Every once in a while I run across an essay that helped inspire Doug Engelbart to work on augmenting human intellect by using computers.  It's called "What Makes a Life Significant," and it's by William James.  Today I read it again.

James's point is that a life has meaning when "inner joy, courage, and endurance are joined with an ideal." 

What's an ideal? "[S]omething intellectually conceived, something of which we are not unconscious, if we have it; and it must carry with it that sort of outlook, uplift, and brightness that go with all intellectual facts."

And there must be novelty in the ideal -- novelty at least to "him whom the ideal grasps."

What's yours?