Passion and Purpose

Passion and Purpose

   Find your passion.  Find your purpose.  Those words, passion and purpose, seem to be appearing everywhere, as if soon the mega-corporations will pick them up and make them as insincere and meaningless as their letters to employees that usually ended with, "Thank you for all that you do," words that were marketed as the buzz words of the past years or so.  But today, there may be blossoming  a difference as people are finding their passion.  A quick survey among those with MBAs found that the percentage of people skipping the corporate route to found their own venture had jumped to nearly 10%, about a third higher than the numbers from the last decade.

   Passion was the lead story in this month's Fast Company (the article was actually titled, Find Your Mission) as well as in this month's More and Inc.  People who had decided to break off and do what they loved (and were succeeding) were featured and indeed, they were inspiring, giving the reader hope that just doing what they always felt passionate about could make them a living.  But as the pieces make clear, it's not all roses and for the most part, it's difficult work (the Fast Company article, however, was the only one to add this caveat, "We should, of course, stop for a moment to acknowledge that choosing a career built around meaning is not a choice available to billions of people who are desparately struggling just to make enough money to find shelter and put food on the table."

   But the occupations of those finding their working dreams are all over the map, from Google to a gang crew making ghetto food (their term and featured in the current Playboy), flower artistry to creating a foundation; the (mostly) younger crowd is apparently breaking away with more vigor and determination than ever.  Even John Cleese, of Monty Python fame, told Men's Journal this about work: You have to try like hell to get it right, because if you're going to do anything seriously, then not trying to get it right seems pointless.

   I mention the primarily younger crowd, a crowd Fast Company's article labeled Generation Flux, because while age enters the picture, it is more an attitude of youth (one changer mentioned is 49).  Here's how author Rober Safian describes it: This refers to the group of people best positioned to thrive in today's era of high-velocity change.  Fluxers are defined not by their chronological age but by their willingness and ability to adapt.  These are the people who are defining where business and culture are moving.  And purpose is at the heart of their actions.  Don't confuse this with social service.  For these folks, a mission is the essential strategic tool that allows them to filter the modern barrage of stimuli, to motivate and engage those around them, and to find new and innovative ways to solve the world's problems.  Their experiences show the critical advantages of building mission into your career and your business.

   This finding of one's purpose, however, might not be quite as easy as portrayed.  When Sharon Butala, author of the Canadian best-seller, The Perfection of The Morning (ironically, the book failed miserably in the U.S.), suddenly found herself married and living on her husband's working cattle ranch in the middle of what seemed to be nowhere, she felt that finally she had the time to pursue what she always wanted to do.  But each thing she tried (now that she indeed had the time) she found that it really wasn't what she wanted to do, despite what she had told herself all those years.  The search to find out what her "passion" really was involved so deep and time-consuming reflection.

   During a recent broadcast on my local station KUER's Radio West, there was an interview with Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus, minimalists and the authors of Everything That Remains.  In the interview, one of the authors made a comment that when people meet you, the first question is usually, "What do you do?," implying that they consciously or not want to see if you fit on some sort of socioeconomic scale, usally one related to what job do you do or pretty much, is the job an important or impressive one.  Why not turn that around, he suggested, and reply what you're passionate about?  He mentioned his passion for writing, although not mentioning that he was a writer because then the conversation would turn right back to an economic one of what have you written and how many books have you published and who is your publisher?  Then, he said that you can jump right back and ask them what do they feel passionate about?

   One of the better words of advice came from Inc. when they interviewed Richard Melman, founder of Lettuce Entertain You which has opened over 185 restaurants of all sorts, including Lawrence of Oregano and Jonathan Livingston Seafood. "Know your limits," he said:  Artists create for the public but also express something about themselves at a given time.  I do the same thing with restaurants.  I don't have a good sense of customers more than 20 years younger than I am, so my three children help with concepts for Millennials.

   So there.  Ready to go for it?  You may find that it may not be as easy as you might think.  Chery Strayed, author of Wild (the movie version comes out this month), had this to say about her decision to hike solo on the Pacific Crest Trail:  There was the first, flip decision to do it, followed by the second more serious decision to actually do it, and then the long third beginning, composed to weeks of shopping and packing and preparing to do it.  There was the quitting my job as a waitress and finalizing my divorce and aselling almost everything I owned and saying goodbye to my friends and visiting my mother's grave one last time.  At which point, at long last, there was the actual doing it, quickly followed by the grim realization of what it meant to do it, followed by the decision to quit doing it because it was absurd and pointless and ridiculously difficult and far more than I expected doing it would be and I was profoundly unprepared to do it.  And then there was the real live truly doing it.  The staying and doing it, in spite of everything.  In spite of the bears and the rattlesnakes and the scat of the mountain lions I never saw;  the blisters and scabs and scrapes and lacerations.  The exhaustion and the deprivation; the cold and the heat, the monotony and the pain; the thirst and the hunger; the glory and the ghosts that haunted me as I hiked eleven hundred miles from the Mojave Desert to the state of Washington by myself.  And finally, once I'd actually gone and done it, walked all those miles for all those days, there was the realization that what I'd thought was the beginning had not really been the beginning at all.

But if you are ready, Bloomberg Businessweek may have just the quick guide you're looking for, complete with apps and what to do when you hit it big.  Go for it, find your passion, find your purpose and best of luck...and let's hope that "thank you for all that you do" is finally gone.