Purpose Doesn’t Get Found. It Has Its Way With You.
לעילוי נשמת הילארי
Most leadership advice about purpose treats it like a plaque you mount on the wall.
Find your why. Define your mission. Align your goals. Craft a statement and hang it where everyone can see it. The framing is acquisitional: purpose as a thing you commission, finish, and display.
The framing is wrong.
I’ve been sitting with a passage from Bob Anderson and Bill Adams’ Mastering Leadership. Anderson is describing how he found his own work, looking back over thirty-five years. I used to think that I was stalking my longing, he writes. I realize now that the longing was stalking me the whole time.
Then the instruction:
Practice paying attention to what your life is trying to tell you about who you are and what you are here to do. Exercise the courage to submit to the purpose that wants to have its way with your life.
The word that breaks it open is submit.
We don’t talk that way about purpose. We talk about choosing it, owning it, driving it. Submit sounds like surrender, and we have been trained to think surrender is the opposite of leadership.
It isn’t.
We don't find our purpose. It guides us. It's built in. The work of leading yourself, and leading other people, is about harnessing that purpose, that energy that drives you. Noticing what's already pulling. Following what you keep returning to even when the strategy says don't. Paying attention to the version of the work you do when no one's watching and no one's measuring. That’s where the why lives.
This is the premise my work is built on: the capacities you need are already in you, buried under noise, speed, and survival patterns, not absent. The trick is to be present enough to hear what’s humming.
I had a colleague and friend who fought for inclusion, belonging, equity, and justice with a force most people couldn't match. She died this week, too young. She lived and breathed this. She didn't just think it or talk about it. She did it. Some people pushed back. She didn't back down. And her purpose encompassed so much.
As I reflect with those who knew her well, I am realizing how fundamental her example has been to my growth and to this work. I found my purpose in helping people and systems who are carrying more than they can metabolize at work, and I wanted them to see and understand how to make real progress, together.
If you’ve been on the search to nail down your purpose and you don’t feel any closer to what’s actually moving you, I’d offer a different starting point.
Stop asking what your purpose should be.
Pay attention to what keeps pulling you. The conversations you keep returning to. The work you do when no one is paying you to do it. The thing you find yourself saying out loud that you didn’t plan to say. The version of yourself that shows up when the room finally goes quiet.
That’s not a purpose statement. That’s purpose, doing what it does. Already underway. Already shaping you.
Anderson and Adams again:
Purpose is something bestowed — and received. It arises in our lives and in us. We must notice it and inquire what it wants from us. It is something we receive and to which we surrender.