With The Path to Purpose, Parent’s Choice Award winner William Damon lays out why having purpose is so vital to the growth of our young people. Drawing heavily on the results of a groundbreaking study into the subject, Damon breaks down the issues that today’s youth struggle with the most. Many of today’s youth lack motivation and forward momentum. Even many of those who appear to be succeeding don’t really understand where they are heading. Direction is nothing without purpose but today’s youth are struggling to understand why they should succeed past the most superficial of reasons. Damon brilliantly and engagingly breaks down what these issues mean to today’s young people and how we might go about remedying them. With evident care for young people and their futures, Damon’s The Path to Purpose is an essential roadmap to guiding the young people in your life to a more fulfilling future.
LESSONS ON PURPOSE
One of the biggest things missing in young people’s lives is a sense of purpose. The resources on this page have been created to help teachers, mentors, parents and teens to understand the importance of purpose and the role it plays in laying the foundation for an amazing life.
“Your purpose becomes your inner motivator, turning on the ignition switch in your brain to transcend the noise in your life and focus on what matters most.”
Victor Strecher
The Path to Purpose
By: William Damon
“Sooner or later something seems to call us onto a particular path. You may remember this “something” as a signal calling in childhood when an urge out of nowhere, a fascination, a peculiar turn of events struck like an annunciation: This is what I must do, this is what I’ve got to have. This is who I am … If not this vivid and sure, the call may have been more like gentle pushings in the stream in which you drifted unknowingly to a particular spot on the bank. Looking back, you sense that fate had a hand in it…. A calling may be postponed, avoided, intermittently missed. It may also possess you completely. Whatever; eventually it will out. It makes its claim…. Extraordinary people display calling most evidently. Perhaps that’s why they fascinate. Perhaps, too, they are extraordinary because their calling comes through so clearly and they are so loyal to it…. Extraordinary people bear the better witness because they show what ordinary mortals simply can’t. We seem to have less motivation and more distraction. Yet our destiny is driven by the same universal engine. Extraordinary people are not a different category; the workings of this engine in them are simply more transparent….” —JAMES HILLMAN
