Practicing purpose can infuse our lives with a profound sense of fulfillment. For many, it’s an essential part of leading a thriving life.
Yet, we can also overprioritize purpose. We convince ourselves that our lives cannot be meaningful unless we are in a constant state of service, unless our contribution is the only thing we care about. Or we feel the need to constantly make our purpose bigger, more impactful, or more visible to the world. Or we agonize over whether we’ve truly found our “true” or “highest” purpose. If held like this, purpose can be a prison of our own making.
Because of that, even as I extol the virtues of purpose in other pieces, it feels important to right-size it in our minds. That way, we can orient to purpose in a way that enlivens, focuses, and fulfills rather than suffocates and imprisons.
So let me be crystal clear: There’s a lot more to life than purpose. Pursuing purpose alone often makes us suffer needlessly while actually undermining our impact and sense of fulfillment. So let’s examine different pursuits that help us cultivate thriving lives.
1. Purpose: The gateway to fulfillment
We can think of purpose in many different ways. We can think of it as our motivation for the work we do, our why. We can also think of it as the practical endeavor of contributing something to the world, the what and how.
However, purpose can also simply be a felt experience, a sense of focus and fulfillment. If I’m filled with purpose, it means I am dedicated to some project that I believe offers my life meaning. When we pursue purpose, we are perhaps ultimately trying to cultivate that feeling of focus and fulfillment that comes from knowing what our lives mean to us and believing that they contribute something meaningful to others.
Purpose is what allows us to feel that our lives matter to ourselves and others. It’s the gateway to fulfillment.
2. Passion: The gateway to aliveness
Passion is an essential element of purpose. Purpose is passion plus service. In this case, by passion, I mean the sense of aliveness and inspiration one gets by doing what one truly loves. We all have our passions: the things in life that we most love to do and experience. Passion is simply the experience of doing those things.
While passion is a key ingredient of purpose, it also thrives in the absence of purpose. We might get that sense of aliveness and inspiration by going on a walk through the woods on a beautiful day, listening to music, playing our favorite video game, engaging with a friend, having sex, or any number of things.
I believe we experience our lives as most meaningful when we pursue passion both within our purpose work and simply for its own sake. In pursuing passion for passion’s sake, we fill our own cups so we have the resourcing needed to do our purpose work. But perhaps more than that, we practice loving our lives and loving ourselves. If purpose is our gift to the world. Passion is our gift to ourselves.
Passion is what inspires us to do something meaningful in the world. It’s the gateway to aliveness.
3. Presence: The gateway to peace
Presence is perhaps the very bedrock of a thriving life. Some use this word to convey a sense of gravitas one can exude. When someone is self-assured, calm, and powerful in how they carry themselves, we say they have presence. That is not what I mean here. Rather, presence in this sense is the capacity to be with, attune to, accept, and embrace all that is in the present moment. This kind of presence is typically what people intend to cultivate when they practice meditation or mindfulness.
So often, we spend our lives in our minds, obsessed with some future goal or ruminating over past pain. Through presence, we untangle ourselves from the past and future and simply rejoice in the here and now. We distance our selves from our minds and find respite and freedom in the expansiveness of our being. We realize that every experience and state of being we yearn for is available right in this very moment.
Presence is what allows us to unburden ourselves from the weight of the world. It is the gateway to peace.
There’s a lot more to life than purpose
I think of presence, passion, and purpose as three concentric circles. The pursuit of purpose falls within our pursuit of passion. In other words, if something doesn’t evoke our passion, it’s not purpose. Similarly, we might also think of passion as falling with presence. If it doesn’t bring us more into the present moment, it’s not passion.
However, we might also think of these circles as defining the limitations of these pursuits. Our purpose work is limited by our capacity for passion. The more we cultivate our passion, the more fully we can experience the fulfillment of purpose. Similarly, our passion is limited by our capacity for presence. The more we cultivate our presence, the more passion can blossom within us.
So here’s my invitation: If you spend so much of your life trying to serve the world that it no longer feels enlivening or fulfilling, allow yourself to do whatever it is that you love most for its own sake. And if you spend so much of your life trying to do something in order to experience life as meaningful or fun, give yourself the permission to simply be in and rejoice in this moment without having to do anything at all.
Always remember: If your purpose work is not helping you feel alive, inspired, and fulfilled in the here and now, it’s not really purpose. But perhaps more importantly, there’s a lot more to life than purpose. For your own health and wellness and the efficacy of your purpose work, let yourself do what you truly love for its own sake. And then, let yourself do nothing at all. Purpose alone can never capture the full beauty and goodness that life has to offer you.
More from the Purpose 101 series
What does it mean to be purpose-driven?
You can skip the Hero’s Journey
The magical harmony of inner purpose and outer purpose
What is purpose? Purpose = passion + service.
Claim your change agent archetype
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Peter Schulte
Purpose Coach
Bellingham WA, USA / Lummi & Nooksack lands
Purpose statement: I reveal a world of beauty and goodness