You are born into this planet with an inner task and life is so arranged that you cannot find yourself and your meaning through life alone, but only through seeing what this inner task is. The Work says that everyone is born into, and is in, exactly the best circumstances in regard to this task, and that if you meet this Work your conditions are just what is best for the purpose of work. But of course everyone thinks that if only you were in different circumstances everything would be easy. This is not the case.

But when we think of our lives from the standpoint that we and all other people have a chief thing to understand and transform, the whole meaning of existence changes. Life is very brief—a moment or so of confusion and muddle —but even so it is possible by the action of the Work to catch a glimpse of what it is one has to work upon and what one's existence here really means. This Work, if rightly felt and applied, gradually brings into view what you have to do, what lesson you must learn, what chief thing in you that you have to understand and transform. This is called Chief Feature.

Maurice Nicoll, "Karma-Yoga" in Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Vol. 1, p. 88)