What Is Your Quest?

What is your name?

What is your quest?

What is your favorite color?

I’m reading Designing Your Life right now, by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. These guys have taken industrial and product design theory and applied it to personal development, and to figuring out how to live the life we want. This resonates deeply with me because, 1) I love to take an analytical look at things like this, and 2) I’m working on my own book that has a similar goal, at least in part.

So what’s with the Monty Python questions? Basically, as they talk about in the book, two of those questions are fairly easy to answer, and the other is really hard. What is my quest? Why am I here? What Holy Grail am I seeking in this life?

One of their main points is that we shouldn’t stress too much about “figuring out” our quest. This goes hand-in-hand with a lot of the mindfulness work and therapy I’ve been doing lately. We need to get out of our heads. We’ll be happier when we aren’t trying to think our way through every life experience or situation. The same goes for finding our quest.

Instead of sitting down for a day (or a month, or a decade) to try to “solve” this one, we can gain insight and wisdom by approaching it from different angles, and by trying things out, by noticing our feelings. The five principles they set forth in the book are:

1. Curiosity
2. Bias Toward Action
3. Reframing The Question
4. Awareness
5. Radical Collaboration

Or, in other words, consider a new approach, try it, look at the issue from another angle, be aware of how it’s going, and ask for help. Pretty solid advice. You’ll have to read the book to really dig into specifics on each of these suggestions, but maybe for now tuck that question away in the back of your mind.

What is my quest?

Aaaand, here you go: