Empirical Purposing: Inhabit Your Purpose in 9 Difficult Steps

Hello Friends,

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(note: if you’re looking for free dating advice, it’s in this week’s interview with the director of a Men’s Finishing School)

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I spent decades frustrated that I wasn’t living up to my potential.

The whole time I had vague ideas of what I meant by “potential”, but I never really tuned in and pursued the inquiry.

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Don’t do that! Be better than me!

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Here’s what I would do now in 9 simple (but not easy) steps. I call it Empirical Purposing (insert dolphin joke here):
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  1. Believe It’s Possible
  2. Trust Your Experience
  3. Do The Math
  4. Imagine The Future
  5. Grab Low-Hanging Fruit
  6. Let The Future Make You A Plan
  7. Review The Plan
  8. Do The Work
  9. Iterate

My goal here is to reincorporate meaning into modern life.

It’s really hard to get away from the notion that everything is just R-R-R-Random.

So Empirical Purposing starts with the opposite notion: That we’re here to do two things.

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1: To find out Why We’re Here.

2: To Do The Thing we found out in Step 1.

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I can’t justify that belief. You could just as well believe the opposite.

But if you try it on and run the experiment, either you’ll feel a sense of purpose or you won’t.

And either that will help you, or it won’t.

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I found it and it helped me, so I’m sharing.

Here’s a little more detail:
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Phase I: Make a Hypothesis

  1. Believe that it’s possible, ie: “I can find a sense of purpose and meet my need to contribute to society, support my family, and enjoy how I spend my time.” It’s pretty hard to get the “juice” to run the experiment if you start with skepticism.
  2. Trust Your Experience: Make a list of all the powerful experiences in your life. The times you were fantastically happy. The moments you felt most in the Flow. Traumatic events and how you reacted to them. The long-term consequences of how you were parented. Work you love and work you hated, etc.
  3. Do The Math: If your experiences could be graphed as a punch of points, attempt to draw the curve that best fits the points. What is the throughline or the theme of how you love being in the world? What are the ways you think, act, and see the world that you couldn’t stop doing, even when you tried?
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Phase II: Design The Experiment

  1. Imagine the Future: Imagine you got the Hypothesis right in Phase I. Imagine some extraterrestrial put you here to Do That Thing in a major way, in order to benefit the whole biosphere and all its inhabitants. In that case, what would your future look like? What’s the grand vision that still feels fun and maybe a little bit scary?
  2. What part of that Vision could you start doing tomorrow? If daily yoga practice is on there, that would fit in this category. If being a senator is on there, that most likely would not (are you even registered to vote?)
  3. Make a Plan: For anything that you can’t do right now, use Backwards Planning. Start with the goal and figure out where you need to be in 5 years to make it happen. 1 year. 3 months from now? 1 week. Every long-term goal can be translated into a simple task for this week (“Download Astronaut Application”).

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Phase III: Run The Experiment for 90 Days

  1. Review The Plan: Every day, read the plan. That includes the through-line from (3) and the vision from (4). How does it feel? It should feel pleasant, inspiring, and a bit scary. Would it be fun to be living that vision? Would it feel like you and meet your needs? Not just “doing what needs to be done” for retirement funds and climate change mitigation, but actually like “Hell Yes, That Sounds Awesome.”
  2. Do The Work: Now see what needs to happen to today, from (5) and (6). Do you see how these actions are connected to the goal? Does it feel connected? Do you get why it’s worthwhile to do those things? Are they essential? Is there an easier way to achieve the feelings behind your goals? If not, do the work.

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Phase IV: Evaluate and Iterate every 3 months

  1. Make a new Hypothesis: Every 3 months, you have 3 more months of data about who you are. Celebrate Empirical Purpose day every 3 months and take a moment outside the Grind to redo this process. Maybe your hypothesis will be better. Maybe your experiment will be different. The iterative process should converge. Your day-to-day sense of meaning and happiness is the only rubric for success.

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One of the core ideas here is to train the scientific method on a deeply personal domain: our lived experience.

Have you tried this? What do you think?

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Yours,

Ankur