Life Purpose

Life purpose has a bad name in business circles, and mostly it has earned it. It gets taught as something you discover on a retreat, then written up in language that would embarrass you in front of your operations manager.

Treat it differently. Purpose is not something you find. It is something you notice, and the evidence is already sitting in what you have done well for the last twenty years.

What the model is

It is a thread, not a destination. Look across the things you have done that went well, that you enjoyed, that people still mention, and one activity keeps turning up in different costumes. Strip away the industry, the job title and the decade, and what is left is a verb.

A finished statement is short and slightly awkward to say. "I make complicated things usable for people who are out of their depth." "I build order where there is chaos, for people who are drowning in their own success." "I get people ready for things they think they cannot do." Notice that none of those is a job, an industry or a turnover figure. That is deliberate. A purpose expressed as a job dies with the job.

Two tests. It has to be true of you at twenty and true of you now, in different settings. And it has to explain something you would otherwise call a quirk: why one type of meeting leaves you energised and another identical-looking one flattens you.

Why it matters to an owner

You are going to spend the next decade doing something. The business is the vehicle, and the question is whether the vehicle is pointed roughly where the thread runs. When it is not, the pattern is familiar and expensive: the numbers improve, and the owner disengages. Turnover up, energy down, and a growing suspicion that the reward for building it is being trapped in it.

It is also the most practical filter available for the hardest owner questions. What should I delegate first? Whatever is furthest from the thread and least dependent on you personally. What should I never delegate? The one or two things that are the thread. Should I sell? Only when you can answer what you would do next, because plenty of owners sell and then buy something similar within eighteen months, having discovered that the money was not the problem.

And it makes hard decisions faster. A clear thread rules out a whole category of opportunities that look attractive on a spreadsheet and would bore you inside a year.

A worked example

Illustrative. Take an owner of a £2m installations business, twelve years in, competent and quietly bored. He is considering selling, mostly because he cannot think what else would change.

The four pieces of evidence come out like this. He lost track of time the fortnight he rewrote the install method and filmed it. He is proudest of two apprentices who now run their own crews. What people come to him for is not quotes, it is "how do I explain this to a customer". And unpaid, he would happily do the technical talks he gives to the trade association.

The verb is not installing. It is teaching. Every one of those is a version of getting someone from not being able to do something to being able to do it. Which explains why the pricing decisions bore him and the toolbox talks do not, and why his best months are the ones with new starters in them.

So the answer is not selling. It is a restructure. Hire an operations manager at, say, £55,000 to run the day to day, and move himself into training, quality and technical sales, where he is both better and happier. That hire has to earn its keep, and in this illustration it does, because the bottleneck was always him signing off work. The thread and the business problem turn out to point at the same job description, which is usually how it goes.

Sometimes the honest answer is the other one: the thread runs somewhere the business will never go, and the right move is a sale in three years with a plan for what follows. That is a legitimate outcome of this exercise, and better found now than at 62.

How to apply it this week

1. List six moments, not six achievements. Times you were absorbed, from any part of your life, including before you owned anything. Two of them should be from before you were 25.
2. Strip the context out. For each one write what you were actually doing, in a verb, ignoring the industry. "Selling" is too vague. "Working out what the customer could not articulate" is the right level of detail.
3. Ask three people what they come to you for. One from work, one from home, one from years ago. Ask what they would ring you about and what they would never ring you about. The second answer is as informative as the first.
4. Write one sentence. The form is: I [verb] [what] for [who]. Keep it under fifteen words. If it could be printed on a competitor's website, it is not specific enough yet.
5. Audit last month against it. Go through the diary and mark the hours that were on the thread. Most owners find it is under 15 per cent, and that the number, not the workload, explains how they feel.
6. Change one thing in the next 90 days. One recurring commitment you drop, one you add. Purpose that does not change the diary is a nice sentence.

The mistake most owners make

The biggest mistake is waiting for it to feel momentous. It will not. When you write the true sentence, the usual reaction is a slightly deflated "well, obviously". That flatness is the sign you have got it, because it has been true so long that it looks like wallpaper.

The second mistake is confusing your purpose with the company's. They are different things and they do not have to match perfectly, they just have to be compatible. Your purpose is the thread through your life. The company's is what it exists to do for customers. Fusing them is how owners end up unable to sell, delegate or step back without feeling erased.

The third is using it as a licence to avoid the boring parts of the job. Nobody's purpose is doing the VAT return. Knowing the thread tells you what to build the business towards over five years. It does not excuse you from running it on Tuesday.

The questions to sit with

• Out of 10, how much of last month did you spend doing the thing you are actually here to do?
• What did you do at 22 that you would recognise in your best day last month?
• If the business were sold tomorrow and the money was sufficient, what would you be doing within six months?
• What do you keep doing yourself, badly, that a better structure would take off you, and what would you do with the freed-up week?

The Life Purpose exercise sits inside Mindset & Self-Leadership for a straightforward reason. Owners who cannot say what they are for tend to build businesses that make them successful and mildly miserable, and the second part usually takes about a decade to show up.