Meaning, purpose, and how they intersect with our life and work
Connecting the dots between meaning, purpose, and what they mean for how we view our work and careers
Hello! And welcome to the Sunday Edition of Work in Progress. If you’re new here, welcome, make sure to drop me a note to introduce yourself, and tell me what you’re up to and working on right now. This is a long essay on purpose, meaning and what it entails for our work and careers, so buckle up and enjoy!
The words meaning and purpose get thrown around a lot when we talk about our lives, work and careers. From an early age, we hear from successful and more experienced leaders, stars, and public figures and entrepreneurs talking about how finding their meaning was an unlock to building a successful life and career. We hear encouragement and messages from society and culture to pursue a life of meaning and purpose.
Our mentors, educators, teachers and advisors tell us to find a career or profession that gives us meaning and purpose. And Corporate America and culture have at times co-opted purpose and meaning for their own intentions of attracting top talent or rallying their business around a strategic direction.
Large events like COVID-19 give time for all of us to stare reality and life directly in the eye, which often leads to reflections and questioning of the fundamental elements and truths of our lives.
To be sure, research does seem to bear out some of these claims. Even before COVID-19, it was clear that finding meaningful work was a priority for many employees. According to a 2017 survey of over 2,000 workers by BetterUp, 9 out of 10 career professionals told researchers that they would sacrifice 23 percent of their future earnings—an average of $21,000 a year—for "work that is always meaningful."
As a result of COVID-19, the search for re-evaluating purposeful and meaningful work continued this theme. Gartner surveyed more than 3,500 employees around the world in October 2021, and 65% said the pandemic had made them rethink the place that work should have in their life. Furthermore, 56% said it made them want to contribute more to society.
Finally research from McKinsey shows that many employees (about 70%) have expectations that their sense of purpose is defined by their work. However, a separate McKinsey study also mirrors the challenge and nuance of this - while many people have expectations for meaningful work, there is also a lack of clarity around what that entails. While 85% of people feel they have a purpose, only about 65% percent of them believe they can actually articulate that purpose.
Over the past 16 months, I’ve been reflecting a lot on the idea of meaning and purpose, and how those two concepts intersect with living a good life and doing good work. This has come through a lot of reading, research, conversations with smart people, reflection mixed with some courage and big decision making. I wrote about this experience but over the course of that time frame I’ve done a lot of thinking about these concepts, which resulted in leave the corporate world for a path of entrepreneurship/soloprenuership, turning a side-business and side-hustle into my profession, and moving to Southern California, to be close to loved ones and family. It would be an understatement to say that the thinking I’ve done has had an impact on my life, but I what I found was that the answers to those questions were a lot more nuanced and required a lot more thinking, even for someone like me, who has always been a reflective person. This essay is going to take a stab at stitching together some of what I learned.
Nuance, Language and Definitions
One of the things that sucks about social media (and perhaps society, at large) is that nuance is not always easy. I think that’s also true with the terms meaning and purpose, especially when it comes to work and careers. Between the messages we hear from culture and society, well-intentioned mentors and leaders, and the current state of affairs of a global pandemic and the implications for all of us and our own lives it can be confusing to sort through the nuance of how we as humans should think about these types of topics. But I’m going to try to unpack that…
My first brush with meaning and purpose came when I was a teenager. I was about 13 or 14 years old when I first heard the concept of “doing something that you love.” At the time, I was a proactive and eager middle school student who had just started their first job as a caddie at a golf course, and I truly loved what I was doing. I got the chance to work at a place that I loved (the golf course) , the ability to interact with other people and free food and good pay.
Furthermore, I felt like I was making an impact, and could see some of that impact in the form of the feedback I got from the members and fellow employees I worked with. I remember having a conversation with my mom after coming home one day and telling her about how much I loved my job, and asking her if she loved her job in the same way. I’m paraphrasing here, but her response was something along the lines of, “I don’t love my job, but I love what it enables me, which is to support you and your sister, spend time with our family and live a life that is meaningful, but no, I don’t love my job..”
At the time, this was a difficult concept for me to understand, because I was a naive teenager, but also, because I could only see what I felt about my own experience. As I reflect back on that exchange, this is the first time where I started to understand meaning and purpose.
Purpose vs Meaning
According to the UC Berkeley Greater Good Magazine, purpose is an abiding intention to achieve a long-term goal that is both personally meaningful and makes a positive mark on the world. At the time, I was in my 2nd year of a Jesuit Middle School education, and deeply internalized many of the messages around service, community, and teaching others. I would have told you that my purpose, which was greatly, was to use my talents to help others.
