Sense of Purpose and Well-being
At our weekly "founders health" session we talked about "sense of purpose" and its relationship to wellbeing!
We didn't find many broadly accepted definitions of what "purpose" might be or what qualifies as one.
But some key elements we found were:
it is something that is subjectively significant,
it is long-term oriented, feels achievable, but requires some challenges to be overcome
it provides coherence and direction to your desires, and things you seek
We did an exercise at the end which brought up lots of interesting discussion (with minor modifications):
Step 1: Write down 5 things that are very important to you and without them you’d be very sad
Step 2: For each one, ask yourself “why do i care about this” and write down the answer
Step 3: Investigate patterns in your reasons, and see if you can narrow down to 1 reason
Step 4: If not, for each reason, ask yourself “why do i care about this” and write down the answer
Step 5: Can you narrow down to 1 reason now?
Step 6: Repeat if needed
Step 7: Write this down in a full sentence, and reflect if what you spend the majority of your time doing every day is aligned with this, and if there are any correlations between that reflection and your sense of well being and satisfaction.
As a startup founder, we have to constantly handle so many different aspects and dimensions of our work and life that staying “focused” is the farthest thing from our reality. But at the same time, lack of focus is a death sentence for a startup.
An exercise like this once in a while can keep us honest about what we spend our days doing and why!
