Sometimes when we talk to people, they have the attitude that making a difference in the world is about giving back, volunteering, or random acts of kindness. We have a different view. Let’s talk about it.
When we care about something deeply, it’s not good enough that we just dabble in it occasionally. That would be like me saying, “I love my wife, that’s why I’d like to visit with her about once a year or so.” That statement just isn’t congruent.
Instead, we will want to dive headlong into the thing about which we are passionate. For example, perhaps we don’t want to live in a world where there is child abuse. If we really care about this, we will want to spend hours each week looking for ways to end child abuse. After a while, we would gain a lot of mastery around this. We wouldn’t be merely interested in child abuse issues. We would become an expert in it.
Mastery and purpose go together. When we discover purpose for our life, and we live it with intention, we will naturally become expert in it and gain deep mastery over time. Approaching from the other side, when we pour our life into something, which we often do, there’s an inner need for it to be about something meaningful. Gaining mastery in collecting and knowing desk trinkets, for example, doesn’t lead to deep satisfaction.
We all have an innate drive to be self-directed in an area of meaning and purpose and to gain mastery in it. The trouble is we live in a sea of mixed messages, some telling us we’ll be happy if we buy something, others telling us that meaning and purpose don’t exist, and yet others telling us to just be happy that we’re alive.
But when you’re at work, you feel it. You want your work to matter. You want to be given autonomy in how you accomplish your work. And if these two are in place, you want to get better and better at it.
The first step is to determine purpose. What meaningful endeavor do you want to pour you’re whole life into?
