YOUR
UNIQUE CONTRIBUTION TO THE WORLD
SYNOPSIS:
What purposes will you pursue
with the time you are given on the Earth?
For
the most part, we find ourselves (at least initially)
devoting
our time and energy to purposes
that were well established before we
were born.
And probably this phase of self-development is impossible to avoid or
skip.
We develop our capacities to
pursue purposes
by first giving ourselves to goals we adopted from our cultures,
by pursuing ready-made goals we did not create ourselves.
Only later do we develop the capacity
to pursue purposes no one else has ever tried before.
What
projects will never be done if YOU don't do them?
OUTLINE:
I.
GOALS SHAPED BY EMPLOYERS
II. MY EARLY PROFESSIONAL LIFE
III. MY TEACHING IN NON-ACADEMIC SETTINGS
IV.
MY OTHER BOOKS
V.
YOUR UNIQUE CONTRIBUTION TO THE WORLD
VI.
THE INTERNET AS ONE PLACE TO MAKE YOUR UNIQUE CONTRIBUTION
VII. THE OPPORTUNITY OF CREATIVITY
YOUR
UNIQUE CONTRIBUTION TO THE WORLD
by
James Park
I. GOALS SHAPED BY EMPLOYERS
The economic realities into which we are born
also militate to make us employees,
who pursue the purposes of the
organizations that pay us.
Our educational system is primarily intended
to help us to fit into the
world as it already exists
and to take jobs as they are offered by established employers.
The assumption that we must 'make a living' is so
strong
that we spend almost no time
in our early years
considering organizing our lives in any other ways.
We wonder which job
to take, not whether
to take a job.
And if we make unique contributions to the world,
we probably do so despite
being employed for other purposes.
Our employers were primarily concerned to have us produce
goods and services that were well-defined
before we were hired for those tasks.
II. MY EARLY PROFESSIONAL LIFE
When I was beginning my adult life,
I also was trained in a profession that existed before I came along.
I became a minister in the United Methodist Church.
I know I fulfilled that role in ways that no one else did,
but basically I was paid to perform certain functions
for congregations that were organized and on-going
before I was selected to
be their minister.
III. MY TEACHING IN NON-ACADEMIC
SETTINGS
Later, when I began my free-lance life,
I was also doing some things that had been done before I came along.
I began to offer classes in the Minnesota Free University.
There was no committee that decided what I would teach.
I simply offered what seems interesting to me.
And people decided to take my classes or to stay home.
As I look back on these classes,
I see that they were mostly my own content,
rather than anything like the classes offered in academic institutions.
And my most successful classes
were the ones that resonated best with the interests of the people.
My most popular class explored love in a new light.
In the early years it was called "Authentic Love: An Existential
Vision".
Later this class (and the book that grew out of it)
was called "New
Ways of Loving: How Authenticity Transforms
Relationships".
And this continues to be one of my most popular books.
Such efforts illustrate the difference between
taking up an occupation
with a ready-made set of procedures
(as would have happened if I had started teaching philosophy
in a normal academic institution)
and pursuing goals that I
alone could have created.
Altho there were certainly thinkers before me who had similar ideas,
no one else in the whole world could have written my book on love.
And I believe it will stand as one of my unique contributions to the
world.
IV. MY OTHER BOOKS
Other books written by me were also unexpected and
mostly unprecedented.
This is one reason they have not easily found major publishers.
Publishers are ready and willing to print books
that they know will sell
because other books like them have sold well.
But books that present completely new ideas
cannot easily be marketed by the book industry.
But enough about me.
It is sufficient to say here that basically all of my books
are attempts to make unique contributions to the world.
Some have found a few readers directly by means of the Internet.
And a few have gone into multiple editions
because readers are still interested in reading them.
V. YOUR UNIQUE CONTRIBUTION TO
THE WORLD
Your talents and interests probably lie in different
areas of human endeavor.
But whatever you are considering as your purpose in life,
there are probably some people before you
who have in fact made unique contributions in the same field.
In philosophy, we can name the recognized thinkers
of the past.
These are the men (mostly men) who are studied in philosophy classes.
If they had not created new ideas,
there would be no point in studying them.
Often their ideas are now replaced by better thinking,
but their contributions were original enough in their times
for them to be remembered as thinkers worth studying.
If you have some original contribution to make,
that contribution will ultimately be accepted
by the people who are open to (or even hoping for)
what you have to offer.
Gatekeepers close out new ideas:
Their role is to find new examples of what has already succeeded.
But if you are able to offer your unique contribution
directly to the people—as,
for example, by means of the Internet—
then some people who are open to your contribution
will eventually discover it.
Consider the most original persons in your field of
interest:
How often do genuinely new ideas make it to the top?
Is creativity really
welcome?
Or are the rewards given to people who can do more of the same?
The arts are supposed to be areas of great
creativity,
but the 'successful' artists are the ones
who can create art that happens to be popular
because it is close to the art that has already been selling in that
medium.
