Finding your ‘why’: How to dig deep and define your purpose | Dan Cable | Big Think

It seems that this concept of purpose is uniquely human. It's a really interesting one; it's this idea of having an answer to the why of what we do. We know that that is one of the activators of the seeking system. We know that the concept of looking for the outcome or the effect of our behavior is something that our seeking system is urging us to do.

But it's also interesting to take a step back from that and just think about how all of us have stories running around in our brains about why we do what we do. For example, if I'm talking to a class, I sometimes would say to them, "You know, what are you doing right now?" It's possible to think about sitting. A lot of times when I'm teaching a class full of MBAs or executives, they're all sitting, and that would be a truthful answer.

But they also could say, "I'm listening." If they're listening, that's a slightly different story because it moves the emphasis off the bum and into the ear and engages the brain a little bit. But they also could say, "I'm learning." The idea of learning is a bit different again because that implies that I'm listening to what you're saying, but I'm also comparing it to what I used to believe and that I'm deciding if I need to do any updating on what I believe.

You also could say, "I'm trying to learn how to be a better leader so that I could ignite the people that I lead." Each one of these is just a different purpose. They can all be true; they all have the opportunity to be a true story in our brain. But we, as humans, have the ability to shift that focus. Sometimes at work, especially menial work that we feel is repetitive, we start to think about the behaviors.

So when somebody says, "What are you doing?" they might say, "What do I do at work? I put these screws on that machine." Or, "What do I do at work? I process this film and I clip this out and I upload it." Those are the behaviors of the work. You also can think about the why at work: "What do I do? I delight by putting this film online that they can watch and enjoy." Or, "What do I do? I built an automobile, which is a piece of equipment that moves 80 to 100 miles an hour."

Those can all be true stories, but what we're finding is that a lot of the time this sense of purpose, the higher-order purpose, is lost. It's lost and it's nudged out by the lower-level "What do I do with my body all day long?" The evidence and the research suggest that when we think about our work as a set of scripted behaviors that we do in a repetitive way, we lose stamina and we lose resilience.

When we think of it at a high level of control—the why of the work, meaning what is the impact, the final result of this on the world—it really makes our stamina higher and makes us much more resilient to difficulties in accomplishing that effect.

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