"What on earth am I here for?"

This question (from Rick Warren's Purpose Driven Life) is a question that we all ask ourselves at some point in our lives. Without purpose, our lives are literally meaningless, so it is only natural that each of us would want to answer this important question.

Much of what I will discuss in this blog is going to rely on one important understanding, and that is around the idea of individual purpose. I believe that every human being has a sense of purpose. Every individual has an inherent need for their lives to have some sort of significance. And if there is someone who says that they do not have a sense of purpose, they are really stating that they just have not figured out there purpose yet.

I also believe that this sense of purpose is by design. According to my Biblical worldview, I have a Creator. And anything that the Creator creates has some sort of purpose. Think about this from an everyday perspective...

Let's say that you create something, maybe a new tool. Well as the creator of this tool, you would have only created it if there was some sort of need that it had to fill. You would have had an idea in your head about what you needed to do, and after realizing that there was currently no tool to fill that need (or not fill it properly), you would develop the idea of how to create this new tool that could do the job for you. So even before you actually create the it, you can see that it already has a purpose (see also Jeremiah 1:5). Then you set out to make the tool. Once it has taken it's physical form, then you are able to use it for the purpose that you created it for.

But also imagine this... Let's say that you put your tool into mass production so that it can fulfill it's purpose all over the world. But to your disappointment, people buy it only to use it as a paperweight, or a door-stop, or even worse... they just never use it. Using it for the wrong reason, or not at all does not change the purpose of the tool.

Well it is the same way with people. We ALL have a sense of purpose whether we are tapping into it or not. We were created that way. The alternative worldviews do not account for a Creator, but then this does not mean that we do not have a purpose. In fact, in any naturalistic view (denies the existence of God and anything spiritual) there is nothing to give us a purpose. Because everything simply "happened by chance", our lives have no meaning. That realization is actually quite depressing. Our sense of purpose still exists, and this is a VERY important factor to understand when considering how to manage people.

More important than having a purpose, I would argue that it is this purpose that drives every single action that we take. When someone realizes what their life is supposed to be about, then everything that they do falls into one of two buckets: (1) actions that help them accomplish their purpose, or (2) actions that do not help them accomplish their purpose. I would even argue that even the simplest of daily activities like brushing your teeth, or brushing your hair fall into that first bucket of actions that help accomplish the purpose.

My point here is that every individual has this innate sense of purpose and a need for their lives to be significant in some way. And because this purpose drives our actions, then there are significant workplace implications in this idea. Think about why people work in the first place. Is money always the biggest driver for why people work? No. And even if it is, why is money such a big driver for some people? Maybe because they feel the need to accomplish something else with the money? Possibly. The bottom line is that people have a reason for being in the workplace, whether it is purely financial, or based on some other deeper meaning. Whatever it is, people's actions in the workplace are driven by their sense of purpose.