Clarify your Purpose, Passion, Meaning and Mission in life.
By understanding their actual differences.
Defining and differentiating between purpose, passion, meaning, and mission continues to be a challenge for anyone who thinks about such things. They are undoubtedly confusing terms because they have overlapping intentions and interpretations. What does the word meaning mean? And what does purpose have to do with following your passion? To complicate matters, we hear that someone is on a mission and wonder how that fits everything else.
I will argue that these terms are hierarchical and need to be approached and contemplated in a specific order. The hierarchy demonstrates itself well as levels of a pyramid that build upon each other:
Meaning. The Why
Meaning is why you care about something.
Outside of man’s main concern of avoiding pain and pursuing pleasure, he, above all, seeks meaning to his life and is ready and willing to suffer for it, on the condition, to be sure, it has a potential purpose. — Viktor Frankl
At the pyramid's base is meaning, and it provides our lives with a base, structure, and framework. Its function is to ask one fundamental question:
Why do I care?
Let’s begin with the assumption that feelings of meaninglessness have become one of the deadliest epidemics besetting humanity, so it’s imperative to find meaningful things in our lives.
How many of us saunter through life doing what others wish of us or conforming by doing what others do? Often, we lack a clear orientation to guide our thoughts and behaviours, so we remain lost, evidenced by our poor choices. We live in an age where we have enough to live by but nothing to live for. In other words, we have the means to live but not the meaning.
A Nihilist would argue that the universe is a random entity void of meaning and purpose. However, even if this were true, we are still not denied the capacity to assign meaning to things in our lives because life can be potentially meaningful under almost any condition.
Pro tip: It is meaningful if you care about it.
Building the base: How to find meaning in your life.
Step one: Start by writing a list of anything and everything you care about in this world. Don't overthink this step, and note what naturally comes to you.
Step two: Ask yourself why each thing in your list is meaningful to you. By asking why and providing the answer, you immediately assign it a reason, and when you assign a reason, you justify it. These meanings and justifications for why something is meaningful will become your raison d’être. (reason for being).
Step three: Once you have reasons assigned to why you care about certain things in your life, you can start to develop a picture of who you are as a person by the things you care about most in life. Connect the dots and look for patterns, similarities and connections, etc.
Clearly defined meanings that are justifiable help explain your brand, reputation, and legacy. Example — Brenda likes cats, and as such, she finds cats meaningful because she loves animals. Meanings make up our identities and define and explain how other people see us.
Five areas to find meaning in your life.
- Recognize what inspires you. Become mindful of the things that motivate you to take action to do something. Inspiration can be highly motivational and are clues to some of the things you care about in life.
- Check-in with your responsibilities. Another clue to help discover what is meaningful in your life is to list all of your responsibilities. Don't include extrinsic duties — ones you don't care about, like a dead-end job you wouldn't mind if you got fired tomorrow. When you consider all of your responsibilities that do matter, you'll find some things you intrinsically care about.
- Your sufferings and struggles. Suicide is the impulse to take one's life because suffering becomes too great due to not identifying what is meaningful and worth living for. Self-pity is a dead-end road, so you can choose to leverage your battles and turn them to your benefit. In his book, Man's Search for Meaning, Frankl points out, "There is no greater shame than not being worthy of your sorrows and accepting the challenge to suffer bravely for it. No one can relieve us from our suffering or suffer in our place. We have a unique opportunity in how we bear our burdens because everyone's struggle is different, and their acknowledgement of the responsibility for their suffering and struggle."
- Your interests, hobbies, or passions: Interests, hobbies and passions stem from your most primal inclinations. They are the things you can't stop yourself from doing, the things you are unconsciously willing to suffer and make sacrifices. Passion grips your attention and immerses you in a state of flow so profoundly that you lose the sense of the passage of time. It's where your time, energy and finances flow. You cannot choose what interests you in life because life picks it for you.
- Your desires. Your desires are an obvious clue to help determine what is meaningful in your life. But be careful you’re not building a house of cards. Desire often amounts to nothing more than superficial gratifications and pursuits of pleasure. Hedonistic desires are insignificant when the desire is for fame, status, recognition, or money because these reasons don’t have the necessary substance to build a solid purpose.
When we inevitably become lost, demotivated, or resentful with life, we can routinely remind ourselves what is meaningful by asking, What do I care about and why?
However, the struggle with meaning is figuring out what to do with it once we determine what is meaningful. Meaning is why you intrinsically care about something, but it doesn’t tell you what to do with it. That’s what the next level of the pyramid is about; Purpose.
Organizations with strong “whys” or meanings have consistently outperformed the S&P 500 by 8:1
He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how — Friedrich Nietzsche
Purpose: The What.
