Autotelic

Autotelic is an adjective that means not driven by external factors. The word auto comes from Greek, meaning ‘self,’ while telos (TAY los) also from Greek, means ‘end.’ Our word of the day is often used to describe an activity or creative work that has a purpose in itself. All those push-ups and sit-ups we did in the army seemed to be autotelic to me. We never used any of those activities for any of our duties. Instead we just seemed to be doing calisthenics for the sake of doing calisthenics.