Your purpose score is 0 out of 70, indicating a low level of purpose.
Purpose is an abiding intention to achieve a long-term goal that is both personally meaningful and makes a positive mark on the world. The goals that foster a sense of purpose are ones that can potentially change the lives of other people, like supporting your company's mission, creating art, or teaching kids to read.
Your score suggests that you haven’t yet found such a purpose. Of course, purpose evolves over our lifetimes. It’s normal for our sense of purpose to wax and wane throughout life, and to go through stages when you’re searching for your new or renewed purpose. If you're young, you may still be figuring out what matters to you. You might find yourself at a crossroads in your life, when one purpose has been accomplished (such as raising children) and you’re looking for a new one. If you feel isolated or depressed, you may find yourself wondering if life is meaningful or if you matter, compromising your sense of purpose.
Often, finding our purpose involves a combination of finding meaning in the experiences we’ve had, while assessing our values, skills, and hopes for a better world. It means taking time for personal reflection while imagining our ideal future. Here are some exercises purpose researchers recommend for finding your purpose in life:
- The Magic Wand: Think about the world around you—your home, community, the world at large—and visualize what you would change if you had a magic wand and could change anything. Then ask yourself why you chose what you did and consider concrete steps you might take to move the world a little closer to that ideal. This exercise may be a good fit for youth and young adults, in particular.
- Best Possible Self: Imagine yourself at some future age—like 10 or 20 years down the road—and think about what your life would be like if everything went as well as possible. Then ask yourself these questions about your future self: What are you doing? What is important to you? What do you really care about, and why? Focusing on an ideal self can increase your optimism for the future, which researchers believe is tied to purpose.
- Clarify your values: If it’s hard to figure out what matters most to you, reflecting on your values can help. Three values surveys—the Valued Living Questionnaire, the Portrait Values Questionnaire, and the Personal Values Questionnaire—ask you to rank the importance of different values, something that can help you get clearer about your purpose.
- Recognize your strengths: To get a handle on your particular skills, try the VIA Character Strengths Survey to see what it reveals about you. Or you can contact people who know you—teachers, friends, family, colleagues, and mentors—and ask them what you’re good at, what you seem to like to do, and how you might make your mark on the world. Sometimes an outsider’s opinion can help clarify your personal strengths and help you figure out how best to apply them.
- Volunteer: Finding purpose is aided by having a broad set of meaningful experiences that can point you in the right direction. Volunteering expands your experience, while also improving your well-being and helping the world. Not only that, volunteering puts you in touch with people who have similar values, who may inspire you or suggest other opportunities for making a difference that you hadn’t thought of before.
- Cultivate positive emotions: Positive emotions help us to broaden our outlook on the world and feel energized to take action for the greater good; so they can be useful for finding purpose. Gratitude and awe, in particular, help us care about others, build relationships, and feel connected to something greater than ourselves, which is why they’re tied to fostering purpose. You can visit our website, Greater Good in Action, to find exercises that will help bolster your sense of purpose—and make you happier, too.
