The Importance of Purpose

So glad you’ve joined me for Sunday Morning Coffee. I come to you from the great state of Texas this morning as I’m taking a break to visit my BFF in the Panhandle of Texas. TX is a big place, as you know, but I hail from the part that is expansive and beautiful in its starkness…big, colorful skies, majestic thunderstorms you can see miles before they reach you, sand, wind, extreme heat, extreme cold, and the friendliest people you’ll ever meet. This week I’m doing all the things of my childhood…yesterday we watched my BFF’s granddaughter compete in barrel racing, I’ve communed with horses and dogs, sat in a stock tank full of cold water since the temp is in the triple digits, drank copious amounts of iced tea, and laughed til my sides hurt. It’s been a good week.

One of the topics of conversation during my visit, consistently, has been the woes of working in city management in small towns. When I say small, I mean population of 200 people or less. This has been a theme because it’s a daily worry for another friend who has to deal with a lot of shenanigans (some of these are a little bit scary and involve drunk people with firearms). As the conversations have stacked up, I finally made note that the root cause of the crazy, out of control behaviors I was hearing about really was due to a lack of purpose. People without purpose can be a little bit scary and a little bit sad. Really small towns in the middle of nowhere can be great, but there’s not a lot to do. Literally. Unless you’re involved in agriculture or education, there aren’t any jobs. Unless you have family land, you’re hired help in the agriculture job pool, or unless you have money to buy someone else’s family land, in which case, your name is likely to be Mud and there’s some resentment brewing about “outsiders.” There can be a definite caste system, even if everyone’s homogenous as to race and religion (although I’m hearing lots of conversations about Methodists and Baptists and who’s trying to run things). Lack of purpose (a healthy purpose) is a vacuum that can be filled with thoughts and activities that can ruin a life (Methodists and Baptists would say something like, “idle hands are the Devil’s workshop).

This doesn’t sound much different, actually, from cities I’ve lived in, or prisons or schools I’ve worked in. Know why? It’s human nature.

If you’ve never read Daniel Pink’s book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, I encourage you to do so. The summary of the book says, Pink “asserts that the secret to high performance and satisfaction-at work, at school, and at home—is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world.”

Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose.

The third element of motivation in Pink’s research is purpose. Autonomy and mastery are magnified by purpose. This could be the biggest motivator of all. Pink observes that deeply motivated individuals mostly work for something larger than themselves. In one study of university students, researchers described two groups: one had extrinsic aspirations that they called ‘profit goals.’ These were goals based on financial achievement. Simply put, they wanted to get rich, or at least build wealth.  It was their primary reason for working. The other group had intrinsic aspirations. These goals centered around working to help people, improve the lives of others, and create opportunities for people to learn and grow. They called this group ‘purpose goals.’ A couple of years after graduation, the researchers revisited the participants and found that in the purpose goals group, the participants who felt like they were achieving those goals or at least moving towards them satisfactorily had higher levels of satisfaction, happiness, and well-being than when they were in school. The profit goals group, even those who had attained their financial goals, reported experiencing depression and lower levels of self-esteem than they had when they were students.

This isn’t to say that building wealth is a bad thing and not worth pursuing, by the way. What the research is saying is that on your road to building wealth, contributing positively to the world around you yields a healthier professional and personal life and can make you more productive than simply working to make money.

Finding purpose in your life and at your job may sound like an overwhelming task. Finding purpose in your life when you’re incarcerated may seem down-right impossible. For ourselves, we have a plethora of avenues we can take to find or create purpose, to focus on something other than ourselves, and to make a difference in the world every day. For folks who are living in confinement, we may have to provide those avenues…cognitive behavior therapy, 12 step programs, religious services, career-readiness training, 21st century technology skills, opportunities to give back to the community, humane treatment…

Wait a minute! What if we, on the outside, made giving opportunities to find purpose to people on the inside OUR purpose???

Sounds like a win/win, doesn’t it?

In Daniel Pink’s book, he recounts a story about Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce who told President John F. Kennedy, “A great man is a sentence.” What she meant is that an individual’s life purpose should be able to be capsulated in a single sentence. As examples, she said Abraham Lincoln’s sentence was, “He preserved the union and freed the slaves,” and Franklin Roosevelt’s was, “He lifted us out of a Great Depression and helped us win a world war.” Her challenge to President Kennedy was to come up with his sentence and then live up to it.

I challenge you to write your sentence, then spend your days living up to it.

But first…coffee.

Tallyho purpose-filled-warriors!