Meaning on the other hand, is the symbolic value that we subjectively assign to something that we do. For me, the job of being a caddie gave me a sense of meaning. As a caddie, part of my job was to help members navigate the course, since I knew all the holes, and how to best play them to score well. I would often give advice, help them pick what club to use, or make them aware of things they couldn’t see or didn’t know. Taking a job like caddying aligned with my purpose, but the doing the job, even the nitty gritty aspects of each of the tasks gave me a sense of meaning.
Sure, carrying someone’s golf bag around the course, or cleaning a club is not the most impactful task, at a macro and longer-term level, doing that repeatedly over the course of a round had the ability to help a member have a great experience and shoot a better score - that was a purpose that excited me.
As a result of that, I felt like a team member, like my work valued, and over time, that I had some significant expertise and knowledge that was useful. That gave me a sense of meaning in the work I was doing. If the purpose is choosing something to work toward, meaning is the feeling you assign internally to the outcome of what it is that you do.
Meaning is a waterfall. Purpose is a mountain. Now, your goal in this little life is to find a mountain with a waterfall on top of it.
Something I find that I got hung up on is this idea that you need to find your purpose. This comes from hearing lots of messages over the years, to well, find your purpose! What I’ve come to learn since then is that purpose is a journey not a destination and as you evolve, so can your purpose.
According to the Berkeley Greater Good Magazine:
We don’t have to worry about finding our one true purpose; we can find purpose in different areas of life. In fact, purpose isn’t something we find at all. It’s something we can cultivate through deliberate action and reflection, and it will naturally wax and wane throughout our lives.
And if your purpose can change and evolve, and meaning is very tied to the subjective feelings you assigned to your purpose, the other good news is that your meaning of what you get out of your purpose can also change. The upshot here is that meaning and purpose don’t have to be fixed targets that we aim to reach, which hopefully gives us grace and space to be curious and think intentionally about what they might mean to us just right now. And given the events of the past two years, I couldn’t think of a better thing to do than reflect.
Should Meaning and Purpose Come From Your Work?
My internet friend, Nick de Wilde (Author of The Jungle Gym) posed a great question, in his essay, Your Work and its meaning.” He wrote:
While many people (including me) get genuine fulfillment from work, that doesn’t mean it’s the ideal environment for all of us to pursue meaning. Yet, for many, the idea of deprioritizing work can feel like a betrayal– like we are reducing our capacity for finding meaning. Where does this feeling come from? Should we pay attention to it, or do we need to find a way to move past it to build lives that are truly worth living?
Nick raises a very important point - you’ve probably encouraged to find meaning in your work, or to find your purpose and align your job with it. But just like I learned from my Mom that not all people love their job or find meaning in their work, Nick also highlights that while people can absolutely get fulfillment from their work, it doesn’t always necessitate that everyone has to find meaning.
He goes onto add:
Work may or may not be the right environment to facilitate your pursuit of meaning. A startup founder may find that work is the ideal context to make an impact on employees and customers. Meanwhile, a parent may simply want a job that pays enough to allow her to raise a happy and healthy family. Whatever gives your life meaning, it’s essential that your career choices facilitate, rather than limit, your ability to pursue those goals.
Individual Purpose vs Organizational Purpose at Work
Companies and organizations also have purpose integrated into their company culture, which is critical to helping the organization move in the right direction and toward a desired goal. However, organizational and individual purpose can be conflated at times, which also causes to the confusion for individuals around how they should thinking about concepts like purpose and meaning at work
One of the interesting pieces from the research from the McKinsey study was that the authors of the study found a really important nuance - companies and organizations who want to unlock the benefits of having employees who feel a sense of purpose, need to think about the employee’s purpose, not just organization’s. It’s less about how to make the employee feel like their individual purpose connects to the employee’s purpose, and certainly not trying to purpose-wash, and more about making it visible and empowering the employee to have agency over the rest of the process. They said:
“In fact, a good portion of the research we continue to do is about moving from the attractiveness of individuals seeing the stated purpose of the organization to getting a sense of whether or not that’s real, seeing how they could fit in, and then whether or not they can realize that in their daily activities—and whether or not that firms up a sense of belonging.
..Organizations can be a conduit. They can make their purpose visible. But the individual alone has agency in deciding what their purpose is and whether or not it aligns with the company’s.”
The other critical role that organizations play in defining their own purpose as it relates to their employees is ensuring there is both transparency and congruence, with what they say their purpose is, and what it actually is. Said nicely, organizations need to be on purpose.
