Your Guiding Purpose
I once spent a year unemployed.
I was in a secure job that paid relatively well, but it was awful. When I
couldn’t stand the thought of staying even one more day, I broke from this job
and found work as a press officer for a charity. It was supposed to be my dream
job, but after several months my manager let me go.
He told me I didn’t have what it takes. I contacted my old employer and
asked for my job back, but I’d already burned the boats; there was no way I
could return to my old and safe role.
I spent months out of work, considering what career I should follow. I knew I
wanted to write, but I didn’t know if this meant working in journalism, public
relations or some other career.
I was adrift.
I eventually discovered people who are happy in their chosen professions
face these types of crises armed with a personal mission statement, a guiding
purpose or code.
They have done the hard work of educating themselves about what drives
and inspires them. They know, too, that creativity doesn’t just appear at will. It
takes months and years of hard and purposeful work.
Originally from Chicago, singer and poet Patti Smith (b. 1946) has dedicated
her life to the pursuit of art through poetry and punk rock. During the 1970s, she
began performing poetry in clubs around New York and teaching herself how to
play the guitar.
At first, Smith played alone in her room before performing for friends and
then reciting poetry in small New York clubs.
Finally, she embraced the guitar and the microphone as her means of creative
expression. After assembling her band, Patti knew at once they shared a guiding
purpose. In Just Kids, she wrote:
We imagined ourselves as the Sons of Liberty with a mission to preserve,
protect, and project the revolutionary spirit of rock and roll . . .
We would call forth in our minds the image of Paul Revere, riding
through the American night, petitioning the people to wake up, to take up
arms. We too would take up arms, the arms of our generation, the electric
guitar and the microphone.”
Artists Henri Matisse (1869-1954) and Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) are two
fine examples of artists with a guiding purpose.
Matisse worked solidly for 50 years at his craft. Even after abdominal cancer
and a difficult operation left the elderly artist bedridden, he continued to create
works of art in the form of paper cut-outs until his death.
Matisse found a joie de vivre in his art that wasn’t possible anywhere else,
and he famously said, “Work cures everything.”
Picasso, sensing his mortality, used his art to look death in the eye. The last
of his works tackle subjects like human sexuality, physical decay and his
looming death. He also left instructions for anyone in search of creative success.
Our goals can only be reached through a vehicle of a plan, in which
we must fervently believe, and upon which we must vigorously act.
There is no other route to success.”
Both artists paid attention to what drove them. Each figured out the purpose
of their lives and pursued it to the end.
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