This series took two weeks off due to urgent travels, but we are back now. This week’s readings discuss Purpose and Meaning.
Fast Company interviewed several entrepreneurs who believe they have created businesses that mean something to their customers.
These are not just stories about underserved consumers; these are stories about people who could not get on with their jobs or their family lives because brands were not thinking about their needs. “These are stories shared by millions of people,” Walker says. “We take a very consumer-centric approach to our innovation. It’s not about building it and seeing if they come; it’s talking to them and knowing that they will come.”
LinkedIn’s founder Reid Hoffman writes about the power of purpose at work. Purpose not perks.
According to Imperative’s research, purpose-oriented employees are:
* 54 percent more likely to stay at a company for 5-plus years
* 30 percent more likely to be high performers
* 69 percent more likely to be Promoters on Bain & Company’s eNPS scale, which measures employee engagement and loyalty
So how to find one’s own true purpose? Help is at hand from several corners, as curated by Maria Popova. Here, Paul Graham on the false metric of “prestige”:
What you should not do, I think, is worry about the opinion of anyone beyond your friends. You shouldn’t worry about prestige. Prestige is the opinion of the rest of the world.
[…]
Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like.
[…]
Prestige is just fossilized inspiration. If you do anything well enough, you’ll make it prestigious. Plenty of things we now consider prestigious were anything but at first. Jazz comes to mind—though almost any established art form would do. So just do what you like, and let prestige take care of itself.
Prestige is especially dangerous to the ambitious. If you want to make ambitious people waste their time on errands, the way to do it is to bait the hook with prestige. That’s the recipe for getting people to give talks, write forewords, serve on committees, be department heads, and so on. It might be a good rule simply to avoid any prestigious task. If it didn’t suck, they wouldn’t have had to make it prestigious.
A lot of times, pursuing and even re-focusing on one’s own purpose means saying No. No is a full sentence. Here is an interesting, rambling piece by Tim Ferriss who is taking a break from investing in and advising startups, and may do the same for conferences, interviews etc.
To become “successful,” you have to say “yes” to a lot of experiments. To learn what you’re best at, or what you’re most passionate about, you have to throw a lot against the wall.
Once your life shifts from pitching outbound to defending against inbound, however, you have to ruthlessly say “no” as your default. Instead of throwing spears, you’re holding the shield.
On that business of saying “yes” to a lot of experiments, here is a bonus link — for one year, Shonda Rhimes said “yes” to everything. Here is how it started.
“My oldest sister said to me, ‘You never say yes to anything.’ And by that she meant I never accept any invitations,” Rhimes says. “I never go anywhere. I never do anything. All I did was go to work and come home. And she was right. My life had gotten really small. Once I sort of realized that she was right, I was going to say yes to all the things that scared me, that made me nervous, that freaked me out, that made me think I’m going to look foolish doing it. Anything that took me out of my comfort zone I was going to do it, if asked to do it.”