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The Power of Purpose
Find Meaning, Live Longer, Better
Richard J. Leider
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eBook - ePub
The Power of Purpose
Find Meaning, Live Longer, Better
Richard J. Leider
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About This Book
In this third edition of his bestselling classic, the legendary personal coach offers brand-new tools and techniques for unlocking your life's purpose. Purpose is an active expression of our values and our compassion for othersâit makes us want to get up in the morning and add value to the world. The Power of Purpose details a graceful, practical, and ultimately spiritual process for making it central to your life. This completely revised and updated edition will help you bring a sense of purpose to everything you do. In addition to new stories, examples, and resources, this third edition features four new chapters. "Purpose across the Ages" looks at how purpose can evolve during our lives. "The 24-Hour Purpose Retreat" includes seven mind-opening questions to help you unlock your purpose. "The Purpose Checkup" offers a new tool for periodically evaluating the health of your purpose. And in "Can Science Explain Purpose?" we learn what researchers are discovering about how purpose can improve our health, healing, happiness, longevity, and productivity
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PART I
What Is Your Purpose?
CHAPTER 1
The Purpose Checkup
I was just trying to get home from work.
ROSA PARKS
What is your purpose? We all have a unique gift and were put on this earth to share it. What is yours?
The first step toward unlocking your purpose is to mine your life story for major threads and themes that reveal your lifelong gifts, passions, and values. Next, create a clear purpose statement that energizes you to get up each morning with intention and joy. The words in your purpose statement must be yours. They must capture your essence. And they must call you to action each and every day. You must envision the impact youâll have on your world as a result of living your purpose. Your actionsânot your wordsâare, ultimately, what truly matters.
To do this, letâs begin with a Purpose Checkup. Many of us accept the wisdom of regular physical checkups. Weâre also generally willing to review our financial situation with some regularity.
So, if money and medical checkups are essential, we might be wise to take guidance from the financial and medical worlds and adopt the practice of a regular meaning checkup on that third dimension to ensure that our spiritâour sense of purposeâremains healthy.
The Purpose Checkup
Take a moment, now, and complete the Purpose Checkup (in the Resource section at the end of the book). Use this checkup to check in with yourself yearly, perhaps on your birthday!
Purpose is essential to our well-being. It is what makes us human. Purpose is not only what makes us human, it gives us the will to live or to persevere. It gives us a reason to get up in the morning. Purpose is fundamental to our health, healing, happiness, and longevity.
Purpose is one of the chief requisites for a well-lived life. A constant in the lives of people who experience a sense of well-being are the moments of meaningâthe âpurpose moments.â This chapter shows the importance of purpose moments and helps you to recognize and create such moments in your own life.
The Power of Purpose Moments
Most of us want to know there is a purpose to lifeâthat our being here does mean something and that what we do matters. Most of us want our lives to matter, and we want to live intentionally.
Rosa Parks had a purpose moment that ultimately changed a nation. She was arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white passenger in Montgomery, Alabama, on December 1, 1955. This single act of intention sparked a bus boycott that led to the integration of Alabamaâs bus system and paved the way for the civil rights movement in the United States.
Meaning matters. The search for meaning is basic to us all. However, we often examine it only when some crisis forces us to confront itâan arrest, an illness, a death, a divorce, or a loss of job. We take life for granted until a crisis wakes us up and forces us to ask the big questions. Crisis is a catalyst for purpose moments. And purpose moments bring us face-to-face with the big questions, such as What am I meant to do here?
Flight 427 was scheduled to depart Chicagoâs OâHare Airport at 4:50 p.m. on a hectic Friday afternoon. Bill was on his way to Pittsburgh to attend his first meeting of the executive committee of a college board of trustees. Just before flight time, above the din of a busy OâHare, Bill heard a page that asked him to check with the nearest gate agent. He was instructed to call his office immediately, where he learned that his meeting had been canceledâthe first such cancellation in eleven years!
