Purpose

My friend Kip Tindell was the co-founder of The Container Store and a leader in the Conscious Capitalism movement. I was recently reminded of something he once told me: “One of my firmest convictions is that our wake—those waves and ripples of consequences that follow our every action—is much bigger than we can ever imagine. Everything you do and everything you don’t do affects the people around you and your business, far, far more than you realize. Even the most self-centered, egotistical person you know wildly underestimates the power of his wake.”

British playwright and screenwriter Tom Stoppard wrote, “Every exit is an entry somewhere else.” In Spanish, “my success” translates as “mi exito,” which sounds a lot (in English) like my success is my exit. Makes sense to me. After all, how we end things influences how we begin something else.

At least once a week, I meet a forlorn mid-lifer who whispers to me, almost embarrassed, “I don’t have a purpose.” It’s almost like they’re suggesting they don’t have a personality or a reason for living. Self-help gurus, like Tony Robbins, proclaim, “Activity without purpose is the drain of your life.”

For the past quarter century, I’ve been on a journey to tend the soil and soul of communties by bringing community-supported agriculture and biodynamic farming to communities far and wide. It’s so clear to me that we should be more connected to the earth and each other and through those connections, we nourish ourselves, the land and society.

Thanks to my friend Alain de Botton’s School of Life for this question. No disrespect meant to those who strictly follow an existing organized religion. We’re just dreaming a little here. If you were to start your own religion, what would be your commandments (or, at least, “suggestions” if “commandments” feels a little too commanding)? How can you start living those commandments today?

We live in a shut down time. COVID will eventually let up and we will again start to gather, with pent-up revelry and passion. Our Roaring Twenties await us, just as happened post-Spanish flu and World War I. Can the choices we make about how we gather help inform and unite us in addressing equity, sustainability, and the climate crisis?

Tom Morris is a former University of Notre Dame philosophy professor who left to champion practical philosophy via books and seminars. He was one of 23 interviews that my partners Jeff Hamaoui and Skylar Skikos performed last spring around the subject of regeneration. The title of today’s post comes from Tom.

Today is my 69th birthday and I am jolted in ways that continually serve as signposts along this path of modern elder-ism. Yesterday, a dear friend, who became a collector of my photographs over the last 12 years, informed me he was closing his office and wanted to return all the images he procured from me due to no space.

Midway into our second year at our company Next For Me, some of our advisors and readers questioned the tone of our corporate story and consumer message. It was filled with what they considered too much negative messaging rife with doomsday predictions for 50+ audiences.

I love the title of Roman Krznaric’s book (which is also the title of this post) and his seven-minute TED talk, both of which are as inspiring as they are illuminating. Roman helps us see that we’ve been colonizing the future with those generations powerless over our mistakes.