Finding purpose — first attempt at compiling what makes a good career

I woke up today with a weird feeling of clarity after a crazy epiphany. It's the result of reading books on motivation and career design, watching TEDs about purpose, research and articles I've read over the years, and personal retrospective.

Scribbles — this is what I mapped after waking up. In Spanish.

It started with three elemental thoughts:

1. Relevant expertise requires ongoing work. Currently relevant skills, economic trends, and people in power change over the years. This means professional directions and personal goals will dramatically change as well. After professionally working for a while, people are able to identify a demand to become an expert in, though.
2. Passion doesn't lead to success. It is said that passion follows success instead, and that common motivational philosophy preaches reversed logic. Authors increasingly say following your passion can be detrimental if you don't have a clear field expertise, a defined view towards good work, demand for what you're trained on, and what life is about for you. Plus, it can be devastating to strive for a goal you think you're passionate about, to then find that in reality it's not congruent to what you imagined.
3. What is personally meaningful mostly remains constant. Your heart (can’t find a better descriptor for it yet) can identify what feels fulfilling after some introspection as well. This relates to Guy Kawasaki’s “make meaning, not money” phrase, and also to what your reciprocity profile resonates with. Companies awarded as best places to work usually are concerned about creating environments that foster culture and support employees when they find what is meaningful to them and strive solve big problems.

I feel an inward exercise to balance these premises can lead to a better definition of life's purpose that can be applied generally. And then, started thinking about how all of these affect each other as a system.

Example: Entrepreneurial solitude

Over the years I've increasingly seen colleague entrepreneurs falling into deep depression.

I questioned myself: "How come entrepreneurs fall into such deep depression, given they're supposedly inspiring others by leaving known reality to pursue their dreams as founders?".

First of all, the passion deal is absolutely untrue. Secondly, entrepreneurs follow an opportunity, or are driven by necessity. Real entrepreneurs are very rational, "wantpreneurs" follow dreams, or even worse, hype. Unfortunately, both groups deeply or superficially falling into isolating sadness.

Sometimes, this is due to not being able to separate the fate of startups and founders, other times it's about utter solitude and lack of understanding from their non-entrepreneurial peers, it can also be a consequence of the accrued anxiety of not having achieved what they set out for, or worst of all, finding personal lives, careers, and health diminished or paused as a consequence of their dedication to their businesses.

I can personally relate to this. Since 2005, I've founded 6 startups. Two are past breakeven today. But four were heartbreaking failures, even after tirelessly working for them. It could have been us not persevering enough, lack of strong contacts, lack of expertise, disappointing results, bad timing, lack of adjacent possible, indifference, or anything all of the above. Our lean experiments led to a lot of learnings, but learnings don't console time invested and clashing realities.

Moving on to the academic world…

Venn Diagram for Purpose — fuzzy logic and hard for a student without an ongoing career to apply.

As an entrepreneurship professor, one of the things we like to help our students with, is finding their purpose. This is extremely hard to do. Sometimes, even professors don't know what their purpose is, and can even feel depressed or unhappy.

I feel this is is the result of a lack of personal definitions, and as a consequence, lack of congruency with them.

In the future, I'll be trying some experiments to find a more rigorous approach to these questions, but for the time being, I believe there are three variables that we need to define to pursue a compelling purpose or passion.

The Triforce of Purpose

I’ll find a name for this sooner or later. But, for now I’ll call it the Triforce of Purpose. Because why not?

The Triforce of Purpose is based on three pillars: Work, Expertise, and Heart. Why Triforce? Well, Heart can be related to Power (Ganondorf), Expertise can be related to Wisdom (Zelda), and Work can be related to Courage (Link). I'm a huge nerd. I know.

Anyway, each of these pillars is fed by a certain energy type.

