Life on purpose

Being ‘on your purpose’ seems to be a fashionable expression today. We are all encouraged to ‘start with why’ and to have a tight ‘mission statement’ for our business. To be honest, I knew the buzzwords but they meant little to me.

Until Paris of course

Ah yes, we’ll always have Paris :)

One sunny spring day I had some time to kill waiting for a friend and had been reading ‘Maverick’ by Ricardo Semler. I decided to try the exercise that he had used to turn his father’s business around into one of the most successful in Brazil. When he took over, he looked at each part of the organisation and tried to decide if it was working.

In order to do this, he asked ‘Why?. Three times. His rule of thumb was that if he could not come up with three good answers for why this part of the business operated as it did, he would change it.

Semler suggests this as an exercise for everyone, to help them determine which course of action to take in life at any stage.

So I started asking why? My first question was ‘Why are there so many people out today?’ Ninety minutes later, my final question was: ‘Why am I so scared of the transcendent?’ In the intervening period, I had borrowed a pen, scrawled all over the Financial Times Weekend pages and borrowed some blank paper from a newspaper vendor.

From that day forward, I began a religious exploration which is still ongoing, over 20 years later.

Quite a powerful process, don’t you think?

Now I use it to clarify if I really really am living my purpose. If I can ask why three times and come up with convincing answers, then I am good. Having done this process for my current career, I can see that I am ‘on my purpose’. This process also worked for me when I worked in the theatre and in education. Until it didn’t.

Your mission or purpose (at least in terms of your career) does not always stay the same. You change, the world changes and this is perfectly normal. The only problem comes, when your mission has changed but you are still ‘stuck’ in your old life and your old job, not quite understanding why you have that nagging feeling that ‘something is not quite right’.

So if this describes you — you now know what do. Start asking ‘why?’