CHAPTER NINE

The Purpose of Purpose

“Now we have found that this is of paramount
importance in order to progress. We absolutely must
leave room for doubt or there is no progress and there is
no learning. There is no learning without having to pose
a question. And a question requires doubt. People search
for certainty. But there is no certainty. People are
terrified—how can you live and not know? It is not odd
at all. You only think you know, as a matter of fact. And
most of your actions are based on incomplete knowledge
and you really don’t know what it is all about, or what
the purpose of the world is, or know a great deal of
other things. It is possible to live and not know.”

From The Pleasure of Finding Things Out by Richard P. Feynman

Most people seem obsessed with the notion of purpose. The world seems to be divided into those who believe they know their purpose and those who are searching for their purpose. I don’t think I know anyone who is blasé on the subject—doesn’t know, isn’t searching, doesn’t care. People who say they’ve found their purpose are judged to be mature, grounded, inspiring, on track. The ones who are searching, the majority it seems, are seen as anxious about it, frenetic, insecure, lost. Have you ever noticed how people don’t want to admit that they don’t know what they’re doing here? It seems to be a good thing to know what your purpose in life is.

Unless, of course, your purpose is evil. We seem just as obsessed with ridding the world of bad purpose. The War on Terrorism has certainly consumed a lot of airtime since 9/11. We don’t mess around when it comes to purpose. Whether we know what ours is or not, whether we’re on the receiving end of good ones or bad ones, purpose is a subject we take very, very seriously.

With such seriousness about the subject, why do you think it is that so many are at a complete loss when it comes to the question: What’s the purpose of my life?

Let’s look into it.

 

Sarah and I next met on the telephone one morning not long after our last meeting, to address the question she posed to me about purpose.

My mood that morning was a bit ironic, if not skeptical, a reflection of the ambivalence I was feeling about speaking with Sarah about the subject of purpose.

On the one hand, I knew how important this subject was to Sarah at this stage in her process and I wanted to serve her need. On the other, I knew that she probably wasn’t going to like what I had to say.

When the subject is a prickly one, where I know I’m about to burst someone’s bubble, I often rely on a little sarcasm to get me through.

That is, when I no longer can avoid the subject.

The subject of passion is something that most people can only take for so long. For most people, the conversation about passion inevitably turns to purpose, which is about results, which is about what do I want and what do I get in return for the time and energy and money I’m investing?

So I knew in my last meeting with Sarah that the jig was up.

Sarah needed to engage in an inquiry about purpose, what she would get at the end of all this, presuming she was committed enough, presuming she had what it took, presuming that I would deliver on my part of the bargain, what would the end game be? What was her purpose in doing all of this? And how would she know that she’d achieved it? And what difference would it make when she did, to her life, to her experience of being alive?

Dear reader, I’m about to rain on your parade. And here it is in a proverbial nutshell: There is no purpose to purpose!

There, I’ve said it. I’m glad. And it’s exactly what I said to Sarah.

“What?” Sarah said.

She sounded deflated like I imagined she would. I told her that “purpose,” the word, is deceptive. That there’s a narrowness, a strictness, a rigidity to the word that is very different from the energy or essence of purpose. The meaning people give to the word “purpose” has a reality to it that is exactly the opposite of what Sarah needs to see and engage with right now. The common interpretation of the word “purpose” has to do with wanting and getting results. My purpose is to do or to get this or that. That’s the business of the little girl who wanted to write a book, but it is not the business of the Sarah I’ve been calling out over all these months.

“Then, why is the E-Myth and the work you do so important to you, Michael? Why are you doing it?” Sarah asked incredulously.

“Candidly, Sarah, I have no idea. It just is.”

“I don’t understand,” she said, without completing the sentence.

“What were you hoping I would say, Sarah? That business has always fascinated me? It hasn’t. That the plight of people who own their own business is of deep concern to me. It isn’t. That my father’s failure in his small business, which literally killed him, made me vow to help others like him avoid his fate? It didn’t. That my Primary Aim in life is to transform small business worldwide? It isn’t and never has been. These are the reasons people most want to hear and are inspired by. But they’re just stories, Sarah. Empty stories. They’re stories that start out, ‘Once upon a time…’ and end with the frog turning into a prince, or the poor tailor marrying the princess, or The Little Engine That Could puffing up the hill. They’re stories speakers tell to their audiences because audiences eat them up.

“The only answer I can give you to your question about why the work I do with small business is so important to me is, I don’t know. I do know it’s important, though. More than anyone could imagine. And it’s important because I have made the commitment to do it. Why I made the commitment to do it is beyond me. It was just there; it showed up. And it was more than just interesting. It was compelling. It was elegant. It took my breath away. And I didn’t make the commitment all at once. It took time. All the rest is a fairy tale.”

“But what about purpose?” Sarah asked. “How does what you’ve said fit with what you’ve said or at least implied about purpose for months? I thought it was important to you. You sure made it sound that way.”

