How to Serve a Purpose

If we serve a purpose, we’re serving someone’s need: their “ends.”

There cannot be a purpose without an unmet need.

And there cannot be a meaning without a plan to meet a need.

(See Pragmatic Marketing’s “market problems” and Competing Against Luck’s “Jobs to be done”)

So let me be clear:

• Purpose = the needs someone or something meets, including its own. Anything and anyone can serve many ends, often without knowing it.
• Meaning = the needs someone or something was meant to meet, including its own. Anyone can plan for anything to be a means to their ends.

What does this look like in practice?

Take your laptop — you picked it up because you meant to get some work done, but you ended up fiddling around on Medium. It was meant to help you work, but ended up serving the purpose of educational distraction.

Photo credit: Daniel Korpai

Let’s take that bigger.

In a pure hypothetical, imagine there is no higher purpose to life. You were born because your parents were lonely and wanted to Belong to someone new. This was your meaning to them.

But you grew up, and you had your own needs that you worked to meet. You found others whose needs you met. You served purpose beyond your meaning.

Since meaning comes from minds and you have a mind, you built your own new meaning. This was probably difficult for your parents to watch (and they probably didn’t know why).

You redefined yourself, providing a new meaning and new purposes to serve.

Photo credit: Kristopher Roller

Your destiny is iterative — you are constantly fulfilling it, changing it, and creating it.

There is no limit to the purposes we serve or the meanings we have. You’ll often hear about people seeking the meaning of life, as if there was one.

There is not one meaning of your life, let alone all life ever.

Each life serves as a means to many ends, sometimes its own. Each life serves many purposes, sometimes its own.

You will never know which or how many purposes you served. Whether you are or aren’t part of some bigger plan, you’re integral to the plans of so many other beautiful humans.

Your meaning is how they hope you’ll help them — your purpose is how you actually do.