My sense of purpose has changed profoundly over the years. Earlier this week, I met someone who reminded me where its real power lies.
I was in the Swiss Alps for an offsite with a group of executives. After a hike, we went for dinner at a small mountain hotel, and I got talking to the owner.
He was sitting in a wheelchair.
In his early twenties, he had been one of Switzerland’s most promising ski racers. His life was built around becoming one of the best in the world. Then, during a race, he crashed. His spinal cord was severed.
Within seconds, the future he had imagined for himself was gone.
Today, more than two decades later, he runs this hotel with his wife. We only spoke for a while, but I have rarely met someone who radiated so much joy in being alive. Warm, funny, curious about others, full of energy.
I kept thinking about him.
We talk a lot about purpose these days. Companies have purpose statements. Brands discover purposes grand enough to save humanity. People are told to “find their purpose.”
Sometimes the whole thing makes my stomach turn.
Because the interesting question is not whether you can formulate a purpose. It is whether it carries.
A career can carry for a long time. So can building a company, creating wealth, winning, becoming extraordinary at something. They can give enormous direction and meaning.
But what remains when the career ends? Your body no longer performs? The future you built your identity around disappears?
Viktor Frankl, one of the most influential figures in modern psychotherapy, spent much of his life exploring meaning as a fundamental human motivation. Then history subjected his thinking to an unimaginable test.
He survived several concentration camps. His parents, brother and pregnant wife were murdered in the Holocaust.
Frankl believed that having something still to live for helped him survive. He also observed that prisoners who could still see a task or future waiting for them were more likely to survive.
His point was not that suffering is good. It was that meaning can carry us when circumstances no longer do.
Through someone we love. Something we create or contribute. A responsibility we assume. Something beyond ourselves.
That is what came back to me after this brief encounter in the mountains. Not because we had some profound conversation. We didn’t.
Because of what this man radiated.
As I approach 60, I am less interested in purpose as an idea and more interested in what actually carries a life.
Most of us will never face what he faced. Certainly not what Frankl faced.
But that doesn’t make the question less relevant.
What gives your life direction and meaning beyond getting through the day, achieving the next goal, or simply keeping everything going?
And then the harder question:
If some of what gives you that meaning disappeared, what would still carry you?