“I didn’t mean to be disingenuous,” I responded. “We have a purpose, Sarah, to create. And creation does not need anything other than itself to justify it. Creation, the act of producing something out of nothing, the love that one finds in the pure act of it, is enough to last a human being a lifetime.

“The question for me is not why this work is important to me, but do I behave like it’s important to me? Do I give my creative focus the time and attention and passion it deserves? Do I take my life seriously, or not?

“I have asked myself the question you are asking me—Why is this important to me?—for years. And I have never been able to find a true answer, a completely satisfying one, other than the one I just gave you. All the rest is false. Empty. Lies, if I were to tell them.

“If I have any purpose in this life that feels real, it is to not lie to myself. That’s how I want to live my life, not lying to myself.”

“But what about telling the truth, Michael? Why do you say it in the negative? Aren’t you really saying that the purpose of your life is to always tell the truth?” Sarah said.

“No, Sarah, it’s different. To not lie to myself means that I will always be vigilant to smell the lie. To be that vigilant, to be that honest, to be that aware and interested, not to tell a lie to myself, is even bigger than telling the truth. I can believe I’m telling the truth, but if I do not know a lie when it presents itself to me, I’ll never know whether I’m telling the truth or not.

“And that is what the true essence of purpose is. It’s a vision, no matter how that vision comes to you. And vision comes to people in the strangest, most unpredictable ways. You can be standing on the corner about to walk across the street. You can be turning in your sleep, dreaming. You can be in the shower, or packing a suitcase, or cleaning out your closet, and a vision will all but knock you off your feet. Purpose, in the sense of a vision, is what passion serves. It provides passion with something to do, which is greater than itself, which is more productively focused than what passion finds when it wakes us up every morning. Vision is a reason to live. You can call it purpose, but the minute you turn it into a purpose, it calls forth the part of you that is more focused on results than process, like the little girl who wanted to write a book. Purpose doesn’t free you. Vision can.”

“So help me understand, Michael, what the difference is between purpose and vision. I don’t get it yet.”

“Okay, Sarah. A purpose has a clear, palpable construction to it. A vision is what you see through feeling. The passion of the mind and the passion of the soul creates vision. A vision makes you laugh out loud for no reason. A purpose makes you dig down deep to persevere. Managers have purpose. Entrepreneurs have visions. Vision is where the passion lives. Purpose is a doing that fills the space that passion cannot occupy. Vision leads. Purpose follows. Vision is the aura of enlightenment. Purpose is the work of the monk. Bottom line, vision is about magic, Sarah, the ecstatic experience of the magic of being human.”

I stopped, and took a breath, and then said, “Vision is where the heart resides. It is the love of living.”

Sarah was silent for a moment, but I could hear her breathing on the other end of the line. She said, “Michael, part of me is swept away by your passion and your vision, in the purest way. And part of me, maybe the manager in me, is still not getting something about this. I feel like there’s something you’re not saying that is keeping me confused. Does that make any sense to you?”

I laughed, feeling a little exposed, but grateful that Sarah invited me to reveal my motive. “To be honest with you, Sarah, I made a somewhat overly dramatic point of telling you that I didn’t believe in purpose to move you to see something important. And that is that purpose is a lesser thing in the scheme of things for an entrepreneur. A true entrepreneur finds her truest joy envisioning the reinvented world of a poem or a work of art rather than an essay or a work of engineering. It’s the same difference you experienced between writing in your journal and trying to turn it into a book. There is a role in our lives for each. But we invariably give up the vision, which may have little, apparent practical value to it, for the purpose, which has so much. And in so doing we give up our lives. The vision is what calls us. The purpose is what manifests the vision. The passion is what fuels us to achieve what we can’t clearly describe in a way that we are made able to describe it.”

“Oooooh, now I can follow you. Thanks for letting the charade go,” Sarah offered lovingly with a grin that I could only imagine in my mind.

“And that’s why your letting your passion express itself is so important, Sarah. Unless we do what we’re doing right now, unless you form a deeper understanding and relationship with your passion, you will never be able to sustain an entrepreneurial pilgrimage because you will not have sufficient energy for it. The entrepreneur pursues the impossible. Not because it is impossible, but because it will remain impossible until he pursues it with the belief that it isn’t impossible, that somehow, some way, he will manifest it into being. The four-minute mile and the Golden Gate Bridge and the summit of Mount Everest and so on and so on. All of them have been impossible. And all of them have been the product of a vision first and a purpose second. The pursuit of the impossible calls for enormous amounts of energy, fueled by passion, the juice of vision.”

“So I guess what you’re saying,” Sarah said with some disappointment in her voice, “is that I’m not going to find my purpose today, that the part of me that wants to, needs to, is attached to producing results, getting things done. Okay, okay, okay. You’re asking me to trust that my passion will bring me to vision. More of the impossible.”

“Yes, Sarah,” I said, “yes.”