September 25 Readings

                The theme of this week’s readings has been vision. Kouzes focuses on inspiring that vision in others while the other three readings concentrate more on personal vision. Umair Haque’s “How to Let Your Purpose Find You” offers an almost quixotic version of vision, in which one exposes themselves to heartbreak. He does not mean to say that vision = heartbreak, but that having vision and pursuing it means doing what you love, and risking the possibility that that love may end in heartbreak.

                I take some issue with the process described in “Drawing Forth Personal Vision,” in that the fourth part of the approach is basically the “why” game small children play. Yes, learning the motivations behind your wants and desires is important, but ultimately it all traces back to happiness. As Aristotle wrote in Nicomachaen Ethics,

“…honor, pleasure, reason, and every virtue we choose indeed for themselves (for if nothing resulted from them we should still choose each of them), but we choose them also for the sake of happiness, judging that by means of them we shall be happy. Happiness, on the other hand, no one chooses for the sake of these, nor, in general, for anything other than itself.”

I suppose the source of my mild ire is that this exercise is, in a fashion, thousands of years old, but pays no heed to the original source material. Maybe we could read a little Aristotle for class?