better sense of how to consider questions of meaning and purpose.” A third wrote that “from attending this workshop, I have gained the basic knowledge for greater self-exploration.” Several chose to give videotaped interviews about their experience in a workshop on meaning and purpose. They kindly permitted me to include their names and links to their videotaped feedback, for example Ryan Mulholand; Brenda Penn; Karen Thimmes, and Jake
Calaway. Their descriptions of their experience testifies to how much they benefitted from engaging with the research-based strategies to finding a deeper sense of meaning and purpose in life. I got in touch with some of these workshop participants a few weeks after the workshop, to see whether it influenced them in the long term. It did. The most illustrative statement came from Ryan, whose story I will share throughout this book. Ryan, who is a 21-year-old college student, stated that when he first came to the workshop, “my original highest order goals revolved largely around living a comfortable life.” Yet in the course of the workshop, he realized that “the issue with this mindset was that it was too shallow and self-centered for me to be content with for long.” As a result of the workshop, he stated that “ “I reached several conclusions in what I desired most out of life. I figured out that I wanted to build a life that was centered around bettering myself and other people. I wanted to be someone who constantly was learning and growing, while at the same time, being a teacher of sorts to help
those around me... With these thoughts in mind, I promptly changed my major and have since then, begun to work toward making these wants into realities.” His full statement describing his experience is available here.