“I always wanted to have my own business and step away from drugs, but I was stuck on making so much money,” he told me. These days, he is focused on using his talent to create a product that contributes positively to his community. Coss’s clients are mostly young professionals—“the same people I sold drugs to,” he said. But now, he is touching their lives in a very different way.
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Coss’s story contains an important insight: living purposefully requires self-reflection and self-knowledge. Each of us has different strengths, talents, insights, and experiences that shape who we are. And so each of us will have a different purpose, one that fits with who we are and what we value—one that fits our identity.
The famed twentieth-century psychologist Erik Erikson described identity as complex and multifaceted; it involves not only who a person is but also where he comes from, where he is going, and how he fits into society and the broader world. Someone who has a solid grasp of his identity knows his core beliefs, his values and life goals, and how his groups and communities have shaped him. He is able to answer the central question that emerges during young adulthood, which is: What kind of person am I and what kind of person do I want to be? And yet identity isn’t static. At every stage of life, he must actively revisit these questions. Toward the end of life, that means asking not What kind of person do I want to be? but What kind of person have I been, and am I okay with that? A person who has lived according to his values and accomplished his life goals will feel “ego integrity,” as Erikson put it, instead of “despair.”
Researchers at Texas A&M University have examined the tight relationship between identity and purpose, and they’ve found that knowing oneself is one of the most important predictors of meaning in life. In one study, a group of psychologists led by Rebecca Schlegel had undergraduates list ten traits that best represented who they were deep down, their “true self,” as opposed to the inauthentic self they sometimes presented to others.
About a month later, the students returned to the lab to complete the second part of the study. As the students performed random tasks on a computer, the researchers flashed the words that the students had used to define their true selves on the screen for 40 milliseconds—too fast to visually register and consciously process. The students who were subconsciously reminded of their true selves subsequently rated their lives as more meaningful than they had before the study. Being reminded of your authentic self, even subconsciously, makes life feel more meaningful.
There’s a reason for that. “Our culturally shared sources of meaning are dwindling,” Schlegel said, “so people have to turn inward to figure out how to best lead their lives. Knowing your true self is the first step of that journey.” People who know themselves can choose to pursue paths that align with their values and skills. Someone whose strengths are love and zest, for example, may make a great educator. But you don’t have to change careers to put your talents to use. That same person could also use those gifts to connect with and serve his clients as a lawyer. Research shows that when people use their strengths at work, they find more meaning in their jobs and ultimately perform better. And when they pursue goals that align with their core values and interests, they feel more satisfied and competent. They’re also likelier to persevere through challenges to actually accomplish those goals—that is, they are more purposeful.
The story of Manjari Sharma, a Brooklyn-based photographer, reveals the central role identity plays in helping us discover our purpose. Manjari’s purpose as an artist is tightly tied to who she is and where she came from, and her journey offers some clues about how people come to know themselves.
Manjari was born in Mumbai, India. She grew up in a Hindu household where the divine was a constant presence. Her childhood home was filled with representations of deities—as were the shows she watched on television, like Mahabharat and Ramayan, both based on ancient Hindu epics whose myths captivated her growing up. When Manjari went on family vacations across India with her parents, her mother always took her to visit the nearby Hindu temples, some of them over five thousand years old, where she stood in awe before paintings and sculptures of deities like Vishnu, the majestic protector of the universe, and Shiva, its ferocious destroyer and transformer, who is often depicted dancing on the back of a demon.
Viewing these figures as a child inspired a darshan in Manjari. Darshan is the Sanskrit word for “glimpse” or “apparition”; it means seeing the essence of something. In Hinduism, a darshan refers to having a momentary connection to the divine in worship. Manjari only had such experiences from time to time in the temples, but they left their mark on her imagination.
Though Manjari has devoted her adult life to art, she had no intention of becoming an artist when she was younger; she wanted to be a dietitian. But when she got to college in Mumbai and saw the thick textbooks that she would be required to read, with their unending lists of caloric counts, her eyes glazed over. She decided to study visual communications instead, though she had no clear idea of what she wanted to do with the degree.
But then serendipity struck. With the help of a mentor, Manjari began to discover where her calling lay. A freshman photography class required her to snap some pictures every now and then. At the end of the year, her professor gave her the equivalent of the “best student of the year” award in photography.
She was shocked. “Really? Was I really that good?” she wondered. “I was completely caught off guard. I was just taking pictures without paying much attention,” she said. “What if I started to pay more attention?”
To this day, Manjari, who has had her work exhibited internationally, considers her professor’s award the most meaningful piece of recognition she has received as an artist. He not only awakened Manjari’s calling in art, but also encouraged her to travel to the United States to study photography, which she did in 2001 at the Columbus College of Art and Design in Ohio.
There, she was “culture shocked,” she said. For one thing, her ideas about America came to her via Hollywood. When she got to Columbus, she looked around and wondered, “Where are all the people?” She was lonely and missed home, but eventually she adjusted—and she soon realized that those feelings of estrangement could be transformed into something artistically productive. “When you are pushed out of your comfort zone—when you experience alienation—amazing things happen,” she said. For Manjari, coming to America pushed her into developing an artistic vision tied to her childhood experiences.