Shortly before Flight 427 was to begin boarding, Bill turned in his boarding pass and made a quick exit to another concourse, where his assistant, Nancy, had booked him on a flight back to his hometown of Atlanta. When he called his wife, Valerie, on his mobile phone from his car on the way home, he was greeted by an outburst of tears and raw emotion. âBill,â she sobbed, âYou havenât heard! The plane you were supposed to be on to Pittsburgh crashed short of the airport and no one survived.â
Bill was stunned. Of that purpose moment on the freeway, he said, âThere was only this amazing calm, a sense of peace that settled over me and affirmed that God was holding me in the palm of His hand.â He arrived home to tears of joy and hugs that didnât want to quit, while the television brought the bitter details of Flight 427 into their living room. âI know my reprieve is temporary. My life has been extended for now.â
Bill believes that God had something more for him to do with his life. On Monday after his narrow escape, he got a hint of what that purpose might be. At his insurance agency, where he was managing director, he was besieged by friends, staff, and agents, all expressing gratitude for his role in their lives. Bill was already the leader of one of the largest, most successful insurance agencies in the country, but at that moment he realized that his true purpose, from here on, was to âgrow values-driven people.â That became the purpose of his life and agency. Bill no longer postponed those purpose moments but focused his newly precious time on coaching people to live in alignment with their values.
A Whole Life
Our well-being and quality of life depend on finding greater wholeness in life. The words health, heal, whole, and holy all derive from the same root. This reveals the obvious fact that to grow whole is not just a challenge of money and health, but a challenge of meaning as well.
Having a purpose in lifeâa clear reason to get up in the morningâis essential to growing whole. Imagine that youâve decided to conduct your own personal survey by asking a handful of your friends, What is a life purpose? What do you guess the most common answer might be? Would it be similar to your own response or quite different?
At first glance, it might seem like the answer to the question is so obvious that itâs a waste of your time to even ask it. Donât be fooled, however. There is wisdom in revisiting the questions that we think we already know how to answer. Our answers change at different phases of our lives and with changing life circumstances.
Iâve dedicated my professional life to exploring that single question. Consequently, Iâve had the privilege of asking thousands of people that question and many others. Iâve discovered that the majority of people define life purpose in a similar way. They may use different words, but the common thread weaving through their responses is this: âA life purpose is what Iâm meant to do and be with my whole life.â
Living a Life Worth Living
So, what is your purpose? Whether we explore this question publicly or privately, it is vital to our health, healing, wholeness, and our holiness that we do examine the question. Because what ultimately shapes our lives are the questions we ask, fail to ask, or never dream of asking. It is our questions that shape our humanity.
If we had to name what makes life worth living, what gives it meaning and purpose, most of us would probably say itâs the people we love. Relationships, along with work, are the core differences in quality of life at all ages. Whom we love and how we love them are in a way the fundamental reasons we get up in the morning.
Yet the number-one issue in many peopleâs lives today is isolation. A sense of alonenessâa strong feeling of isolation or going it aloneâaffects almost half of us. We complain that we either want more time for friends or would like to have more true friends, versus acquaintances, because busy lives can result in an abundance of acquaintances and a poverty of true friends.
We can easily fill our lives with busyness. There is always more to be done, always a way to keep from staring into the mirror. If weâre not careful, we can begin to mistake our busyness for meaning, turning our lives into a checklist of to-dos that can occupy all the waking hours of our days and leave us breathless, with our feeling of friendship left incomplete.
And always there is more to do. Our to-do lists will outlive us. The labors of our lives will be endless. For every person who summons up the focus and energy to step out on the purpose quest, there are many more who plod on, waitingâwaiting for some magical, easy solution to their quest, waiting to live the life they yearn for, a life that matters.
Discovering What Matters
The Met Life Mature Market Institute (MMI) applied sophisticated market research to the question of purpose. The MMI team worked closely with me and used my purpose work as a foundation for the purpose model in this study. The study, titled Discovering What Matters, explored with a researcherâs eye for precision the way people prioritize their lives as they face transitions. This marriage of measurement to meaning produced unique, measurable evidence about the role purpose plays in peopleâs lives. It revealed that regardless of age, gender, financial status, or life phase, the majority of people assign the most importance to meaning-related activities and, above all else, spending time with friends and family.
People with a sense of purpose in their lives were more likely to report being âhappyâ and to describe themselves as living the âgood life.â Having a sense of purpose was related to possessing both a âfocusâ on essential things today, and a âvisionâ of the future they wanted to enjoy.