They say:
“If a person showed up believing the organization stood for one thing and they really needed the organization’s purpose to line up with their own, and then the organization violated this, it was just that, a violation. It had significant downticks in the person’s willingness to stay, their engagement, their involvement. You’d see a direct link to performance. Also, for most people, that creates so much dissonance that they usually leave.”
Many people see this regularly as one of the frustrations with the workplace and organizations. While companies proclaim one thing, what they do or how they act often portrays another. It’s like when a company says they prioritize Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, but their Executive Team doesn’t reflect that. Or when a company says they believe in doing well and doing good, but regularly takes consistent actions that undermine that intention. While these instances and occurrences were common prior to COVID-19, it gave employees who felt troubled by the disconnect between the stated purpose and actual intentions a chance to vote with their feet.
To be sure, there’s a difference between falling short while you try to live your purpose and values because at an organizational level, getting a company to pursue a strategy with its actions is hard to do, and regularly taking actions that show a dissonance between the two.
My takeaway from the research for leaders and managers who care about the well-being and development of their employees is twofold
Provide space, time, and coaching to allow your employees to think about their individual purpose - About 85% of people feel they have a purpose. But only about 65% of them believe they can actually articulate that purpose. Whatever you can do to help your employees find their purpose is a great first step. Whether it’s taking time in 1:1’s to ask thoughtful questions, or finding them mentors or guides who can help them do this, if you want to unlock the benefits of purpose, it starts with giving your employees the space to find their own
Be Transparent about the organizational purpose - The problems arise when there is a disconnect between the stated purpose and lived purpose, or when the purpose is not transparent. Employees who know their purpose will start to connect the dots on if their purpose connects with the organization’s, but your job is to show them context whenever possible, about how the organization is living its stated purpose. This comes from you having a much broader (and perhaps more experienced) viewpoint and vantage point on what that is, but doing so will allow employees to determine how it aligns for them.
Your Search For Purpose and Meaning in Work
In her book the Power of Meaning, Emily Esfahani Smith writes about four pillars of meaning:
Belonging defines a connection to a larger community. Forging and sustaining relationships is how we increase this connection, which in turn makes our lives feel meaningful.
Purpose is defined by long-term goals that give us a sense of accomplishment. Purpose, for many, can be found in their children, their work, or a passionate hobby.
Storytelling is building meaning through your own personal narrative and reflections. Understanding our place within the world, as well as our impact on those around us, is what creates a strong sense of identity.
Transcendence is based on connection to something bigger than one’s self. Transcendence can be tied to spirituality, nature, or historical ties.
While the meaning we derive and the importance of meaning is different for all of us, this framing can help us understand the type of meaning that is most important in our lives. Part of the nuance of this conversation is figuring out what to do about meaning in our work and careers. If we agree that work does take up a good portion of our life, to what extent should we look to find meaning in our work, and for some of us, our career?
Drawing again on Nick’s piece, he also provides a good frame for how to think about this when he describes three ways in which he’s seen people think about the role work plays in the pursuit of meaning:
Work as a Source of meaning - In this scenario, an individual gets meaning out of the work they do, either because it’s challenging or rewarding, or they genuinely like what the do. “Whether it’s investing the hours in mastering a craft or getting a life-changing product into the hands of millions of customers, work can be a tremendously fulfilling endeavor,” Nick writes.
Work as an Enabler of meaning - The concept of meaning from work is a new one, as for hundreds of years in civilization, work was only meant as a means to survive and to have time for other things in our life. In this scenario, work enables you to achieve meaning in another aspect of your life. “Work simply supplied the resources to make those things possible” - As I think back on my conversation with my Mom when I was a teenager, I think this is where she felt.
Work as a Portfolio of meaning - According to Nick, this is the most common one, but also one of the most challenging. In this scenario, we acknowledge that for us to live a meaningful life, work will be one place where we get meaning, but we don’t limit our meaning to just our jobs or careers, we have other places where we find meaning too. For me, I’ve always tried to find meaning in my work, whether it was through selecting the right job, or using techniques like job crafting. But, it’s also what led me to pursue curiosities, which led to things like a blog, writing a book , a podcast, and a training and a training and speaking business.
