Why are you on this planet? Why are you in your position at your company or organization? Are you excited every morning when you wake up? Are you ready to get busy? If not, you might want to ask yourself why not.
Purpose is important. Not only for you but for all of the people in your company or organization. I find that living a purposeful life is critically important — not only to your career, but to your health, frame of mind, happiness and attitude.
When living with purpose you are living a life beyond typical measures of status in society like money, car, title or career.
Purpose stirs passion. For instance, if your purpose is serving the unbankable with bank services via a prepaid card like our teams plan for relaunching S&H GreenStamps, it creates passion, a passion to get this done, not only to help those you’re trying to help, but a passion to accomplish what you want to do. Or, maybe while listening to a call with the United Farm Workers you can feel the passion and energy built around providing this much needed service to farm workers who really need it.
What I’m saying is… passion creates energy, and energy is infectious — people will want to be around it and embrace it. Even get involved it.
When I look at any business, I spend a lot of time dissecting and determining where the gaps are. Looking for where the aspiration is.
For example, when we were looking at launching a new Organic and Natural Pet Food, we distilled it down to the protein source — primarily “rendered protein” which was in essence the sickest animals. Those full of antibiotics, that go into the rendering system, which is where the protein is basically separated from the fat and dried. This got us so upset that it became our rallying cry to eliminate rendered protein and replace it with natural and organic protein.
When launching Wild Oats in Wal-Mart, the idea of “Democratizing Organic” was a great rallying cry. I wanted to help make organics affordable and accessible to everyone — our purpose was clear, the availability of organic food should not depend on the size of your wallet. This purpose guides all the activities today of the Wild Oats brand.
So decide today what your purpose is. Don’t worry about whether or not it is your only purpose or what will happen if you change your mind later. Sure, you can change it anytime. But it’s important to begin to live with a purpose. It can make a big difference in your life. Just get started. Just put it down on paper and start living your purpose.
Do something every day toward your purpose. And oh, yea, don’t forget to have a bit of fun, too.
