Dear Ava,

In the weeks preceding your eighteenth birthday I considered writing you a letter, a note in which I might dispense some fatherly advice that might guide you in the coming years. I had done as much for Ari about the time she turned 18 and moved out, and I was inclined to do the same for you.

But as I reflected on what useful thing I could say, nothing came to me that I hadn’t already said. “Follow your curiosities,” “be true to yourself,” “find the others,” and other platitudes I’ve harped on were the only forthcoming ideas. And because I believe a letter should above all be grounded in something to say, I set my pen aside. I didn’t have anything new or meaningful to say. Not immediately, anyway.

That changed when an idea occurred to me one day while backpacking in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. The idea I received was for me, meaning that I think it applies to my life, and I think the idea came to me as a result of pondering the course and direction of my life. But the more I reflected on it, the more I thought it might also pertain to your life.

It was a day much like those you’ve been enjoying in Logan lately—a sunny, September, mountain day, marked by a deep blue sky, cumulous clouds as thick and white as whipped cream, and the combination of a cool breeze and the particularly golden and warm sunshine that prevails in the autumn months of the Mountain West. I paused and sat on a rock to record the idea in my journal.

Replace ambition with purpose. Ambition’s aim is vain, its catalyst anxiety. Purpose’s aim is right, and its catalyst contentment. Ambition asks, ‘What can I gain from the world?’ Purpose asks, ‘How can I glorify God?’ Ambition’s prize is the world’s trinkets and attention from chumps, both of which are empty. Purpose’s prize is integrity and the blessings of Nature. Ambition is hurried, purpose is patient.

That’s the whole of my journal entry, and now I’d like to clarify and expound on it. Not to preach at you, but to invite you into my experience of receiving an insight that I hope you’ll find worthy of contemplation. Because you are young and talented, you will find yourself wrestling with questions of ambition and purpose over the next few years, and perhaps the next few decades.

~~~

If you look in Merriam-Webster’s dictionary, you’ll see that ambition and purpose are synonyms. But, in the words of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, “Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.”

I’m not trying to define ambition and purpose, but to use the words to represent two different phenomena in the world. Both appear to be a kind of striving, yes, and yet it seems to me they are separate psychological phenomena, grounded in different motives and producing different effects in our lives. Though they both are human propellants, they can propel a person in drastically different directions.

The source of ambition, as far as I can tell, is an inner sense of lack. Combined with this inner feeling of lack is the belief that it can be filled by acquiring and achieving, by having and doing more.

The source of purpose, on the other hand, is an inner sense of completeness or wholeness. Combined with this inner feeling of being complete is the belief that nothing external to me can remedy problems internal.

Ambition is grounded in what others think is important in life; purpose is grounded in what I think is important. Ambition looks to outside sources for direction, through the lens of the world. Purpose looks to self and through the lens of Nature, considering natural endowments and how to develop them for good and use them to do good or make something good.

Whatever can be gained from the world cannot make up for whatever is missing in my soul, thus the aim of ambition is futile. The aim of purpose is to express in the world and give to the world who and what I am. Because doing this depends on nothing external to me, as I already have within me what is required, the aim of purpose is worthwhile.

Ambition is concerned with outcomes, while purpose is concerned with genesis. Ambition asks, “How can I exploit myself, others, and the world around me to enrich my life and increase my net worth, and demonstrate to others my might, thus glorifying myself?” Purpose asks, “How can I put my talents to good use, to enrich the lives of others, increase my sense of self-worth, and demonstrate the human virtue of living rightly, thus glorifying existence?”

The fruits of ambition are envied by others, while the fruits of purpose are respected by others. Ambition is unaware; purpose is aware. The prize of ambition is status; the prize of purpose is character. Ambition is greedy; purpose is generous.

Ambition is more likely to compromise one’s integrity, while purpose will contribute to its development. For the ambitious, other people become pawns in the effort. For the purposeful, other people become partners in the effort.

Ambition is hasty and impatient; purpose is patient and deliberate. Ambition wastes energy and resources; purpose conserves energy and resources. Anxiety follows the ambitious; peace follows the purposeful.