Once Manjari left home, she did not continue to practice Hinduism regularly. Though religious ritual was central to her daily life in India, in America her focus shifted to immersing herself in art, from the art history classes that she took, to the art projects she was working on, to the museums that she visited with classmates. “I went from being in a country where art was worshipped in temples to a country where art was venerated and placed on a pedestal in museums,” she said. The art museums recalled the Hindu temples she visited as a child on road trips with her family. As in a temple, there was a ritualistic component to going to the museum: the standing in line, the anticipation, the connection with a piece of art. “It had all the ingredients of a darshan,” Manjari said.
That insight sparked Manjari’s most ambitious project to date. Darshan, as it’s called, is a series of nine large photographic representations of Hindu gods and goddesses. These images, Manjari told me, are meant to stir the viewer in the same way that being in a temple, surrounded by the presence of the divine, electrifies the pilgrim.
Creating Darshan involved more than just taking pictures of nine models in fancy clothes. It was itself a ritual. For each portrait, Manjari worked with a crew of over thirty craftsmen to create an elaborate diorama that she then photographed. All of the objects that appear in the final portrait—from the jewelry and costumes to the props and sets—were handcrafted, painted, sewn, and assembled in a workshop in India into a traditional representation of the deity. The craftsmen, painters, workers, and m
odels were not just hired help—what was most important to Manjari was that each person working on the project shared her vision. “I wanted everyone to have a special relationship to the set we were building together. That way, each crewmember would be personally invested in the project. Many people can come together to create something bigger than themselves,” Manjari said.
The series is full of rich, bright colors and psychedelic imagery, and each portrait, like each deity, is utterly unique. The first portrait that Manjari completed with her crew is a radiant image of the goddess Lakshmi seated on a pink lotus flower with white bejeweled elephants behind her. Lakshmi is the goddess of material and spiritual fortune and, in the image, gold coins drop from the palm of her hand. In another portrait, Maa Saraswati, the goddess of art, music, and education, sits on a clay-colored boulder in a jungle and plays a stringed instrument with a peacock at her foot. And in yet another, Lord Hanuman, the monkey god, holds up a mountain with one hand as his tail floats in the air behind him.
Hanuman was the deity that made the greatest impression on Manjari when she was young. The story goes that Hanuman was very mischievous as a child, using his special powers of flight and transformation to sneak up on meditating sages and disturb them with pranks. One day, the sages punished him with a curse: Hanuman would forget his special gifts and powers, and would only remember them when he was truly in need of them to do good. That myth taught Manjari a valuable lesson about purpose. “We are capable of something unique, each one of us, but it takes time to find out what that is,” she said. “There are all these layers that cover up our true potential, and it’s not until the time is right that we might discover who we are truly meant to become or transform into. Just like Lord Hanuman.”
Manjari’s journey of self-discovery took nearly a decade, and it involved lots of twists and turns. With the help of a mentor, she devoted herself to pursuing art. Then, moving to an unfamiliar place, the United States, expanded her boundaries and gave her the opportunity to gain greater clarity about who she was—which, in turn, helped her develop a series of topics to address in her art. She was, she realized, someone who has a deep connection to myth, religion, and spirituality, and her works bear this imprint of her identity. “I learned that my artistic sense comes from the fact that I love myths and people’s stories,” she said. “I love telling them, hearing them, learning from them, and re-creating them in pictures.”
Manjari looked over at the prints tacked across the white walls of her studio—pictures of her mother in a sari on an Indian beach, of the god Vishnu rising from the clouds like Venus from the sea, and of a father holding his newborn child to his chest in the shower. “That’s my purpose,” she said, “to tell a meaningful story that moves people the way I was moved by these stories.”
Of course, self-knowledge is not enough on its own. Coss knew his strengths from a very young age and used them to achieve his goals as a drug dealer. Manjari took longer to discover her unique gifts and didn’t find her purpose as an artist until she discovered that her work had the capacity to inspire others. For both of them, finding purpose required a critical step beyond self-knowledge: using that knowledge to figure out how they could best contribute to society. Today, they employ their skills to help others live better lives—Coss by helping people stay healthy and Manjari by creating an elevating experience for her audience.
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Though living with purpose may make us happier and more determined, a purpose-driven person is ultimately concerned not with these personal benefits but with making the world a better place. Indeed, many great thinkers have argued that in order for individuals to live meaningful lives, they must cultivate the strengths, talents, and capacities that lie within them and use them for the benefit of others.
That idea was expressed forcefully by the eighteenth-century German thinker Immanuel Kant. Kant asks us to consider a man—one like so many of us today—who “finds in himself a talent that by means of some cultivation could make him a useful human being in all sorts of respects. However, he sees himself in comfortable circumstances and prefers to give himself up to gratification rather than to make the effort to expand and improve his fortunate natural predispositions.” What should this man do? Should he abandon the cultivation of his natural talents for a life of enjoyment and ease? Or should he pursue his purpose?
