“When calculating the prospects of a young man, and the likelihood of his being able to go through life without being taken off his feet, I always want to know whether he stands for anything in particular. A written sentence may be mere words or it may mean something. So a young man may be only a mixture of body and soul or he may mean something: that combination of body and soul may stand as the expression of an idea. He may be some truth incarnate, so that when you meet him you feel that you are encountering that truth, and when he talks to you you have somehow the notion that truth is addressing you and arguing itself out with you. We none of us have to look far to find such men. There may be a certain stringency and aggressiveness about them some times that makes them uncomfortable, a kind of directness about them that makes them inevitable, but there is no mistaking their meaning. They are an idea become flesh — a doctrine, a theory, dressed in human apparel. The feature in the case of interest to us just now is that a man so conditioned is not likely to lose his way nor to founder. The point is not that he has mastered the idea, but that the idea has mastered him and in that way counteracts the influences operating to pull him in other ways.” – Charles H. Parkhurst

To live a meaningful life, you must at a minimum devote yourself to the elaboration of an idea. Such devotion tests your resolve and requires that you overcome the gravitational pull of mediocrity, that insidious force which transmutes inherent potential into frustrating meaninglessness.

To live an extraordinary life, you must mature beyond the devotion to an outer ideal and learn to live solely in the expression of your inner purpose, your raison d’ȇtre. This is the means by which the invisible, eternal and omnipresent principles of truth are made flesh.

The truth in abstract is of no value until it is expressed, made incarnate, just as your soul is meaningless at this level of creation until it is made flesh, given expression through your body, mind and heart. Personal meaning, personal value is established exclusively from the inside out.