درسنامه اصلی

##San Francisco Weather – Coaching Lesson

Hi, this is AJ and welcome to this month’s coaching lesson. Now this month the topic of the conversation is San Francisco weather, and honestly I could not think of a coaching topic about the weather. So I’m going to talk about something completely different. In fact, I’m going to talk about one of the most common questions I get.

So people, Effortless English members and Learn Real English members, they connect with me on Twitter usually, and I get a lot of questions but this is one of the main ones, one of the main, big life questions I get. And here’s the question. The question is this: AJ, how do I find my purpose, my purpose in life?

Right, so I think most of us know that there is a big benefit to having a feeling of purpose in your life, a feeling of meaning, something bigger than just you, just yourself. Right? We can live only selfishly if we want to, of course, we have that choice. So we can just party and have fun. Lots of young people do that or try that.

But eventually it becomes empty, right? People who live that way, they don’t usually have happy lives.

Their lives usually, as they get older, don’t go very well. We see this with celebrities all the time, right?

They’ve got tons of money. They’re super famous. They’re partying all the time. They got the beautiful men or beautiful women, whatever.

They have everything but they’re only focused on themselves. They have no bigger purpose, no deeper meaning. And what? They become drug addicts. They become alcoholics. They get in all kinds of trouble with police. They just become miserable. So having a deeper purpose, deeper meaning in your life, very, very important. But how do you find that if you don’t have that already?

Especially a lot of young people ask me this question, younger people. But not always, I mean sometimes people ask me, they’re 30, they’re 40, they still don’t have any feeling of purpose or meaning in their life. Or maybe you’re a parent or a grandparent even, and you have children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews, and they lack purpose and you want to help them find some purpose in their life, so they have a connection to something bigger and deeper and more meaningful.

How do you do it? How do we find this? It’s easy, right? There are all these books about find your purpose, but how do you do it? Where do you look, y’know? That word find, find your purpose is the idea that your purpose, your meaning for your life is out there somewhere. Where do you look? And why do so many people now, it seems, have trouble with this question? Why do so many people lack purpose?

Now I believe it is because of our modern age. We are living in the information age, that’s what all the newspapers and television tell us, right? This is the information age, the age of information, and I believe that’s true. We are drowning in information. We have information, more information than ever before in history. We have information but we do not have wisdom. We lack wisdom.

This is an age of information. It is an age without wisdom. This is the problem of the modern world. This is why so many people feel lost, without a purpose, without meaning in their lives. What are the differences, right? What’s the difference between these two words, information and wisdom?

Well, information is kind of like raw opinions, statistics, events, measurements, observations, right? It’s just things that happen. So newspapers, television, all our media, the internet, filled and filled and filled with information, more information than we can handle. So what is wisdom then? What’s the difference?

Wisdom means judgment, deep understanding, values, what’s more important, what’s less important, meaning and, at the deepest level, wisdom gives us how and why to live, how and why, not just information but how to live and why to live a certain way. That’s wisdom and that’s what we lack, right?

That’s when people say, “What’s my purpose? I have no meaning,” and all this stuff that we have in the modern world. It’s because people, they don’t know how to live or why to live a certain way. They lack wisdom. We, as a general global culture have lost our connection to wisdom because we’re drowning in all this information and technology.

So where to look? Well, the good news is there was a time when things were very different, in fact, quite the opposite of what we have now. Where human societies around the world were exactly the opposite, where they focused mostly on wisdom and not so much on information, and that is the ancient world, the ancient world. Ancient means very, very old. S when I say the ancient world, what am I talking about specifically?

Specifically, in this lesson I’m talking about the cultures and societies that are over 2000 years old, so go back at least 2000 years and beyond and even farther back, right? The ancient cultures of humanity.

And those ancient cultures around the world, so we’re talking about ancient Egypt, ancient Greece, Persia, India and China, these are the big, the very large ancient cultures that had massive influence throughout the world and that left behind an incredible culture and incredible wisdom.

So I believe that the balance to our modern age of information, what we need, because we’re unbalanced now. We have too much information. We have no wisdom. To balance that out, I think we need to go back, back, back, back, back to the far past to these ancient cultures and that is where you look to find wisdom. That is where you look to find purpose and meaning for your life.

See in the ancient world, they were absolutely focused on this pursuit of wisdom, not information, wisdom.

In the ancient world, the most important areas of life and of human study were meditation, philosophy and religion. Meditation, philosophy, religion, in other words, practices of wisdom, investigation of wisdom.

How to live. Why to live a certain way. The deep understanding of life. This is what they thought about and meditated on and wrote about and based their whole societies on.

And these cultures and societies left us a heritage. A heritage is like something that…a gift from the past, right? A gift from the past, these great cultures left us gifts from the past. See, we tend to think of ourselves, especially again in the media, like we’re the best. This is the best that humanity ever was, right now.

Look at this, we’ve got rockets and ships and television and the internet. Aren’t we so great? We’re so much better than those people from the past, those poor people from the past that didn’t have phones and internet and cars. But I don’t think that’s true at all. I think it’s true somewhat. Certainly, we have a lot of great things. We’re far more comfortable and our technology is far superior, of course.

But I think they had things also that were superior to us, that we have lost some fantastic great things, especially these: philosophy, meditation, wisdom. And that’s what they have to offer us and we need that to balance ourselves out as a culture, as a society, and individually, as people, individuals. So if you’re looking for purpose, you’re looking for more meaning in your life? You don’t need to read modern books.

You don’t need to look on the internet.

I recommend you go back, back, back to these ancient cultures. The ancient cultures of ancient Egypt, Greece, Persia, India and China, especially, those are the big five in my mind. There are others as well, but those are the big five in my mind. Especially because those five left behind books. They left behind books of wisdom and this is why we know them so well. They’re a counterbalance to our information age.

So this month, you action, what I would like you to do is to push aside, put aside the noise, all this noise of the information age, all the constant media, looking at our screens on our phones all the time. And constantly reading and watching videos and listening to audios and podcasts and reading modern books and newspapers and magazines…aaarrrrggghhh, all this information.

Put it aside, turn it off and just go and read some ancient books. You can do this for a couple months.

You can really do this for years, honestly. But at least this month do it. I’ll give you a few suggestions of books, there are many others from these cultures, but ancient Egypt, there’s the Egyptian Book of the Dead. The Egyptian Book of the Dead, which I’m planning, I haven’t even read it yet, I just got it, just bought it. I’m planning to read it. But it’s one of the oldest books ever. One of the oldest books of human history that still exists now, Egyptian Book of the Dead.

From Greece, we have the writings and teachings of Plato and Aristotle and, of course, the poetry of Homer. You can get translations of all these books in different languages. From India: the Bhagavad Ghita, the Upanishads, the Buddhist Sutras. From China: the Tao Te Ching, the Chong Zou, which I can’t pronounce but also Taoist, and Confucius, and also Buddhist teachings and the Three Kingdoms.

So many out there. Just get some of these because they did, the ancient cultures had a deeper wisdom, a deeper understanding of human nature and the nature of life and existence. Much more so than we do now. You don’t have to make any decisions. Just start reading these books, thinking about the ideas in these books. These books will guide you towards a deeper purpose and a deeper meaning.

So good luck to you. Enjoy the wisdom of the ancient world and I hope you can find even more clarity, be more clear about your own personal purpose and meaning. See you next time. Bye for now.