The question then becomes, which of these makes the most sense for you right now? And how can you figure out which one you are mostly aligned to? Here are a few suggestions:
1)Reflect on Meaning and Purpose as it relates to your job
Going back to the McKinsey research, many people struggle with articulating their purpose. A lot of this stems from a lack of definition of what it is (but you have that now) as well as making the time to reflect on this. Now is your chance to do this, especially is it pertains to your job and career. This can be done as a solo mission (internal reflection, journaling, etc) or perhaps with a thought partner, (mentor, friend or guide) but being intentional about making space to define this is a great first step in clarity. One first step for defining meaning is to take a look at Nick’s framework for the role that work will play in your life. Another step would be around reflecting on questions like
“What role should work play in my life right now?”
“What is my relationship with my job?”
“What specifically in my current role allows me to actualize in my defined purpose? Does that feel meaningful enough right now?
2)Take a step back to gain perspective to make changes
Reflection is a great starting point, but sometimes in order to see clearly on something, you need to take a longer break. In an interview with the HBR, Esfahani Smith encourages us to think of this on a continuum. For some, it may mean making changes such as relying on the age-old technique of job crafting – or working with your manager to align your specific job tasks in a way that allows you to be more in line with your purpose. For others, it may mean actually taking a step back, removing yourself from the situation to see more clearly in the form of a leave of absence or sabbatical from your current job to get a breath of fresh air, think clearly and get into a better groove of life. For others, it may require something more drastic, like leaving your job, or stepping away from the workplace for a period of time. My advice here comes from another internet friend, Paul Millerd, the Author of the Pathless Path, and Boundless Newsletter. Paul says: “
“First, we need to ask: what do people really want? My take: most people want permission to take a break from the madness. To be able to pause the inertia of the busyness treadmill and having to continue to go through the repetitive motions of their lives. They want empty space, a time and place and a chance to reflect. Often, in this space, answers emerge that help the person figure out what they really want after.”
According to Paul, “quitting a job is thought of as an all-or-nothing decision that can’t be reversed. That just isn’t true. I’ve talked to many people who thought they were going to make drastic changes, only to return to their jobs – but much happier and feeling much more in control.”
3)Acknowledge that you can change your mind
We all are going to have different views on purpose and meaning, and in addition to being unique, it’s also important to recognize your views on meaning and purpose and specifically what they mean for your job and career can, (and will) evolve over time. What you might view as your individual purpose today might be different from what it was 5 years ago and what it will be in 10 years. The same goes for the meaning you derive from it, as well as the kind of meaning you want from work. The key here is that you’re cognizant of it, and moving intentionally in a direction that is fit for you.
Thinking back to my time as the 13-14 year old, some aspects of my purpose are still the same, while others have evolved. It’s still very much influenced by my now 10+ years of Jesuit Education, and I would say the focal point of my purpose is to use my talents and gifts to unleash the human talents and gifts of other people. As a teenager, I was focused on serving others, but it was mostly defined to the people I caddied for, my friends, my teammates on the basketball court and those in the community, especially the less fortunate. Now, it’s still that, but also, as my role has expanded, so has the scope of my purpose. I think about it within the context of being a son, brother, uncle, mentor, role model, alum, podcast host, writer, etc, and eventually a husband and father. This in many ways, has broadened my purpose, and also required me to be much more intentional about defining it.
I have always wanted to get meaning out of work, and I still do. However, now, I have redefined how that work gets done. When I worked in the corporate world, much of my meaning came from the definition of the exchange of work and time for a paycheck that I earned from my employer every two weeks. As an example, I got a lot of meaning out of teaching and coaching, so I tried to include tasks, both in my core job, as well as other projects I took on at work, to include coaching and teaching. This helped me significantly enjoy my time at companies I worked for, but over time, I began to realize that was no longer going to serve me in the best way.
Now, as an entrepreneur/soloprenuer, I still look to get meaning out of coaching and teaching, and those things still very much level up to my purpose, but because I am essentially my employer as an entrepreneur, the possibilities of how I can work to get meaning are essentially boundless. As a result, I feel that I’ve 10x’ed the number of ways to find meaning in the work I do. This has allowed me to be creative about how I cultivate meaning from the work I do and that aligns to my overall purpose, which makes for a richer, and more fulfilling life.
Meaning and purpose get thrown around a lot, but taking the time to define what they are to you at this moment is a great first step in the journey. From there, take the time to think about work and career in the context of your life, to determine what kind of purpose or meaning you want to get out of your job. We all have one life to live, that is ours and uniquely ours to make the most out of. Taking time and space to define how to best do that ensures we live a life that fulfills us, and is on purpose and full of meaning.
Further Resources on Meaning, Purpose and It’s intersection with work
Have a great week!
Al