The purpose mapping
Purpose is a feeling
before it’s a plan.
Chapter 10 opened this. Here it is in full. It takes about fifteen minutes, it works best with a cup of something, and nothing you type ever leaves your browser.
First, about that famous diagram.
You have seen it. Four circles. What you love, what you are good at, what the world needs, what you can be paid for. Sitting in the middle, the word ikigai.
It is worth knowing where it came from. The diagram was drawn by Andrés Zuzunaga in 2011, and he labelled the centre Purpose. In 2014 Marc Winn swapped that word for Ikigai and published it. It travelled around the world in that costume.
It is not a bad map. But look at what it asks of you. Four questions, four answers, all of them from the head, and one of them wants to know what you can be paid for before you have even found the thing.
We are going to start somewhere else. Not with a question you have to answer. With evidence you already have.
Tonight,
make the list.
Your bike-store moments.
Not your achievements.
Your achievements
can sit this one out.
The moments
the glow showed up.
However small.
Especially small.
Way Back No. 10
One of five · the moments
Five moments the glow showed up.
Not the proud ones. The ones where you lost track of time and felt like yourself. Helping someone move. Teaching the thing. Fixing something for your mother. Feeding a stranger.
Small is better. Small is harder to fake.
Two of five · the verb
Now, what were you actually doing?
For each one, one plain verb phrase. Not the job title. The action. “Explaining it until it landed.” “Carrying the heavy end.” “Sitting with her.”
Three of five · the pattern
Here they are, side by side.
This is the part the book asked you to do alone. The page will not tell you what it means. It will only put them where you can see them at once, and show you which words you used more than once.
Four of five · the sentence
One sentence, in your own words.
Not a mission statement. Nobody has ever been moved by a mission statement. Just the shape of the thing you keep doing when you are most yourself.
I am most myself when I am for .
If the second box is hard, that is worth noticing. Purpose that has nobody on the other end of it tends to go quiet.
Five of five · this week
One thing, this week.
A feeling that never becomes a direction stays a feeling. So make it small enough that you will actually do it, and give it a day.
Yours
Nothing here is sent anywhere. Every word stays in this browser, on this device, and it is kept only so you can close the tab and come back to it. Clear everything removes it for good. There is no account, and nothing to sign.