# Finding a Sense of Purpose - The brain is built to acquire beliefs. We have a desire to create and understand cause & effect. We need to know "why?" - Naturally we also want to understand why we should live, to understand the meaning of our life. - It is important to recognize that we are trying to understand the meaning of our life through our brain, and we can only answer this question based on the limitations of our brain. - To create better answers to our question we need to improve our knowledge about ourselves and the world, and we need to improve our ability to reason about these types of questions. - Finding a sense of purpose is a process of exploiting and exploring. We exploit our current abilities and knowledge to find (possibly temporary) meaning and orient ourselves toward that meaning, and exploring new knowledge or abilities to help us answer the question. - We need to fall in love with the process of improvement and finding out what we don't know or what we are wrong about, for the sake of finding our purpose. We need to balance this against executing on our current convictions and moving toward goals that align with our purpose. ## Related - [[The Human Imperative]] - [[Man's Search For Meaning]]