• Heart — Our hearts are fed by our very personal perspective of what makes life meaningful. Bill Burnett and Dave Evans from Stanford D-School call it "Lifeview". Answering questions such as "Why are we here?", "What is the meaning or purpose of life?", "What is the role of joy, sorrow, justice, injustice, love, peace, and strife in life?", etc. can help us shape our own concept of life's meaning, and causally help us find fulfillment in what we do.
• Expertise — People that feel content with their lives often honed their talents toward a life mission. They shaped their talents and skills based on what they want to accomplish for the world, and their self-confidence on their skills allowed some of them to leap towards entrepreneurship. This is what Cal Newport talks about when he suggests abandoning a passion-driven mindset to start adopting a craftsman-driven market. Instead of asking “what can the world offer me?”, ask “what can I offer the world?”. This shifts our mentality to a giver mindset, which will build gratification towards each professional milestone we achieve.
• Work — Fueled by our prosocial factors and our attitude towards labor. More often than not, people who are happy with their work are also very clear on how work changes others. In other words, how is work improving the company they're working for, how is their work affecting lives of other people, or how is their work supporting a cause. Being unclear about this will produce anxiety, and will of course result in grueling office hours. Additionally, asking ourselves "Why work?", "What does work mean?", "What does money have to do with it?" and "What defines good or worthwhile work?" can help us define our view of what compelling work is about. Of course, Work is typically rewarded with money, which provides comfort.

What's interesting, though, is how each of these pillars relate to one another.

• Goals achieved through expertise produce gratification, increasing fulfillment.
• Heart invested in work, produces better quality results, which could help us feel comfortable or even enter flow states within our work environment.
• Dedicated work polishes expertise, of course, which in turn boosts our self-confidence.
• Top expertise creates exciting work opportunities for us, often tied to our life mission.
• Work that improves other people's lives help us feel we're investing in meaningful activities, and provide psychological safety.
• Fulfilled hearts make us feel recognized in the world, and inspire us to polish our expertise even further to keep growing professionally.

Why is this useful?

Entrepreneurs and professionals can put this scheme in practice and measure themselves in retrospective. Example questions can include: "Which of my past work or even non-professional experiences were engaging?", "Which made me enter a state of flow?", "What kind of work makes me feel energized?", "How do my views towards work, expertise, or heartfelt purpose align?", "How do they clash?", "Can I design a 5 year prototype of my own life and self?", "Do I have what it takes to execute that plan?", "Do I have the resources and do I feel confident to execute it?", "Do I know anyone that has followed this path before so I can ask how it's really like?", "Can I find or interview someone who can point me in the right direction?".

They can look to the past and to other people to redesign and prototype their present.

Finding a personal purpose in life is complex. But having a clearly defined view towards work, expertise, and life's purpose can help us put our heart into it. Then, letting go of past experiences and deciding on a path can be much more fulfilling and satisfying that frustrating. In the end, evaluating and redesigning ourselves is like a never ending story, but having a clear framework can definitely help us measure it.

Inspiration

This post is an amalgam of personal thoughts inspired by the following books, in no particular order, to which authors I'm deeply thankful to, since they help me find a path in my own disparate life:

1. Designing your life, How to Build a Well-Lived Joyful Life — Bill Burnett & Dave Evans
2. Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World;So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love — Cal Newport
3. Give and Take; Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World — Adam Grant
4. What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20: A Crash Course on Making Your Place in the World — Tina Seelig
5. Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All — David Kelley
6. Worthless, Impossible and Stupid: How Contrarian Entrepreneurs Create and Capture Extraordinary Value — Daniel Isenberg
7. The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything; Finding Your Element: How to Discover Your Talents and Passions and Transform Your Life—Ken Robinson
8. Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd — Youngme Moon
9. The Upside of Irrationality; Predictably Irrational — Dan Ariely
10. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
11. Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t — Jim Collins
12. Outliers: The Story of Success — Malcolm Gladwell
13. The Snowball: Warren Buffet and the Business of Life — Alice Schroeder
14. The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results — Gary Keller, Jay Papasan