Drive to Significance
Who isn’t looking for deeper significance? Who hasn’t struggled with Egotism?
I recently read this in my new favorite book The Divine Conspiracy by Dallas Willard:
Egotism is pathological self-obsession, a reaction to anxiety about whether one really does count. It is a form of acute self-consciousness and can be prevented and healed only by the experience of being adequately loved. It is, indeed, a desperate response to frustration of the need we all have to count for something and be held to be irreplaceable, without price.
Unlike egotism, the drive to significance is a simple extension of the creative impulse of God that gave us being. It is not filtered through self-consciousness any more than is our lunge to catch a package falling from someone’s hand. It is outwardly directed to the good to be done. We were built to count, as water is made to run downhill. We are placed in a specific context to count in ways no one else does. That is our destiny.
Willard, Dallas. The Divine Conspiracy. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1997: 15.
There will definately be more about this book in my thoughts.