Consider the example of the entertainment industry:
Popular movies follow patterns established by popular movies of the
past.
So here is the challenge of this cyber-sermon:
What can you offer the world
that years later will be acknowledged to be a unique contribution?
In what ways will your contribution differ from the other efforts
that will be made in your field even if you had never been born?
After you are dead, what will you be remembered for? (If anything?)
What benefit to the human race will continue after you are gone?
How will you devote your unique talents toward the good of other
persons?
You probably do not have immediate answers to these
question.
But if you keep asking questions like these,
then you might be able to make the day-to-day choices
that will ultimately lead you to make your unique contribution.
Perhaps the deepest of these questions
asks what you will be remembered for after you are dead.
I ask this question of myself:
If I am remembered after I am dead
(by people other than those who knew me during my life),
what contribution will be the most significant?
I think that I will be best remembered
for the new concept of our 'Existential Predicament'.
This contribution is embodied in my largest book,
now in its fifth edition:
Our Existential
Predicament:
Loneliness, Depression, Anxiety, & Death.
If you are remembered after you are dead,
what contribution to the world will be considered most significant?
One way to explore this question for your field of endeavor
is to ask about the unique contributions
of other persons who
are now dead.
When we name the unique contributions of others,
we are making more explicit what we consider to be 'unique
contributions'.
And this process of naming the unique contributions of others
might help us to ask the same question of our own lives:
For what unique contributions
will we be remembered?
VI. THE INTERNET AS ONE PLACE TO
MAKE YOUR UNIQUE CONTRIBUTION
Invented just before the beginning of the 21st
century,
the Internet is a means by which
anyone can offer anything
to the rest of the world.
There are no gatekeepers to reject new ideas.
Whatever your fields of interest,
you can seek like-minded persons by means of the Internet.
My contributions by means of the Internet now total
over 800 files.
And when I look for others who have written about the same issues,
they are usually few and far between.
Often I find no one else who has tackled the subjects that interest me.
I invite you (the reader of this cyber-sermon)
to surf my website to evaluate how original my contributions might be:
An Existential Philosopher's Museum:
http://www.tc.umn.edu/~parkx032/
The least original parts are the book-reviews of
other people's books.
Other reviewers could have written most of what I say.
But I always offer my own critique of each book,
which usually has no parallel in other reviews.
You can test this out for yourself
by reading reviews of books in the areas of your own interest.
Here in my book review index:
http://www.tc.umn.edu/~parkx032/BIB-JP.html
You can also evaluate the most original parts of my
website
by looking at the areas of interest named by the 7 major doors:
LOVE, SEXOLOGY, EXISTENTIALISM, UNITARIAN UNIVERSALISM,
EXISTENTIAL SPIRITUALITY, MEDICAL ETHICS, & DEATH.
http://www.tc.umn.edu/~parkx032/
And if you can find other websites on the Internet
that deal with similar issues,
I would be happy to learn about them.
And I might create links to them
from the appropriates places on my own website.
I offer my own example from the Internet
because it is the set of offerings best known to me.
But future revisions of this cyber-sermon can offer other examples
if they are suggested to me.
And if your unique contribution to the world
can be expressed in words or images on the Internet,
then the Internet might be the best place to begin.
You can create your own website
as a means of offering your unique contributions to the world.
VII. THE OPPORTUNITY OF CREATIVITY
If you are a creative person
(by which I mean able to invent something genuinely new),
use your creativity to make your unique contribution to the
world.
In my experience, creativity is a sometime thing.
Most of my hours are not creative.
But I am glad for the freedom to follow my creative insights
when they do happen to me.
I encourage you also to follow your creative urges,
even if there is no obvious immediate benefit
to you or to other people in the world.
Later you can come back to see
which of your insights were most useful to the world.
What can be invented only by you?
If you had never been born
—if
the world had existed completely without you—
what items of value would be missing?
What purposes can be pursued only by you?
What projects will never be
done if you don't do them?
originally created
10-19-2006; revised 9-5-2007; 2-29-2008
AUTHOR:
James Park is an independent existential philosopher,
living and creating in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
He is the author of a dozen books, including
Becoming More
Authentic:
The Positive Side of Existentialism,
which is most closely related to this cyber-sermon.
Much more about him will be discovered on his website:
An Existential
Philosopher's Museum.
Here are a related cyber-sermons also by
James Park:
Becoming More
Authentic:
The Positive Side of Existentialism
Becoming More
Free
Further Reading:
Authenticity
Bibliography
Here you will
find reviews of over 20 books, subdivided into:
Philosophy,
Psychology, Biography, & Literature
If you would like to
see a course description
for a seminar on Authenticity, go to:
Becoming
More Authentic
.
Go to the EXISTENTIALISM
page.
Go to other
cyber-sermons by James Park,
organized into 8 subject-areas.
Go to the Unitarian
Universalist Campus Ministries page.
Return to the beginning
of this home page:
An
Existential Philosopher's Museum.