~~~

Now, I’ve painted quite a dichotomy, suggesting that ambition is ugly and immoral, and purpose is beautiful and moral, and I’m not sure that’s accurate. There may be virtues to ambition I’m not admitting.

It could be that ambition is a product of youth, while purpose is a product of adulthood. In other words, the two appear in our lives as part of a psychological process, not a personal choice. Ambition may even be the gateway to purpose, uncovering the way.

For example, there are some who acquire, conquer, and achieve all that their ambition sets them to in youth, and then find their lives lacking purpose later. This is not necessarily a bad thing, for now facing their life with a new awareness, they have the material resources to begin again, considering how they might lead a life that is inwardly rich rather than merely outwardly rich. And while it’s true some may regret having exchanged so many years for material stuff, and others may attempt to use their wealth to assuage such regret, some go on to use wealth acquired by ambition to live and give purposefully.

So, I don’t mean to disparage ambition, to suggest you should rid yourself of it or feel ashamed for possessing it, for I suppose it’s a necessary drive at times, and a useful one too. YouTuber and filmmaker Van Neistat says you should do everything in your power to make money from your passion up until the age of 25, at which point, if you haven’t figured out how to do so, you should seek the highest paying job you can find, and then hunker down for the next several years, after which you should pursue your passion again, and again, and die trying, if necessary.

If I’m being fair, I suspect ambition and purpose serve each other, though they are perpetually at odds. This is a paradox. Yet it seems to me that attunement to such psychological struggles and paradoxes is the bedrock of a life that is both personally interesting and rich—to you—and decent and good to others, sympathetic to their struggles.

For myself, though the two have overlapped, it seems that ambition has largely interrupted or derailed my purposes. For example, I began writing seriously in 2012 in response to what felt like an inner calling. But as I worked on my craft and studied how-to guides and the writing of others, I became less focused on writing itself and more focused on getting published, for much of what I read emphasized “gaining a following,” “building your tribe,” and “launching a bestseller,” which are not the same as writing. Slowly but surely, just as an addiction develops, ambition replaced purpose, and a preoccupation with outcomes replaced a commitment to the process, without me even knowing it till months or years later.

In hindsight, I probably should’ve known. The signs of ambition are anxiety, stress, depression, envy, resentment, exhaustion, greed and consumption. The signs of living with purpose, conversely, are contentment, peace, gratitude, focus, integrity, strength, and respect.

When we find ourselves offtrack, we can either change perspective or change course, both of which can be incredibly difficult to do. Usually these changes are incremental, though you may find yourself doing a 180-degree shift once or twice in life—there simply isn’t time to reinvent yourself more times than that. So, we pick a course without knowing where it will lead, for better or worse, and our options for picking a new course continually decrease as time ticks on. More reason to choose based on what’s internal to us, what is closest to our awareness, rather than what others suggest. Better to take aim ourselves and miss than to let others take aim on our behalf and hit.

I have also discovered through my commitment to craft that the process is better than the outcome. I discovered this when I was given a gallery for my photography, when newspapers and journals published my writing, when I was invited to speak on campus, and so on. I always walked away from recognition and reward unfulfilled. It’s not that I sought fulfillment in those events, but that I had been taught to believe that that is where fulfillment is—in the outcome. And it isn’t. I always received gratification from the work alone, and still do, even if navigating the twofold terrain remains for me a clumsy dance, a stumbling traverse.

I suspect that few people live in one domain entirely and not the other. Any talented person with goals will probably walk much of their life with one foot in each psychological state or oscillate between the two. And any book or person that suggests you can quickly and clearly identify your purpose and then live it fully (and there are many) is probably shortsighted at best and full of shit at worst, unless it's a book that contains the words of Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, Confucius, Lao Tzu, the ancient Greeks, the Stoics, the Existentialists, or Carl Jung. Only poets and philosophers, storytellers and sages, write from a sense of purpose and unveil ideas that feed the soul.

