The Book that Helped Me Find Purpose in Life
By Jon Hersey
At seventeen, I was a well of fantasies with no bottom. I had no real purpose or direction. I thought about pursuing a career in music, about writing books, about dating girls. But where to put my time? My youthful confidence seemed to be evaporating under the pressure of picking one thing to devote my life to. There were things I thought I wanted, but how could I be sure? Worse, I thought it was wrong even to want these things—but I couldn’t help it.
By twenty three, I had a job at a Nashville recording studio, a beautiful wife, and a solid sense of self—and self-worth. I also had a different set of ideas, a different way of looking at the world and evaluating people, including myself. All that thanks to one book.
How I Found the Book That Changed My Life
At the ripe old age of fifteen, for the first time in my life, I began reading the Bible. Growing up, art had always been my bible: song lyrics, movie quotes, great fiction. But when I began to think more deeply about my purpose in life, I also sought deeper wisdom.
Some of my friends already seemed to have everything figured out. I often felt like I alone was wasting time, flailing about. I knew I was intelligent and could do pretty much anything I put my mind to. That was part of the problem, I thought—too many options.
The Bible provided direction, and it came with a built-in support community. The answer was simple: I should live to glorify God. This meant I could do anything, so long as it honored the guy in the sky.
For a spell, this was comforting. But then, I was back where I started, staring blankly at the question: What should I do? Whatever most glorified God, of course, whatever he put me on Earth to do. But how could I determine that?
Some things I enjoyed more than others—making music most of all. But the Bible did not appear to tell me to pursue my own enjoyment. Scripture, sermons, conversations with Christian friends—all pointed me toward serving others. “Let nothing be done through selfish ambition or conceit,” reads Philippians, “but in lowliness of mind let each esteem others better than himself.” Music is personally meaningful, I thought, but pursuing it would be putting myself before others. Of course, others like music, but no one was asking me for it—and it seemed a trifle considering how many people lack the necessities of life. Could I really believe that my God-given purpose was to scratch my own itch by pursuing a music career? But why couldn’t I muster the motivation to put other people’s interests before my own? Was I too self-centered? Why should finding purpose require setting aside my interests? I struggled with these questions for more than a year.
Lost as ever, I decided to consider other views on living a meaningful life. I bought a book on Buddhism. The eightfold path, however, did not point me toward finding purpose, but toward renouncing the quest altogether, giving up all earthly ambitions and preparing to be released from an endless cycle of rebirth. Thinking back to my heroes—Brett Favre, Sherlock Holmes, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Frodo Baggins, Wayne Gretzky—I couldn’t stomach that prescription. It seemed like raising the white flag before taking a single shot.
I was still flailing, and it was senior year. Time was running out. I thought, “whatever I do with my life, I’ll need a degree,” but, of course, I didn’t know what to study. I took some intro classes at a community college and looked for scholarships as I tried to figure it all out. Then wisdom seemingly dropped from the sky. The scholarship contest with the biggest prize required that I write an essay about a novel. So I picked up the book—and I couldn’t put it down.
The Page-Turning Thriller That Transformed My Thinking
He thought of a summer day when he was ten years old. That day, in a clearing of the woods, the one precious companion of his childhood told him what they would do when they grew up. The words were harsh and glowing, like the sunlight. He listened in admiration and in wonder. When he was asked what he would want to do, he answered at once, “Whatever is right,” and added, “You ought to do something great . . . I mean, the two of us together.” “What?” she asked. He said, “I don’t know. That’s what we ought to find out. Not just what you said. Not just business and earning a living. Things like winning battles, or saving people out of fires, or climbing mountains.” “What for?” she asked. He said, “The minister said last Sunday that we must always reach for the best within us. What do you suppose is the best within us?”
“I don’t know.”
“We’ll have to find out.” She did not answer; she was looking away, up the railroad track. Eddie Willers smiled. He had said, “Whatever is right,” twenty-two years ago. He had kept that statement unchallenged ever since; the other questions had faded in his mind; he had been too busy to ask them. But he still thought it self-evident that one had to do what was right.1
Within the first few pages of _ Atlas Shrugged _, my own questions, my own conflicts, were right there in front of me, wrapped up in an intriguing mystery. But they were cast in such clarity, integrated with such varied insights, that I felt as if an industrial drill were boring into them. I latched on and spiraled round and round, deeper and deeper.
I saw people doing what they thought was right, different people taking different roads: some making their lives meaningful, others burning out the lights of their souls, leaving torched shells of self-contempt. In the quest for a purposeful life, I realized, we’re often inspired to emulate our heroes, who represent a sort of moral ideal. But not all moral ideals are equal. Some equip us—or inspire us to equip ourselves—for life on Earth. Others don’t. Instead, they aim to prepare us for a life beyond the grave in an alleged realm we know nothing about.
