LINK: You Don’t Find Your Purpose — You Build It

LINK: You Don’t Find Your Purpose — You Build It

Over at HBR, John Coleman addresses three misconceptions about purpose:

1. Purpose is only a thing you find.
2. Purpose is a single thing.
3. Purpose is stable over time.

My favorite quote from the article:

In achieving professional purpose, most of us have to focus as much on making our work meaningful as in taking meaning from it. Put differently, purpose is a thing you build, not a thing you find.

And regarding it’s ok to change your purpose:

This evolution in our sources of purpose isn’t flaky or demonstrative of a lack of commitment, but natural and good. Just as we all find meaning in multiple places, the sources of that meaning can and do change over time. My focus and sense of purpose at 20 was dramatically different in many ways than it is now, and the same could be said of almost anyone you meet.

A quick and insightful And read.

Nintendo's mission

Reggie Fils-Aime, Nintendo of America’s President and COO, comments on their mission and their new product, Nintendo Labo, in the latest press release:

Nintendo Labo continues our longstanding mission of making people smile by surprising them with new experiences... It is an exciting evolution of the Nintendo Switch platform – one designed to inspire curiosity, creativity and imagination in people of all ages.

Did you know Nintendo is a 129-year old company?

Wow.

Purpose of a Taxi Driver

I came across this article in The November 2017 issue of Inc Magazine. It had stories about how travel was a source of inspiration for big ideas. It included stories from Tatcha, Lyft, TOMS, and Warby Parker.

What caught my eye was this episode of the founder of Tatcha (a cosmetic company) during her trip in Japan.

I spent my first day in Kyoto. The hotel assigned me a driver named Toide-san. He took me around to all these different temples--but I kept throwing up, because I was pregnant. Halfway through the day, I asked him to drop me back at my hotel, where I went to sleep.

She continues:

When I woke up that evening, there was a package waiting for me from Toide-san. Instead of picking up another ride, he had spent the afternoon burning CDs of every picture he had ever taken of Kyoto, before bringing them back to my hotel. He'd left a note: "Since you couldn't see Kyoto, I brought Kyoto to you." That was the day I fell in love with Japan.

Wow.