Welcome back to the Wisdom Workshop with me, Sean Waters. This week, the second edition Galaxy Gems, with (1) some prose-polished mustard seeds on “purpose,” (2) an invitation to cultivate energy via spirituality, and (3) an invitation to reflect on work-life coherence. Like rehearsing a familiar setlist, this email is less about sharing new information, and more about polishing up what we already know.
Gems on Purpose
He who has a 'why' for which to live can bear with almost any 'how'.
— Frederich Nietzsche
cf. Perplexity.ai on comparing fingerprint types to the varieties of human flourishing.
Pleasure becomes secondary when your life is filled with purpose.
— Carlos Del Valle
The real journey of discovery consists not in going to new places, but in having new eyes.
— Marcel Proust
Do you have any favorite ideas, quotes or resources on “Purpose”?
Cultivating a Spiritual Purpose as a Source of Energy
The private voice, the voice that no one hears, is the master storyteller. That’s the seat of power in an athlete’s life.
- Jim Loehr
For high-performance psychologist Jim Loehr, energy cultivation beats time-management every time. Four sources of energy are:
[ 1 ] Movement
[ 2 ] Rest
[ 3 ] Nutrition
[ 4 ] Spirituality
For Loehr, spirituality is anything that transcends the self. A love of making cheesecake, properly polished, could be a spiritual activity. Having a more-than-self purpose can energize all of our behavior.
✍️ Right on, Write on
Which of these four sources of energy could you cultivate further?
Movement? Rest? Nutrition? Spirituality?
What does your spirituality look like?
Where, and how are you oriented to something bigger than yourself?
Calibrating Work-Life Coherence
This one comes from Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, Stanford Design Professors who found their calling in student advising.
A purposeful life, Burnett and Evans argue, is one not of work-life balance, but work-life coherence.
Here’s one set of questions to help polish the coherence between our Workview and our Lifeview.
✍️ Workview Questions:
A good Workview “is your definition of what good work deserves to be.”
Why work?
What’s work for?
What does work mean?
How does work relate to others, to society?
What defines good work?
What does money have to do with it?
What do exsperience, growth, and fulfillment have to do with it?
✍️ Lifeview Questions
no biggie:
Why are we here?
What is the meaning or purpose of life?
What is the relationship between the individual and others?
Where do family, country, and the rest of the world fit in?
What is good, and what is evil?
Is there a higher power, God, or something transcendent *or immanent?
What is the role of joy, sorrow, justice, love, peace, and strife in life?
Put your Workview and Lifeview together, and you get
True-North Coherence
Where does your workview resonate with your lifeview?
Can you approach your life, or your work differently for greater coherence?
Two other powerful frames for coherence behind the paywall.
👋 April 2025
🎵 Friday and Saturday April 18th and 19th, Fort Collins, CO: get your tickets to FoCoMX 2025! I perform Friday night, the 18th, with a full band 5:30 - 6:15 pm at the Colorado Room. 🎉 New music coming May 9 on Spotify / Apple.
🧿 Good Friday April 18th, 2pm-3:15pm MST: Online Contemplative Community hosted by Ruth Kaur, Bhante Chandananda, and me. We’ll contemplate the inter-faith wisdom of love as expressed in the Beatitudes. Register for the Zoom link.
Thank you for being here and now, until next time,
Sean Waters
Founder and Lead Learner
wisdomworkshop.io
Schedule a call with me:
TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and Clubhouse
Thinking of joining our Summer 2025 Sessions? Let us know here. Starts June 25.
⛰️ For Further Reading and Listening
David Brooks has written two great books about what matters in life.
The Road To Character explores the path towards practicing “eulogy virtues” instead of “resume virtues.” For Brooks (and Aristotle), we should focus on becoming the best version of ourselves, not on landing a higher paying job.
The Second Mountain explores what people seek after they’ve achieved everything they’ve learned to want. Plenty of people get fame and success only to realize that their real journey — what Brooks terms “the second mountain” — is just beginning.
We might as well start climbing that second mountain now.
for Subscribers: Write to Polish Purpose
(Week 2 Invitations from the Wisdom Workshop in Writing a Good Life)
✍️ If you want to write with us at a distance, here’s second week’s writing invitations on Purpose. Thanks for your support. The world needs you, as you are, in your own words.
👋 Greetings wisdom-gatherer!
Below, you’ll find a variety of invitations to write, to read and to listen.
Your life can’t be perfectly planned … and that’s a good thing. There are many designs for your life, all filled with hope for the kind of creative and unfolding reality that makes life worth living into. Your life is not a thing, it’s an experience, the fun comes from designing and enjoying the experience.
— Bill Burnett and Dave Evans
Below, polishing up our purpose with my favorite life design frameworks.
Listen to this episode with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Wisdom Workshop to listen to this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.
