What am I actually doing this for
Purpose is a quality of your activity, not a job title or a cause. Find the qualities that keep showing up.
The most effective leaders are driven by a real sense of purpose rather than by money, and financial success tends to follow as a side effect rather than the other way around. W. Edwards Deming put the organizational version in the most literal terms available: a system must have an aim, without an aim there is no system, and the aim must be clear to everyone in it.
The personal version is smaller and more useful than it sounds. Purpose does not have to be world-changing, it has to be genuinely felt, and it is a quality of your existence or activity rather than a label. People land on things like creating order from chaos, or taking on challenges. If you want to save the world you might enjoy grant-writing, or swimming the English Channel to raise money. What matters is the quality of the activity, not the label anyone puts on it.
It also does not cost anything, which is worth saying because purpose gets a bad reputation as a luxury whenever the job market turns. It is intrinsic to who you are whether or not you are employed. It is not what you do, it is how you do things.
What you get
- A table for separating moments that felt worth doing from the qualities underneath them
- A compression step down to the two or three qualities that repeat
- A prompt on what a normal week would look like organized around them
- The organizational half, if you lead people, including who has actually heard you state the aim
Where should we send it?
One email with the worksheet. You can unsubscribe from anything else in one click.
On its way
Check your inbox. If it has not landed in a minute or two, look in promotions or spam, and add sam@startuppatterns.com to your contacts so the rest arrive.
Adapted from the Mindfulness chapter of The Mindful Product Company by Sam McAfee.