That’s why I felt trapped between religion on the one hand, and, on the other, the vision of a hobbit besting the worst that Mordor could throw at him, or of Favre slipping through a defender’s arms and throwing a touchdown pass. Courage. Resilience. Achievement. The pursuit of personally meaningful values. My heroes embodied my moral ideals, and they couldn’t have become what they were had they spent their lives in soup kitchens or monasteries.
Of course, I thought, Frodo couldn’t have triumphed without his fellowship, nor Favre without his. Heroes certainly value others and collaborate with them to achieve great things that they could never do on their own. But, I realized, they’re heroic not because they always put others first but because they achieve their own ambitious goals—things they could not do if they renounced their personal interests and ambitions in preparation for some great hereafter.
A Different Breed of Heroes
The protagonists in Atlas Shrugged had a lot in common with the heroes whose posters hung in my room, except that they didn’t win battles, shred guitar solos, or pilot spaceships. They had seemingly mundane jobs, but they enjoyed their work and did it with full, focused awareness. They didn’t need to win Super Bowls, solve crimes, or blow up the Death Star to find the best within themselves. They ran railroads, manufactured steel, and even wrote soul-fueling symphonies. Rand’s description of “a symphony of triumph” spoke to me of the life-serving value that music can offer:
The notes flowed up, they spoke of rising and they were the rising itself, they were the essence and the form of upward motion, they seemed to embody every human act and thought that had ascent as its motive. It was a sunburst of sound, breaking out of hiding and spreading open. It had the freedom of release and the tension of purpose. It swept space clean, and left nothing but the joy of an unobstructed effort. Only a faint echo within the sounds spoke of that from which the music had escaped, but spoke in laughing astonishment at the discovery that there was no ugliness or pain, and there never had had to be. It was the song of an immense deliverance.2
In Atlas, I saw how much rested on the shoulders of creators and the virtues they had to practice to produce the values that we rely on every day, yet hardly ever think about. They were intelligent, ambitious, creative, and undaunted in the face of countless obstacles.
I fell in love with Dagny Taggart, the trim young railroad executive whom we meet in chapter 1 aboard a train car. When she wakes to find the train stopped in the middle of an empty field, she takes charge of the situation, getting the train back on schedule. We soon learn that the track of the railroad’s most promising branch is falling apart and in need of replacement. Dagny’s brother Jim is president of the railroad and wants to buy steel rail from his friend’s company because they need the business, but delivery is eighteen months past due. Again, Dagny takes charge, ordering rail of a new alloy far superior to steel. Supposed experts denounce the material as dangerous, but Dagny, a trained engineer, has seen what it can do. Instead of following, she leads.
Dagny recognizes that she’s fighting an uphill battle, but she derives an “exhilarating pleasure of action” from her ability to do work she enjoys—and to do it superbly.3 She vigorously pursues her values, and what she feels as a result is not mere satisfaction but a sort of heightened reality. When her train plunges into the tunnels of the Taggart terminal in New York City, she feels a
sense of eagerness, of hope and of secret excitement. It was as if normal existence were a photograph of shapeless things in badly printed colors, but this was a sketch done in a few sharp strokes that made things seem clean, important—and worth doing. She watched the tunnels as they flowed past: bare walls of concrete, a net of pipes and wires, a web of rails that went off into black holes where green and red lights hung as distant drops of color. There was nothing else, nothing to dilute it, so that one could admire naked purpose and the ingenuity that had achieved it. She thought of the Taggart Building standing above her head at this moment, growing straight to the sky, and she thought: These are the roots of the building, hollow roots twisting under the ground, feeding the city.4
Dagny lives her life on the premise that the achievement “that makes all others possible is the creation of your own moral character.” Just “as man must produce the physical values he needs to sustain his life, so he must acquire the values of character that make his life worth sustaining.” Fraudsters, cowards, and couch potatoes feel no relish for life. Truly living “requires a sense of self-value, but man, who has no automatic values, has no automatic sense of self-esteem and must earn it by shaping his soul in the image of his moral ideal.” He must seek “above all else to achieve his own moral perfection,” to become the hero of his own story, and to derive from that quest life’s greatest pleasure—an unshakeable sense of pride.5
The Bible had told me that “Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.” But I couldn’t help admiring Dagny’s pride—her “moral ambitiousness,” as Rand put it elsewhere—and I began actively looking for opportunities to cultivate my own. A year earlier, I had landed the exalted position of bagger at a grocery store and had worked my way up to cashier, then to produce clerk. Atlas Shrugged had taught me that “all work is creative work if done by a thinking mind, and no work is creative if done by a blank who repeats in uncritical stupor a routine he has learned from others.” Instead of merely settling into a comfortable routine, I began looking for better ways to do things. I turned work into a kind of game, and before I knew it, two other guys about my age had joined in.
