more purpose

Almost every single major business has a mission statement. Don’t believe me? Google Honest Tea’s mission statement, and you’ll find that even a company that is only focused on making tea has an overarching mission to everything that they do. They, and countless other companies, let their purpose guide all aspects of the business. However, these missions and purposes are hardly ever actually attainable. Instead, they are lofty and overarching statements. 

While this seems odd to have unachievable mission statements, if these statements were achievable, they’d simply be goals. In almost every cliche high school leadership event, someone talked about having “SMART” goals. Specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-based were the five things that were supposed to structure our lives and lead us into being wildly successful. While “SMART” goals are great for promoting and motivating success, they focus a lot on the “what” and “how”, while rarely answering “why”. 

The other day, a friend told me that if we don’t know the “why”, we’ll have a pretty hard time figuring out the “what” and the “how”. When we think about what it is we want to do instead of asking ourselves why we want to do it, we often end up wandering through to-do lists, desperately wondering when we will feel fulfilled. Purpose can’t necessarily be attained, but it can be sustained. Just like the concept of joy sustaining and happiness being fleeting, purpose gives us meaning while goals just keep us seeking. 

Most of us weren’t meant to invent the next big thing, but we were meant to add value in our own little thing. Every one of us has a purpose, but I’ve noticed a lot of us aren’t sure about what that is yet. I see people every day investing their lives into a lot of “what”, and not a lot of “why”. The issue with this isn’t that we won’t accomplish things by following through with what we are doing, but rather it’s that we will never be able to live a life that has a consistent message.

When we have a consistent and specific purpose to live, we can make a difference in small ways. Our actions are driven by our purpose, and we are able to dedicate ourselves to being impactful in one meaningful way instead of many half-empty ways. 

Letting purpose take hold of your actions doesn’t mean you’ll impact perfectly each day, but it’ll certainly allow you to impact persistently. 

There’s more to purpose.

There’s more to it all.