These questions are the driving force behind the 1997 movie Good Will Hunting. The story begins with Will, a psychologically troubled twenty-year-old from South Boston. Will drifts purposelessly through life, working as a janitor at MIT and spending most of his free time drinking with his friends, even though he is a genius who can solve math problems that the graduate students at MIT cannot. When he gets in trouble for assaulting a police officer, Will gets a lucky break: an MIT professor, Gerald Lambeau, intervenes on his behalf. The judge agrees to release Will to Lambeau’s supervision under the condition that he meet with Lambeau regularly to work on math.
Lambeau wants Will to put his talent to good use, so he does his best to mentor him and arranges job interviews for him with prestigious employers. But Will is defiant. He is not interested in developing his mathematical genius. He mocks his interviewers during their meetings and insults Lambeau, calling his research a joke. Later, when Will’s best friend, Chuckie, asks him how his interviews are going, Will implies he’s not interested in being a “lab rat.” He’d rather stay in South Boston and work in construction.
But Chuckie, like Lambeau, doesn’t want Will to waste his potential—and he tells his friend that his attitude is selfish. “You don’t owe it to yourself. You owe it to me. ’Cause tomorrow,” Chuckie says, “I’m gonna wake up and I’ll be 50, and I’ll still be doin’ this shit. And that’s all right, that’s fine.” Will, however, has the chance to live a better life by putting his skills to work—skills that his friends, Chuckie explains, would do anything to have. But he’s too afraid. It would be an “insult to us if you’re still here in 20 years,” Chuckie says, and a waste of Will’s time.
Should Will throw away his gifts because he does not want to cultivate them, or should he doggedly work to perfect his skills and master his craft, as Lambeau and Chuckie want him to do?
For Kant—as for Chuckie and Lambeau—the answer is clear: a rational person, Kant explains, “necessarily wills that all capacities in him be developed, because they serve him and are given to him for all sorts of possible purposes.” That is, his talents can benefit others and society, and so he has a moral obligation to cultivate them. Kant’s ideas, as the contemporary philosopher Gordon Marino points out, fly in the face of the current cultural imperative, often heard during graduation season, to “do what you love.” To Kant, the question is not what makes you happy. The question is how to do your duty, how to best contribute—or, as the theologian Frederick Buechner put it, your vocation lies “where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”
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Not everyone has a calling as obvious as Will Hunting’s, of course. In the real world, the majority of people have to choose jobs that they are qualified to get, and that hopefully pay enough to support them and their families. The four most common occupations in America are retail salesperson, cashier, food preparer and server, and office clerk, low-paying and often rote jobs that don’t scream “meaningful work”—at least not on their face.
Even those with more options often find themselves at sea when it comes time to find a fulfilling career. Amy Wrzesniewski, a professor at the Yale School of Management and a leading scholar on meaning at work, told me that she senses a great deal of anxiety among her students and clients. “They think their calling is under a rock,” she said, “and that if they turn over enough rocks, they will find it.” If they do not find their one true calling, she went on to say, they feel like something is missing from their lives and that they will never find a job that will satisfy them. And yet only about one third to one half of people whom researchers have surveyed see their work as a callin
g. Does that mean the rest will not find meaning and purpose in their careers?
Adam Grant, a Wharton School of Business professor who studies how people find meaning at work, would argue that it does not. Grant points out that those who consistently rank their jobs as meaningful have something in common: they see their jobs as a way to help others. In a survey of over 2 million individuals across over 500 different jobs, those who reported finding the most meaning in their careers were clergy, English teachers, surgeons, directors of activities and education at religious organizations, elementary and secondary school administrators, radiation therapists, chiropractors, and psychiatrists. These jobs, Grant writes, “are all service jobs. Surgeons and chiropractors promote physical health. Clergy and religious directors promote spiritual health. Educators promote social and mental health. If these jobs didn’t exist, other people would be worse off.”
Grant’s research offers a clue about how people working in any sector can find purpose at work—by adopting a service mindset. In one study, Grant and his colleagues tracked a group of university-call-center fundraisers who each met a student whose scholarship was being funded by their work. These callers took on a different attitude toward their jobs: seeing how their work affected another person’s life made the fundraisers become much more purposeful—and more effective—compared with a control group. They spent 142 percent more time on the phone with potential donors and raised 171 percent more money.
In a study led by Jochen Menges, Grant and his colleagues discovered a similar phenomenon among women working at a coupon-processing factory in Mexico. Typically, workers who do not find their jobs interesting are less motivated and purposeful, and so are less productive on the job. Processing coupons can be dull and repetitive, so you might expect the women at the factory who found the job boring to be less productive than those who found it rewarding. That, indeed, is what Grant and Menges found. But that trend was reversed among a certain subset of women—those who adopted a service mindset. The women who found their work dull were just as productive and energized as those who found it rewarding, but only if they saw their work as a way to support their families. Even the most tedious tasks can be made purposeful when they benefit the people you love.
The Power of Meaning Page 9
