Purpose is the commitment you set in front of you. Meaning is the sense you make of the life behind you. They are two different things, and almost every instruction you have been given confuses them.

The question everybody asks

People talk a lot about finding purpose, and I think it is absolutely a categorical mistake. Purpose is something that you create. Creating your own purpose can only be done by the individual, not by a coach.

That is easy to say and easy to dismiss as a coach’s paradox. It is neither. It follows from what the word has meant for two thousand years, and from what happened to the world that once made the other reading true.

What the word actually says

On the show I said the origin of purpose was moving forward onto a path, taking the first step. The argument was right and the derivation was a shortcut, so here is the accurate version.

The Latin is proponere: pro-, forward, forth, before, plus ponere, to put or to place. To set forth. To place before. Its noun, propositum, is a thing proposed or intended. The image of the path is mine, as for every journey, for every action, the first thing to do is to take one step, to set, to place your foot forth. And then do it again.

This is why the frame of finding one’s purpose is flawed. To ask for purpose is not to ask, “What is the universe telling me?” It is to ask, “What am I putting forward as a commitment?”

Meaning runs the other way. The English word comes from Old English mænan, to intend or to have in mind. Meaning gathers itself retrospectively, out of narrative, revised as new events unfold. Purpose looks forward and supplies propulsion. It is not, on its own, moral: a cartel has purpose, a fanatic has purpose. Meaning looks back and supplies sense.

To ask for purpose is not to ask what the universe is telling you. It is to ask what you are putting forward as a commitment.

How purpose lost its world

Purpose once belonged to a picture of nature, and later to a doctrine about God, that told you what a thing was for. Aristotle’s word is telos, the end proper to a kind of thing, worked out by reason and habit inside a community. It is not unique to you and it is not hidden inside you waiting to be dug out. Christianity kept the structure and moved the source: purpose became a vocation assigned from outside. Then the scientific revolution drained final causes out of nature, and the cosmos stopped being the sort of place that issues purposes to its inhabitants. The order went. The vocabulary stayed.

Into that vacancy arrives the product. Rick Warren in 2002, Simon Sinek in 2009: both selling with the authority of telos and the certainty of providence, while keeping neither the nature that made telos true nor the God that made providence binding.

Three readings of the word are now in circulation at once. Purpose as the word encodes it: something set forth, placed before oneself, carried by the language itself. Purpose as practical action: something toward which you direct yourself, revisable as the life goes on, continuous with the first. Purpose as the industry sells it: something already inside you, waiting to be discovered. The third is a late construction, read backwards into a word that never held it.

What follows from getting it the right way round

If purpose is something you construct over time, then not having located it at twenty-five, or at fifty, is the ordinary condition of a life still being authored. If purpose is something you discover, then failing to discover it is a personal deficiency. That is the industry saying, once again, that you are the problem.

A story we have been telling ourselves, and that was useful to us for five, ten, fifteen years, at some point is not useful anymore. That does not mean it was a bad story. It means things have changed and we need a new one. The question is not which direction was right. It is which direction I want to go now, knowing that it might change in two years.

What you find here is a very summarized version of a longer argument, not an exhaustive explanation. If you want to find out more, contact me at info@federicomalatesta.com.