Businessmen and businesswomen, on the other hand, seem to write from a sense of ambition and reinforce the ideas that feed it, getting rich off their glamorous guides that promise to help you achieve, acquire, and conquer more, even if by pursuing less. How many now refer to themselves as “minimalists” because they intuit that doing so will maximize their status? Meet the American Dream, and the so-called “science” of how to live it.

You have already seen that others expect you to know. Your teachers, peers, and academic advisors may assume you know what you’d like to study because they also assume you know what outcomes you want. See where this is going? In their world—and in the world generally—the object pursued defines the man or woman, not the other way around.

But how can you know what interests you’d like to explore and what talents and proclivities you’d like to develop until you know yourself? And how you can know yourself without first feeling and fooling around in the darkness of Being. The poet David Whyte wrote, “If we can see the path laid out before us, there is a good chance it is not our path; it is probably someone else’s we have substituted for our own. Our own path must be deciphered every step of the way.”

“Know thyself” is perhaps the oldest of philosophical maxims, and it is to this domain that questions of purpose point us. It was inscribed in the Temple of Apollo in ancient Greece, and philosophers from Socrates to Michael Sandel have had something to say about it.

Just as ambition and purpose are open to interpretation, so is “know thyself.” Some believe it is a mandate to scour the depths of your psyche, reiterating that most famous of lines from Socrates: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Others suggest it has little to do with plumbing the depths of your person and more to do with looking around you. That is, to accept your lot in life. Play your part. Own your fate. Live your life, the one you find yourself in rather than the one you wish you’d found yourself in, which is what the Stoics advocated.

It's only natural that the most famous of philosophical dictums should reflect what we inevitably discover about life if we look closely: it’s ambiguous. Funny how a two-word sentence is subject to at least two interpretations. And in case you find the meaning all too clear, consider Nietzsche’s notorious double entendre, which echoes the Delphic inscription: “Become who you are!”

You’re probably wondering, like I continue to wonder, but how?

When a friend asked journalist Hunter Thompson for advice on how to find his purpose, Thompson told him, among other things, “Beware of looking for goals: look for a way of life. Decide how you want to live and then see what you can do to make a living WITHIN that way of life.”

That seems like sound advice, advice I wish I would’ve encountered and understood 25 years ago. Who knows, maybe I did, or thought I did, and I merely have forgotten the ways in which my perspective has meandered and morphed. Whatever the case may be, it requires looking. “Beware of looking for goals: look for a way of life.”

Where? Or how? For my own life, I have repeatedly come back to what I might call the Four Rs.

Read. You can’t have had a serious look until you can say you’ve made an honest effort to read broadly and deeply. Given what you’ve read, and the ideas and perspectives you’ve already been exposed to in your reading, you know the value of this.

Retreat. You must escape the din of society and the company of others, even if only occasionally, so that you can listen. Find someplace. For me, that place is wilderness. It was while camped on the banks of the Price River down some forgotten dirt road outside of Woodside, Utah, which is itself nothing more than a roadside buffalo jerky stand, that I received the ideas I shared with Ari when she moved out. And it wasn’t until I was alone in the mountains 13,000 feet above sea level that I received the ideas I now share with you. Would they have come had I not found solitude? Maybe, but I’m not willing to risk it.

Reflect. Think about your thoughts. Dissect your beliefs. Question your motives. Hold your insights up to the light. What is insight? An idea that arrives with weight. Sometimes that weight is heavy, sometimes light as a feather, but the point is you will feel the weight of it. Not all thoughts arrive with weight. Most flow through our minds in a kind of vacuum. It is the weightier ideas—the insights—that we must pay attention to.

Write. Artists, painters, prophets, scientists and psychotherapists all have spoken of the psychological value of journaling. Remember that essay by Paul Graham? “No one who hasn't written about a topic has fully formed ideas about it. And someone who never writes has no fully formed ideas about anything nontrivial.” When you journal, the topic you write about is yourself—your experiences and perspectives. It’s a way to help you develop self-awareness.

