Finding your calling

Marcus Aurelius had a formula for getting out of bed every morning.

Steven Pressfield echoes a similar exhortation, with an emphasis on one's destiny.

We can't be anything we want to be.

We come into this world with a specific, personal destiny. We have a job to do, a calling to enact, a self to become. We are who we are from the cradle, and we're stuck with it.

Our job in this lifetime is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it.

This, to me, is a bit romantic. There is always that element of molding ourselves into a work of art, an act of will.

But Pressfield's view is a wonderful impetus to act, and that's the important thing.

To act.