Most often, when people think about purpose, they imagine something far into the future. Something they have to sacrifice their present—through working hard, sucking it up, paying dues, etc.—to attain. But that’s not the only way, and often not even the best way, to live a purposeful life.
I’ve seen over and over again how doing the work to clarify what you want, and then orienting toward that vision increases your odds of achieving your goals, whatever they might be. But purpose, as a tool, is actually not a destination but a spectrum. On one side of that spectrum, purpose can be a future end to which you subordinate the present, and on the other, a present to which you subordinate the future.
And rather than skewing hard to either pole, it’s possible to find your own Goldilocks Zone somewhere between them.
The Limitations of Purpose
I was recently a part of a T-group with a half dozen founders of high growth companies, in which we were each instructed to introduce ourselves using two items—one representing something that we wanted to lean into and one representing something we wanted to let go of.
When it was my turn, I held up a limited edition KITH branded G-Shock in white and blue and told the group it represented what I wanted to let go of. I explained how I bought the watch off StockX for more than it was worth. How I used to run a company, and how each time we hit a revenue milestone, or raised money, or celebrated a significant achievement, I’d buy a watch.
Why I wanted to let go of this, I explained, was that when I opened the drawer where I kept the watches, nearly a dozen of them, I couldn’t for the life of me remember the moments they were meant to commemorate. I’d been so fixated on the goals in front of me, the purpose I was chasing in the future, that I’d forgotten what it was I spent all that money to remind myself of.
In my experience, this is a common way of relating to purpose. You figure out the impact you want to make in the future, and then paint that picture in your mind to generate the creative tension necessary to close the gap between your present and future. This is an incredibly effective way of building things. Careers, businesses, lives. Here’s the end we want to create, therefore here’s what we should do now. Activity in pursuit of a purpose far into the future is telic (a fun word I just learned), meaning it has an end. You engage in the activity to produce an outcome. The outcome, the ending, is the point. The process is the means to that end.
For most of (early) life this makes all the sense in the world, which is why future-orientedness has become synonymous with the idea of purpose. The problem is that, in the best case, you get that future. But then it becomes the present, the goalposts move, and all that you’ve sacrificed for is subordinated to yet another future. And around and around you go on the hedonic treadmill, chasing ends all the way until the only possible end of ends.
The Possibility of an Intentionally-Designed Present
But this isn’t the only way purpose can work. Purpose can also be present-oriented.
When I finished explaining the symbolism of the watch, I showed the group a 9/12” sketch pad. It was filled with drawings of shapes, hands, candy bars, dozens of things I’d been looking at. I wanted to lean into sketching, I explained, simply because I liked doing it. I liked the feeling when I got a line just right, or when a landscape actually looked like a landscape. I liked seeing images come to life on a page.
I didn’t show the group any of my drawings when I told them that the sketchbook was what I wanted more of in my life. The results weren’t the point. I don’t draw to have a drawing, and certainly not to be productive (as an average artist I couldn’t have made a buck off a drawing if I’d tried), but for the process of creating itself. For me, sketching is atelic (an activity without an end).
Our consumerist culture doesn’t talk about it often or well, but purpose, one of the most effective ways to consciously orient your life, can be focused on the process (the present) as well.
Not that it should, but it can.
Present-Oriented Purpose in Action
Since most of us were never trained to focus on the present, it can take a bit to orient this way. What does present-oriented purpose look like anyway? How might it work?
In much the same way as we use the traditional concept of purpose, present-oriented purpose starts by choosing something you want. Only instead of choosing something in the future, you choose something in the present. A way of life that you enjoy, now, and that you’d like to experience more of in your life.
When I began considering a present-oriented purpose for my own life, I started with the idea that I wanted to be more present. After 10+ years chasing results, I decided that nothing was more important to me than fully inhabiting each moment. I wanted to notice and experience my life as it happened rather than “get sh*t done” and accumulate meaningless keepsakes. That was my purpose. To be fully awake to my life.
Then I figured out which future would serve that present. I took inventory of the times I felt most alive, the most awake to my life, and unearthed three insights about myself: I felt most awake when I was helping good people with things that mattered, when I was writing about things that mattered, and when I was with the people who mattered most to me. So it became clear that the future I wanted to create would be one in which I got to spend most of my time doing those things. And by building toward that future, I would maximize my chances of achieving the purpose I wanted: being awake to my life in the present moment. And in the next present moment, and the next.
But what about impact?
As American philosopher William James observed, “The greatest use of a life is to spend it on something that will outlast it.” Knowing that I wanted above all to be awake to my life in the present, I wondered, “Does that mean I have to sacrifice making an impact?”
No. Even the impact you want to make on the world can be anchored in the present. It can be, as startup coach and author Jerry Colonna says, “good work, done well, for the right reasons.”
Part of me still finds appealing an audacious, future-oriented purpose like “build the largest executive coaching firm in