What is the purpose of life?
That is the existential question that philosophers, academics, and average individuals like me have asked themselves for millennia. In my experience, a lot of people, including my previous self, have answered this question by referring to specific personal or material objectives. But why?
While I have always pursued goals for my own satisfaction rather than external competition, in the past I regularly experienced performance anxiety because I lacked perspective. Instead of a well-rounded sense of meaning, I often based my purpose solely off how well I accomplished various individual goals.
However, challenging myself inside and outside of the classroom over the past few months has transformed my perspective on life’s purpose. Specifically, staring my personal mistakes in the eye despite all my best efforts has made me see something beyond myself and discover a new sense of meaning.
At some point or another, all of us will inevitably experience moments of undeniable humility that remind us of our own weaknesses. It can be tempting to view these weaknesses as a reduction of individual value. However, these moments should instead be taken as opportunities to improve personal morality and perspective.
In reality, whatever you plan to do in the future, you will not succeed all the time if you are truly challenging yourself. Don’t continue living in a fabricated reality dependent on your personal ego, which will only lead to harmful arrogance and a false sense of superiority while holding you back. In fact, according to research, 47% of people in a 1,000-subject survey say that they would perform better at work if they were not afraid of failing.
Many of the moments when people feel the lowest lead to future moments when they rise the highest. Michael Jordan, one of the greatest basketball players of all time, was cut from his high school team. Beethoven was told he was not smart enough to be a composer, Abraham Lincoln went bankrupt before becoming president, and J.K. Rowling lived on welfare while producing “Harry Potter.” These people should remind us that challenges and setbacks are never the end, but the best way to access the best version of ourselves.
On the other hand, there are many people who have talents, but they use them to destroy the world rather than make it better. On the extreme end, there is Vladimir Putin, who the Harvard Kennedy School describes as a chess grandmaster on the geopolitical landscape. Instead of using his intellectual talents for good, Putin instigated a war in Ukraine that has resulted in nearly two million troop casualties over the last four years.
Extreme cases like Vladimir Putin and other less extreme cases should be a reminder that individual worth should not be tied to what we can do. Instead, our value is connected to how we use our abilities and talents to impact the world.
This shows the importance of students embracing challenges. While setbacks can cause insecurities in the present moment, our abilities and attitudes can grow in these moments to increase our capacity for positive change.
People often fail to overcome challenges because of individual doubt and uncertainty rather than their abilities. By allowing ourselves to face external challenges, we can identify the truth that the greatest difficulty to overcome is our own minds.
Each opinion represented in The Panther Press is the view and voice of the writer. Opinions, as the selection and curation of content by the editors, do not represent the views of the entire Panther Press staff, the adviser, the school, or the administration.
