The Purpose Paradox: What Men Should Focus on Instead

Men you don’t need to find your passion. If your passion exists it has already found you. If not, it’s whatever’s right in front of you.

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IN MY practice as a coach, I encounter many young—and some not so young—men tiptoeing hesitantly through life as they “search for their purpose”. Many feel inadequate for not having found it. They believe that when they find it, they’ll become that guy who started a company and made a billion-dollar exit, just like that one whose YouTube channel they’re watching. In this article, I’m going to show you that this is one of the great delusions of the age. I’ll also show you what you should be doing instead. And what people can do to support you.

Let’s get real here for a moment. I live in Johannesburg, South Africa, a city that was quite literally built on gold. The African name for it is eGoli, the place of gold. Probably half the gold ever mined in the history of the world has come from the gold mines under this city. Many of them go down four of five kilometres underground. You can take a tour to some of the old, unused mines. It’s all clean and airconditioned, but if you use your imagination you can get a sense of how tough and frightening it must have been. They worked so far underground it took them more than an hour in a rickety cage lift just to get down. Then they’d work 18-hour shifts in temperatures of 40-50 degrees Celsius (that’s like 110 Farenheit), drilling, blasting, dragging and breaking rocks. If something happened to you when you were down there, you had a problem. And a lot did happen. Fatality rates were high.

The fact is, those men who worked on the gold mines left their homes in the rural areas and migrated to Johannesburg where they lived in prison-like hostels, many to a room, and worked in those conditions. And why? So that they could send money home to their families.

Historically, men didn’t have that much choice

And here we’re getting to my first point, which is that, historically, men had a lot less choice than we often assume. (As an aside, I wonder the idea of a patriarchy keeping all the good jobs for all the men over all the women fits around this idea, but that’s for another day.) Those men on the mines clearly also had a lot less job satisfaction than we might hope for today. They made major sacrifices—not only in terms of lifestyle, but often in terms of their actual lives. And their purpose? Their purpose was to support their families, their villages, their societies. It was the knowledge that they were doing that that gave them meaning. THAT was their purpose.

Just to broaden my range of proof on the subject of men not always having choice over their careers, let’s look at societies in the Middle Ages. The eldest son would inherit the estate while the younger sons were allotted to the military, the clergy, to civic duty or to some lowly form of commerce—aften against his will. A good example of this is given in the series The Borgias, where the Pope’s second son Cesare was forced into the clergy despite his dreams of being a military leader, and how he struggled with the dissonance.

Similarly, sons of middle and lower class families were often recruited by their lords or kings to do the same. Many of them became sailors or foot soldiers—sent on precarious missions where many died. Once again, choice was not a big part of it. You pretty much did as you were directed—or as life directed you. There was not a lot of drifting around figuring what your purpose or your passion was.

Exceptions that prove the rule

Of course, there were exceptions. There were men who expressed a unique talent or passion, and who inevitably followed that. Someone so determined to be a soldier, or a trader, or a priest, that nothing could stop them. Some examples include Christopher Columbus, who was born to a family of weavers—in other words not a nobleman—yet who convinced the Spanish monarchy to fund his passion as an explorer. Another was David Livingstone, a clergyman who became a great African explorer. Then there’s Napoleon, Lawrence of Arabia, St Francis of Assisi, Van Gogh, and so on. More recent exceptions are Steve Jobs and Elon Musk.

But these exceptions prove the rule. Because the one thing we can say for sure is that those men did not go in search of their passion. They didn’t ever have to ask the question. Their passion chose them. They knew it from an early age. They were men of destiny. For a good reference on this, read The Soul’s Code by James Hillman. The only possibility those men might have THOUGHT they had was to RUN from their passion. And probably some of them tried, or at times wished it had chosen someone else. But they could not run from it any more than they could have gone back into their mother’s womb and come out as someone else.

If your passion exists it has already found you. It never leaves you alone.

So, here’s my point. Men, you don’t need to find your passion. If your passion exists it has already found you. It never leaves you alone. It’s all you think about. You drive people mad with it. And I’m not talking about addictions or obsessions, like gaming or finding the next unicorn startup. Those are mostly distractions or fantasies. I’m talking about men who have a giant, all-consuming desire to do one thing, to answer some inner calling, some unexplainable urge that’s been with them since they can remember.