Purpose is what you decide to do in life.
People strive for meaning and to matter in life, however, human behaviour is directional and goal-oriented, so we also require a purpose in life — something we can do, and ideally, what we do should also be meaningful.
The objective is to identify worthwhile meanings because purpose cannot happen until we first understand what we care about and why.
Meaning is a conceptual construct and exists only as potential. Without purpose, meaning is a waste because it is never actualized. Purpose requires you to take something meaningful and do something with it.
A Purpose is a tangible expression of meaningfulness.
We inevitably choose a role when we do something meaningful. For example, if we love animals and find them meaningful, we might assign ourselves the role of a dog walker, zookeeper, or veterinarian. So, it's critical to find a part in a particular field, niche or opportunity that stems from your natural inclinations, inspirations, interests, responsibilities, desires— or, as I outlined above, the areas you can look for meaning.
A high-level example that illustrates the hierarchy is Steve Jobs, the late founder and CEO of Apple Computers. He found the simplicity of things, art, design, and the concept of reductionism meaningful. The tangible expression of this was making computers simple to use and aesthetically and functionally pleasing — His role or purpose was to become the CEO and visionary of Apple Computers.
When you discover a purpose firmly grounded in meaning, you inherently begin to develop unique skills and abilities that make you good enough to further fuel your motivation, meaning, and purpose. Eventually, you will advance to the third pyramid level, Passion.
Passion: The When.
Passion happens only when you get good at something.
Passion is the third level in the hierarchy simply because nobody begins with a passion. It can only develop over time and happens when you have sufficient experience and get sufficiently good at whatever you do. In his book, So Good They Can't Ignore You, author Cal Newport calls this experience 'career capital.' His premise rejects the idea that all you have to do is follow your passion, and his conclusions for this are threefold: Passion is rare, passion takes time, and passion is a result of mastery. In other words, passion is about being around long enough to get good at what you do by developing rare and valuable skills over time.
When you choose a meaningful purpose and spend enough time getting good at it, it becomes almost impossible not to get passionate about it. You develop a love that grows, and if you continue to grow your passion, your purpose has the potential to evolve into a mission.
Mission: The How.
A mission is how you direct your aim or purpose.
If passion is when and purpose is what, and meaning is why then the mission is the how. Missions are not specific milestones or tasks, but like meanings, they are an idealistic construct about how to execute a purpose. Missions reside at the top of the pyramid and represent the culmination of intense passion, backed by a clear focus of purpose that one believes in meaningfully.
Missions are the pinnacle of a hyper-focused intention that transcends one's wants and needs by allowing others to rally and participate. Missions are what you ultimately stand for as a person, and it’s how you build mindshare with other people.
Pro tip: A mission is unsustainable until it becomes compelling enough to be meaningful and purposeful to others.
According to Robert Greene in his book, Human Nature, aiming at a mission or cause provides a force multiplier when connected to a purpose. Your purpose will have an incredible impact when backed by a mission or cause. It's important to note that missions can't be fake, and it is a dead giveaway to spot a company or individual who isn’t genuinely vested in their mission because it will be evident that they have no passion. Passion predicates getting good at something, so you should suspect someone’s level of competency if they lack passion.
Nobody gets to skip straight to a life mission without first building mastery of purpose. Missions manifest from mastery: when you are at the top of your game, on the cutting edge, thinking out of the box and looking where no one else is looking, you become open and receptive to dedicate yourself to a mission.
Pro tip: People can have the exact same purposes but completely different missions.
Steve Jobs's mission for Apple was "To contribute to the world by making tools for the mind that advance humankind." The mission is a specific idealistic vision backed by Steve's purpose as CEO, to make computers simple and aesthetically pleasing, supported by what he found meaningful (his why) for art, simplicity, design, and reductionism — the pyramid hierarchy at work. Top performers are always on the lookout for a mission, crusade, or cause that grants them a powerful reason to succeed and become more motivated to act and achieve their goals.
How you express your purpose is through a clear and compelling mission.
Hopefully, I've helped clarify the differences between purpose, passion, meaning and mission and have demonstrated how the hierarchal pyramid concept is greater than the sum of its parts.
We all want and need a worthwhile purpose — to matter and feel like we’ve contributed to something meaningful. So, it is no surprise that one of our biggest struggles in life is striving for what we believe we should still become. To unlock our full potential, we have first to identify what is uniquely meaningful to each of us and find an actionable purpose that expresses our meanings. If we stick with it long enough, we develop a deep love for what we are doing and, ultimately, find a specific cause that can define our life's work.
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Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, Thinker Boy and are more opinionated than factual and not intended as, and shall not be understood or construed as, professional advice.
