To what service is my soul committed? Constantly ask yourself this and thoroughly examine yourself by seeing how you relate to that part called the ruling principle. Whose soul do I have now? Do I have that of a child, a youth…a tyrant, a pet, or a wild animal?
—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 5.11
To what are you committed? What cause, what mission, what purpose? What are you doing? And more important, why are you doing it? How does what you do every day reflect, in some way, the values you claim to care about? Are you acting in a way that’s consistent with something you value, or are you wandering, unmoored to anything other than your own ambition?
When you examine these questions, you might be uncomfortable with the answers. That’s good. That means you’ve taken the first step to correcting your behavior—to being better than those wild creatures Marcus mentions. It also means you’re closer to discovering what your duty calls you to do in life. And once you discover it, you’ve moved a little bit closer to fulfilling it.
* Source: The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman