8 Clues to Your Purpose

Soul Gum

by Victoria Hutchins

Philosophy, Society & Culture

4.9 • 560 Ratings

🗓️ 5 January 2025

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Feel like you’re meant for something more but can’t put your finger on what that “more” is? This episode is here to help. The bad news is: finding your purpose in a world full of distractions and expectations is hard. Like, super hard. The good news is: we’ve been struggling with this since the dawn of humanity, so lots of extremely smart people have piped up about it.

Clues to your purpose are hiding in unexpected places. Today, we’ll explore 8 of those clues, as proposed by some of humanity’s greatest minds. Consider this episode a field guide out of your existential crisis. Brought to you by me: your friendly neighborhood lawyer-turned-creative, fresh out of the trenches of living someone else’s life.

SHOW OUTLINE:

00:00 Intro

03:14 If you're looking for your purpose, look for...

03:42 1. What you loved as a kid (Nietzsche)

06:31 2. What makes you jealous (Nietzsche)

10:15 3. What puts you into flow state (Csikszentmihalyi)

13:00 Break

15:56 4. What you see everywhere

16:32 The Invisible Gorilla Experiment

17:30 The Cocktail Party Effect

18:34 Attention as Devotion (Mary Oliver and Simone Weil)

19:00 5. What makes you uncomfortable (Carl Jung)

20:56 6. What connects you to the world (Bhagavad Gita)

23:30 7. What you want your purpose to be (Albert Camus)

26:36 8. Here and now (Alan Watts)

30:07 Lightning Round Summary

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Finding our purpose is what we're here to do, but how do we do it? Let's talk about it.
0:09.6	Welcome back to Soulgum, the self-development podcast with philosophical, psychological,
0:15.7	and literary flair. I'm your host, Victoria Hutchins, and today we are talking about how to find your purpose.
0:24.8	No matter whether you click this episode because you have utterly no idea what you're meant to do with
0:30.4	your life, or you clicked it because you have a lingering feeling that you're not on the right
0:36.6	path, but you don't know where to find the right
0:40.1	path, or you clicked it because you do have a sense of what you were meant to do and you're
0:47.1	hoping to find reassurance. You're in the right place. If you're new here, hi, it's so nice to meet you. My name is Victoria. I am an attorney turned
0:58.0	poet, content creator, yoga teacher. I am so happy you're here. If you are someone who spends a lot of
1:05.4	time thinking about purpose and why you're here and what the meaning of it all is, you're going to
1:10.7	fit right in here.
1:12.8	I am so excited for this episode and I think it's going to spill out of me because I am talking
1:20.3	to you from Bali. I just got here today. I am here to do a yoga teacher training with Peaceful Warriors, a company that I did
1:30.6	my first yoga teacher training with in 2018. And it is so surreal to be back. When I first
1:40.2	arrived in Bali in 2018 for my first yoga teacher training, I was at Rock Bottom. I had just
1:49.4	finished law school and taken the bar exam and I was waiting to find out if I passed. And I was in the
1:56.1	middle of the darkest depression I've ever experienced. If you follow me on social media, you know I write
2:02.9	a lot about mental health and finding hope again after a hopeless chapter. That is a lot of what
2:09.5	my poetry book Make Believe is about. This was that hopeless chapter. So it's so surreal to be back in this place. Do you know the quote,
2:20.1	go laugh in the places you've cried? I think that's what the next month of my life is about to be.
2:25.2	I think that 2018 me is the first past version of me that I could tell what my life looks like today
2:32.5	and she might believe it. Because even though in 2018,
	...

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