The Happiness of Pursuit: Find the Quest that will Bring Purpose to Your Life

Dissatisfaction + Big Idea + Willingness to Take Action = New Adventure

Why should you consider a quest? Because your life is good, but you don’t feel completely fulfilled. You long for a challenge that requires you to develop new muscles and acquire new skills, and if you’re willing to work for it, you can find it . . . or perhaps even better, you can create it for yourself.

Instead, Elise uses the secret that allows “makers” like her to thrive: She clearly defines her projects, and she breaks them down into multiple parts. When she has success with one project, she applies the same format to others. The medium doesn’t need to be the same, she told me, but the process for working on them can still be.

A quest requires a series of small steps and incremental progress toward the goal.

ultimately assessments of a quest’s worthiness depend on the result. Sometimes life itself is risky. There are few goals worth pursuing that are totally risk free.

They didn’t wait until death was around the corner to reflect on what matters. Instead, they chose to take life by the reins as soon as they could. As much as it sounds trite to “live like you’re dying” or “live every day as if it were your last,” that’s exactly what many people obsessed with a quest do. This shift from an intellectual awareness th

Part of it is the process of getting older, and part of it comes from the experience itself. In my case I realized that much of travel was about being open to different ways of life and changes outside my control. When I found myself getting frustrated, more often than not the problem was my own expectations.

I’d like to repeat the advice that I gave you before, in that I think you really should make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to boldly do things which you may previously never have thought of doing, or been too hesitant to attempt. So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their sit

You can apply the same “time and money” principle to many quests and projects. What will it take? What is required? The more specific you can be in your planning, even if you’re making rough estimates, the easier it will be to get your head around the goal. What is the goal, really? What does success look like?