The Humility of Purpose

Sometimes I tremble like a storm-swept flower,
And seek to hide my tortured soul from thee,
Bowing my head in deep humility
Before the silent thunder of thy power.

Claude McKay, Poetry

Working for purpose teaches us lessons we cannot find in any other domain. The challenges of adding value in problems of purpose teach us humility, managing change with deep compassion, and how to stretch collaborative creation to its limits.

Purpose is the sense that your work delivers value for others. That may be traditional benefits for customers, but for many importantly extends to others such as the disadvantaged or community as a whole.

Start a small commercial business to solve a customer’s problem and you are shareholder, director and executive. You are the agent of your own path. The work is by no means easy and success is not guaranteed but you are your own boss. Success criteria are relatively clear and in your control. Rewards also accrue directly to your efforts.

Problems of social purpose can be tougher to understand, measure and solve. The systems at play, complex interactions and stakeholder dynamics can be far more complicated. The decision making criteria involve far more than profit and loss. Some even may be wicked problems that government and society have been struggling to solve for years, like the Indigenous Expectations Gap in Australia. These problems aren’t addressed by the clever decision making of a single talented individual. These problems have already humbled too many enthusiastic and heroic change agents.

Throw all your smarts, energy, talent and enthusiasm at a problem of purpose and it will teach you humility. From outright failure to ongoing rejection of work by the stakeholders you are seeking to benefit, the paths to learn your limits keep expanding before you.

The stories of failure in work of purpose are many. Whether it is well-meaning charity that threatens local economic activity, unintended consequences of compassion or just lack of understanding lack of community engagement, clever people working hard to make a difference often don’t.

For example, trying to reduce incidence of diabetes in indigenous communities involves more than a knee jerk idea of better diet. The issue is woven into wider indigenous health challenges, household structures, social interactions, community expectations of shared property, income cycles, and many more issues. This is not a problem solved by tackling education or food preparation.

These are no problems of purpose solved by an individual acting alone no matter how great their characteristics. Purpose only occurs in and works for a wider community and demands solutions that engage teams and the wider community working together. Work on purpose because of its collaborative, compassionate and community-focused nature pushes us to go beyond the patterns of our past successes, to seek new insights from others, and to reflect on the limits of the traditional heroic mode of work.

Creating greater value in purposeful work involves having the humility to accept that progress will be hard, solutions will be newly created with many authors, and that many more stakeholders should be involved in designing and measuring success to capture all the elements of the systems at work.

Don’t be daunted by the prospect that purposeful work might set you back. See it as an opportunity to learn beyond the limits of your own ego. What you learn in that work will have impacts on many other domains of your life. Despite the many frustrations, purposeful work is incredibly rewarding.

loving-others-to-death—
as Chekhov put it, "compassion
down to your fingertips"—
looking on them as into the sun

Michael Ryan, Reminder