Life is Life's Purpose
By Charlotte Cramer
Award-winning strategist, social entrepreneur, speaker and author of The Purpose Myth: Change the world, not your job.
Purpose isn’t as sexy as bloggers, podcasters, and self-help gurus would have you believe. As someone who has written a book on the subject of purpose, and spent just shy of four years doing so, most people expect that I have something revolutionary to say on the matter.
Maybe you’re hoping I have a simple yet mind-blowing formula, a worksheet, or an algorithm that can help you live a purposeful life in less than 20 minutes a day. I don’t. Sorry about that.
What I do have is a pragmatic simplification of this over-intellectualized idea of purpose: the purpose of our desire to find our life’s purpose is the purpose of life itself.
WTF? Let me break that down. Humans’ ultimate purpose is to create and sustain human life. All activities that elicit a sense of purpose are tied to the belief that by doing the said activity, human life can improve in some way. is is why humans are built with an intrinsic desire to feel a sense of purpose. From an evolutionary perspective, the desire for purpose keeps us alive and thriving. Purpose is just the middle-man.
We often assume that purpose is a singular goal. A thing to be discovered and found. Something fixed and unwavering.
A noun, almost. It may be more useful to think of purpose not as a noun but as a verb. at there are things we do that are purposeful. We do acts of purpose. At its core, purpose is really “a doing word”; as I recall my elementary-level teachers defining a verb. There is no purpose without action.
So if you want to live a more purposeful life, you may find it helpful to think of purpose not as a goal to be achieved but a thing to do day-to-day. Even so, you may feel you don’t know what this day-to-day type of purpose looks and feels like to you.
To find that answer, identify three things that you believe need to change to make human life better.
EG, decide on one action you can take to implement one of those changes into your life. Following that, you can think about how could you take that action and enable others to do it, too.
Trying to find your life’s purpose is a distraction from a purposeful life. Now you know what the purpose of life is, you can stop looking for it and start doing it.