There was a friendly competition among us. On busy days—aiming to quickly replenish bananas, salad mixes, sweet potatoes, and so on—we’d pile just as much as we could onto our carts, then stock it like ninjas, trying to outdo one another. Pretty soon, the height of the doorways in the backroom became our limiting factor.
What could have been mindless tedium became fun camaraderie. I learned about shipping schedules, rotating stock, and the self-ripening gas that bananas release. My culinary horizons expanded beyond microwaved meals as I learned about plantains, basil, and blood oranges. By focusing on creating real, life-serving value, I was building skills and self-esteem. As I learned more and came to appreciate the value I was creating, my work became more meaningful to me. To this day, I still take pleasure at the sight of a pristine produce department.
Best of all, I felt great pride in the person I was becoming and revulsion at the thought of sacrificing that pride to do anything I knew was wrong. If I made a mistake, I owned up to it and thought about how to avoid repeating it. And I tried to help those around me by giving them honest feedback.
After about a year in the role, my boss asked, “Jon, would you like to go through produce manager training?”
The Many Paths to Meaning
Eddie Willers shifted his glance down to the street, to a vegetable pushcart at the stoop of a brownstone house. He saw a pile of bright gold carrots and the fresh green of onions. He saw a clean white curtain blowing at an open window. He saw a bus turning a corner, expertly steered. He wondered why he felt reassured. . . . When he came to Fifth Avenue, he kept his eyes on the windows of the stores he passed. There was nothing he needed or wished to buy; but he liked to see the display of goods, any goods, objects made by men, to be used by men. He enjoyed the sight of a prosperous street.6
In Atlas Shrugged, I saw that values—legitimate values—are things that enable us to survive and thrive. As with the book’s heroes, creating values enabled me to experience my own efficacy—my own fitness for life—and to cultivate pride. But values are as varied as our physical and spiritual needs: bright gold carrots to soul-fueling symphonies—and everything in between.
I found that I could build purpose and meaning in the field of fruits and vegetables. But more importantly, I had learned that I could build purpose, period. My experience, illuminated by what I learned in Atlas, showed me that purpose is something you create, not something created for you. It’s not something baked into your bones that you, like a paleontologist, must carefully excavate. It’s more like a building, and you are the architect who must design and erect it.
But buildings are personal things. Would mine have loading docks for receiving pallets of produce—or something else? In Atlas, I’d seen people in all sorts of professions, from fry cooks to CEOs. Their happiness did not depend on salary or the number of heads they could turn. It was a product of the fully focused use of their minds in pursuit of personally meaningful goals. Around this time, I read Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book _ Flow _, and the psychologist’s ideas dovetailed perfectly with the novel’s. The happiest people are those who choose projects that stretch them—that combine their greatest skills, interests, and ambitions.
Whatever challenges I might encounter in running a produce department, they wouldn’t hold my attention for long. Perhaps running whole stores or chains would, but it wouldn’t call on my varied talents or my desire to create something imperishable, something that doesn’t require continuous restocking.
Instead, I decided to follow a green light: my early and enduring interest in music. That’s what led me to become a recording engineer, to work at the intersection of music, science, and technology. I knew it would be incredibly challenging, but it gave me a “sense of eagerness, of hope and of secret excitement.” It was a goal worth rising to, one that would tap a wide range of my interests. One that would enable me to create the sort of art that had inspired me while growing up.
My boss at the grocery store wasn’t upset that I decided not to go through produce manager training. After all, he got two out of three; both my friends went on to become produce managers. And although his offer meant a lot to me, it paled in comparison to what I felt after being offered the opportunity to work for a Grammy-winning artist—and, later, a job at a Nashville recording studio where some of my favorite albums had been recorded.
Missionaries, Monks, or Musicians
“And he lived happily ever after.”
Not.
Not insofar as that implies the end of new challenges, strenuous effort, forks in the road, and growth. After all, that’s life, a continual process of harmonizing a vast constellation of values.
Today, I’m taking on my most ambitious goals to date. I write for and edit a journal, host podcasts, and teach courses at an institute devoted to the ideas that helped me dislodge my mind from the funk that I was in at seventeen. I recently built my own recording and rehearsal studio where I give guitar lessons, teach music production, and record people whose music I enjoy. Who knows what’s next—maybe I’ll open a produce stand.
What I do know is that I couldn’t have done any of it had I not learned that purpose comes from the ambitious pursuit of personally meaningful values. I would not have found the best within me had I not learned to continuously seek projects that require my fully focused attention, my playfulness, my ambition. If not for _ Atlas Shrugged_, I may never have felt “the exhilarating pleasure of action,” nor glimpsed a world where there is “no ugliness or pain, and there never had had to be.” No doubt, I would not be where I am had I not picked up the book that taught me how to become the hero of my own story. Much of that story remains unwritten. But I know who will write it.