The Common Thread – ElPropósito4 min de lectura

The coherence of purpose

Photo by Bozhin Karaivanov on Unsplash

How do purpose and meaning relate? I’ve long admired how much weight many leaders give to their organization’s pillars: values, vision, mission, promise and so on. The big question is why spend so much time on it, or why someone devotes so much of their day to talking about it. Notice how many speeches and social media posts open with something like "guided by our values, today we wrap up this wonderful project that will put us at the forefront of…". Or how, whenever a company starts shaping its current or future strategy, it checks whether its vision still holds, whether it’s still in the same business (its mission), or whether the need to innovate will take it somewhere new. What does all of this have to do with a common thread of meaning and purpose?

One of the great challenges we face today, more than any shortage, is the need to find meaning in what we do. Entrepreneurs, established business owners and organizations of every kind need coherence between their actions and the results they expect down the road. That space is a frame of reference with clear rules, where everything that happens is connected, personally and organizationally. That’s what I mean when I say an organization needs to define its purpose clearly: the ultimate end that gives meaning to everything it does in the world.

The same goes for each of us. As individuals, we need a thread running from what we do to an ultimate end, our purpose. When something outside us decides how we should feel or what we should do with our lives, and we accept it, it wipes out any meaning we might want to give our lives. It erases our individual purpose and the freedom we’re born with to fulfill it. It’s a kind of existential lobotomy we let someone else perform, and sadly, in most cases, there’s no way back.

Finding the meaning of life, or the purpose I so enjoy writing about, matters enormously. Nobody can do it for us, and we certainly can’t copy it from someone else. We have to hold firm to the values of life and freedom, a freedom that lets us discover why we’re on this planet (to do good, without a doubt, though good and evil are a topic for another post). Once we find that answer, we’ll have the thread that carries us to the end of our days, having done everything with the moral coherence our purpose provides.

Our purpose is a call to action to do everything life expects of us. The opposite is waiting for someone else to take charge of what we have to do and ought to do (that central planner who provides everything and knows everything). The biggest lie is expecting someone else to hand us the thread of our own life. One of life’s great truths is that we’re called to know our purpose. Whether we follow it is another story. Either way, knowing it and living by it are both in our hands.

Can the thread break over a lifetime? Yes, when we stop living by our purpose. Does the thread change over a lifetime? No. The spool is the same, so the purpose is the same, and most interesting of all, the length of the thread is the same too. It’s worth stopping to ask how much we’ve used, how much is left, or whether we’ve used it at all. What do we weave with it? The short answer: our life. The longer answer: the cloak, the great work we leave behind at the end, made of every single stitch. It will show every change of thread and color, and even the stretches where the cloak kept growing with no stitches at all (perhaps because we were alive without following our purpose).

What’s the thread of your life?

Warm regards and all the best,

Rodrigo Baccaro

Author: Rodrigo Baccaro

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