Stop tormenting yourself

So, if you’re wondering around asking what your passion is, or not choosing a career because you haven’t found your passion, then you’re tormenting yourself for no reason. You’ve fallen prey to one of the great delusions of the age, the delusion that choice is inevitable, as though your right to choose was some sacred promise made by God at the beginning of time. Sadly, that was not the case, and although we find ourselves in a time where there is unprecedented choice on many levels, especially from a marketing point of view, our brains have not evolved enough to know how to deal with it in the personal realm. Our brains have not caught up with our expectations!

Let me give you a view on what might really be going on for you. Let’s say your masculine brain likes to hunt. Except with nothing to actually hunt, it turns to solving problems. That’s the modern form of hunting. It’s hunting in the abstract, and your passion is your abstract prey. Your brain gets a little dopamine hits every time you go off on your quest to find your passion. And because it’s abstract, it’s well disguised. I mean, it’s not like you’re stalking the suburbs with a spear, looking like a fool. No, you’re sitting on your meditation cushion, engaging your coach, bending your best friend’s ear, all of which appear very sophisticated. It’s a good look. But it’s not very purposeful.

There’s a lot of pressure and expectation on you to find that purpose and to become that billion-dollar exit guy. Or, these days, it’s about influencing a billion lives. I hear that a lot. This is supposed to not look like ambition, but in my book, it is, all the same. And that’s fine. It’s fine to have ambition and to want to change the world. Let’s just be honest about it.

What those billion-dollar exiters did was to be themselves

Anyway, what competitive male, whose whole biological makeup is designed to prove his worth, would choose to be ordinary in this world of billion-dollar exiters? I have a response to that: what those men—the Steve Jobses the Elon Musks, the billion-dollar exiters—all did was they followed their own path. They were unutterably themselves. Whether it was luck, karma, destiny, or some perfect childhood cocktail that put them where they are, there’s little you or I can do to push our life into that mould. Yet that’s what you’re doing every time you read a biography and then try to be like them.

Sure, you can gain a tip or two, but you’ll never be them. And that’s OK. Your job is to be yourself. To follow the passion that has already found you. And if that’s not the case, then believe me, you’ve been relieved of a huge burden, because when you’re in those positions, when you have to bear the weight of destiny, you end up having to do some awful things, make some decisions you don’t want to make, and take on karma that will take you lifetimes to pay back. There’s a scene in the series Marco Polo that illustrates this. When Genghis Khan has to make a terrible decision—to order the death of someone he really doesn’t want to—he walks with Marco Polo and shares his burden. He points out that everybody wants to be in his position, but nobody would want to make the decisions—do the hard things—that it requires.

What if your purpose is simply to live a good life? Could you handle that?

So, what you should be doing is finding a job—more or less any job, as long as it’s something you don’t absolutely hate—that challenges you enough to focus your attention, and gives you the opportunity to make a contribution—or as I like to say, to pay the rent—and, perhaps, to be a provider for others. Then celebrate that. Celebrate being a partner, a provider, a friend, a good citizen. Do some learning on the side. Get a hobby. Exercise more. That’s your purpose. To live a good life.

Look for it in the small things and let the big things find you

And don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying you can’t pursue dreams, or find your passion, but do it this way around. Instead of looking for some big thing, look for it in the small things and the big things, if they are meant for you, will come to you. Your passion will find you, and it can be a small thing, it doesn’t have to be a big thing.

If you’re young and struggling to find your passion, I pray that you’re not living with your parents and that they’re not supporting you in this quest. My message to you and to them is that the best thing that can happen to a young man who can’t find his passion is for someone to demand that he pays the rent. And I mean that. Everything will fall in line for you, as long as you give up this childish notion that you should be doing something that doesn’t exist, and endeavour instead to always pay your way. You’re not that special and that’s OK. If you’d lived here a hundred years ago, you’d have been going down a mine every day. Be grateful it’s not that. Likewise, if you’re the partner of a man who’s drifting aimlessly while he waits for his passion to drop out of the sky, do the same. Demand that he pays the rent. That’s all. Everything else will fall into place.

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