Of course, whatever talents you cultivate and whatever work you end up doing will not be your “purpose” per se, as if it were decreed by God or the Universe. At least, there’s no way to know whether that’s the case. And even if you believed your chosen vocation was written in the stars or encoded in your genes, it may not remain your highest priority. Children, should you choose to have any, will impact your perspectives on purpose, as will friendship, love, and family, should you be so fortunate. But given the culture in which we swim, you will probably always bear some sense that you must identify your talents and find a way to employ some of them.

Whatever you determine your purpose to be, it will bring you face to face with yourself. Whether we go deep into writing or painting or teaching or healing or building or leading or planting and growing and raising children, we find there in the depths our own psyche staring back at us, our own inadequacies, our hopes and fears, all the promise and lack thereof we originally brought to the canvas. In the end, it appears the project remains self-knowledge. “Know thyself.” Perhaps that’s why we feel called in the first place. It’s as though life is determined to put us under the microscope and behind it at the same time, and it beckons us with the prospect of meaning.

A few times I have had the strange misfortune of discovering that others see me as one of purpose—odd, abrasive, obscure me. Perhaps a young man, like a friend or yours or your sisters, or a quiet coworker or an observant neighbor will, in a random but intimate exchange, reveal as much. “You seem to live with purpose,” they say in effect, eyeing me as though I were a strange bird or a sketchy rogue. “How can this be,” I wonder, gobsmacked, “when I feel so offtrack, so short on time, so derailed by everyday responsibilities, so distracted by diversions?”

I think it’s because, despite all my shortcomings and setbacks, we can sense when another is inwardly oriented, set on navigating life with his or her own compass and map. It may depend on being similarly directed ourselves, but we notice the others. Not all of them, of course, but some. I am drawn to them and hope to learn from them. It’s the orientation, not the outcome, that speaks to our hearts.

Of course, you can’t separate the man from his thoughts. I notice only those who make it through my filters, and I see the world how I do because of how I am. You may see it differently, and that would be an indication of how you are. Something worth exploring.

What I have shared is a philosophy, and it’s my philosophy, developed in part from thoughts I’ve thought, but mostly from books I’ve read. It says that authenticity is the highest good, which depends on self-awareness and integrity, which entail an endless walk down an unknown path. Not the authenticity that claims to know, like you see on t-shirts and billboards and Instragram handles, rather the authenticity that doesn’t know, that’s ever searching itself for self-delusions. But there are other philosophies, and some say that Pleasure is the highest good. Others say that Duty is. Some say Equality, and others say Power. Indeed, the American Way is a philosophy. It will be up to you to determine what your philosophy for living will be.

I want to say I’m proud of you, but that wouldn’t be accurate, for pride connotes possession, and I can’t take credit for who you are. That’s not how I see the parent-child relationship. I feel gratitude, as though I’ve been allowed to witness your growth and development. I feel respect, and I’m interested to see how your life unfolds, whatever course you may take, and wherever that course may take you.

I hope it’s clear I have written this letter not to get you to do anything, but to put forth a small piece of me, to bring to bear some of what I consider to be one of my talents, to give to you, however small and inconsequential it might be, a gift. This has been my purpose. May it aid you as you explore yours.

Love,
Dad

PS. It wasn’t until after writing the bulk of this letter that I decided to look up ambition and purpose in the Online Etymology Dictionary. As you may already know, etymology is the study of the origins of words and the history of usage.

According to OED, in the 13th century ambition originally meant “eager desire for honor or preferment,” “a going around” and around, especially to solicit votes, as well as “a striving for favor, courting, flattery; a desire for honor, thirst for popularity.” It also held a negative connotation, being seen as a moral flaw. It’s only in modern usage that it has taken on neutral and even positive meaning.

The earliest uses of purpose, going back to the same period, suggest “intention, aim, goal; object to be kept in view; proper function for which something exists.” As well as “to put forth,” and “to put [something in its proper] place.”