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

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.

The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.

It’s not all about happiness, although happiness often results from doing something you love. Instead, it’s about challenge and fulfillment, finding the perfect combination of striving and achievement that comes from reaching a big goal.

The lesson, as he explains it: “If I fail more than you do, I win. Built into this notion is the ability to keep playing. If you get to keep playing, sooner or later you’re gonna make it succeed. The people who lose are the ones who don’t fail at all, or the ones who fail so big they don’t get to play again.”

The more you experience something outside of what you’ve known, the more open-minded you become . . . but this worldview can also be somewhat alienating, especially to people at home.

Embracing a calling is about being the best at something, or doing something that you feel no one else can do. Not necessarily in a competitive manner, where you have to beat someone else, but according to your own standard of what you know is true.

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.

A quest is often driven by a calling or sense of mission.

If you can’t wrap your head around going everywhere, or producing a symphony with hundreds of performers, or undertaking any of the other quests I’ve described so far, it’s important to remember that dreams tend to grow as you pursue them. As you gain confidence, “I can do this!” becomes “What else can I do?”