Every human is wired to do meaningful, fulfilling, and creative work. What makes this study profound is not that those jobs don’t matter (they do…good luck in 2025 without IT workers, for example) but that the people working in those jobs have no sense of connection to purpose, even when the jobs *do* matter.
I used to believe that some people are just more purpose-oriented than others, but that’s not true. Every human has a deep longing for a sense of purpose…the only difference is which stage of life we figure this out in. Tragically, some people don’t figure out till the end that they gave their one wild life to something that they didn’t even care about.
In many ways, this is an inside job. A true sense of purpose is deeper than the job you do. In fact, one way to know if you’re on the right track is that your sense of purpose doesn’t change, even as jobs come and go.
But organisations and leaders also bear responsibility. It’s so easy for us to just turn the crank, day-to-day. When people ask, “why are we doing this, and how is it really making a difference in the world?”, what will we say? When more money and promotions and accolades don’t work, what then? Can we even answer these questions for ourselves, much less for those we lead?
My hope for today is that we all quit our jobs and find a purpose. You’ll come back to the same job tomorrow, but it will be for different reasons.