The study showed that the concept of purpose, even the word itself, is something held in high regard by many, perhaps even most people. Some described purpose as giving them a general direction for their lives, while others even went so far as to allow it to prioritize the key choices required in their day-to-day living. And yet, many of the respondents might have found it difficult to honestly point to how they would use purpose in the daily choices they make.
But is purpose merely a luxury that is nice to have, or a more powerful fundamental concept? Responses revealed that purpose was the differentiator between those who reported living the âgood lifeâ and those not living the good life. Eighty-four percent of those who felt their lives had purpose reported that they were living the good life.
Build-Your-Own Life
A build-your-own trade-off exercise was used to assess peopleâs expectations of what their lives would be like with respect to activities five years in the future. They were given a set number of âlife pointsâ to distribute among a range of activities in four categories: money, medicine, meaning, and place. Consistent with results from other parts of the study, respondents across all age groups allocated the most life points to meaning-related activitiesâthat is, being with friends and familyâwith older respondents (aged sixty-five to seventy-four) focusing the most time on meaning-related activities.
It is clear from this research that the pursuit of meaning and purpose in our lives is fundamental, and that the older people are, the more important living with meaning and purpose becomes. While there are certainly some differences among age, income, and asset levels, the consistent message from this research is that the circumstances that truly bring a sense of well-being to life are fairly universal.1
Everyone Else Has a Purpose. So Whatâs Mine?
An entertaining evocation of this purpose research is the musical Avenue Q, which is the twenty-first longest-running show in Broadway history and has won several Tony Awards, including the award for best musical. The show has also spawned other productions around the globe, including the one I experienced at the Gielgud Theatre in London.
The show is largely inspired by (and is in the style of) Sesame Street. Most of the characters in the show are puppets operated by actors onstage; the set depicts several tenements on a rundown street in an outer borough of New York City. However, the characters are in their twenties and thirties and face adult problems instead of those faced by preschoolers, thus making the show more suited for the adults who grew up with Sesame Street. A recurring theme is the central characterâs search for his elusive âpurpose.â
I sat enthralled as the song Purpose was sung. The core messageâeveryone else has a purpose, so, whatâs mine?âbrought forth murmurs from the strangers sitting around me, as they chuckled over the lyrics, such as âPurpose, itâs the little flame that lights a fire under your ass./Purpose, itâs like driving a car with a full tank of gas,â and others. I left the theater that night feeling affirmed that purpose had truly arrived on the public stage. From shows in London and New York, from youngsters and oldsters, the ever-elusive purpose-in-life theme was finally on the marquee. Avenue Q was a purpose moment for me.
Purpose helps us understand what is core to our life, what we care about in our actual day-to-day living. Our world suddenly comes to life.
The Most Memorable Mentor I Ever Met
One person who had a profound purpose-moment effect on my life was Dr. Richard Gustavovich Reusch, my college advisor. On the first day of class of my first day at college, a short, bald man walked in dressed in a green and tan checked sport coat over a maroon vest, black tie, British cavalry twill trousers, and well-shined cordovan shoes. He was not what I expected! He silently looked the class over as if he were a drill sergeant assessing new recruits. He then began class, speaking in a heavy accent. To this day, I can cite stories from his âworld religionsâ lectures verbatim.
Dr. Reusch required students to pick up their exams in his office so he could check in with each one. More than test grades were the subject of discussions in his office, however. At the end of my first semester of college, in danger of flunking out, I went to talk to Dr. Reusch after final exams. I can still smell the pipe smoke and picture his office, where he was surrounded by African artifacts collected in his forty years of calling as a âMaasai missionaryâ in Tanzania. He was the best story teller Iâd ever heard.
âIâm really lost,â I told him. âI want to stay here, but Iâve really screwed up my life. What should I do?â
Dr. Reusch was unlike any other professor on campus. His compassion changed my life. He didnât ask about my courses but simply asked me to tell him something about myself. âAbout myself?â No other professor had ever asked me that! A magical hour later, I left his office with a new sense of what I wanted in school and in life. Somehow, Dr. Reusch made the hour almost a spiritual experience, and I felt something special was intended for my life.
Twenty years later I traveled to Tanzania and climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. I was astonished to learn that the crater at the summit is named Reusch Crater. Dr. Reusch climbed Mount Kilimanjaro sixty-five times, helped to establish its exact altitude, and discovered the crater now officially named after him. He knew twenty ...