We're all on a quest to find our own direction in life. We're all asking the same kinds of questions about what we should be doing with our lives, but we want more than a job. We want to make a meaningful impact. We don't want to just make money. We want to make a difference. 

We want our lives to count for something. We want our work to matter. 

And that means that we are looking for purpose. 

It's not always clear what comes next. It's not always obvious how to get to where we want to be from where we are right now, especially when we don't even necessarily know where we want to be. 

But purpose is emergent. It grows over time as a by-product of our deepest values. 

The purpose grounded life is centered on cultivating this growth. 

This is a path focused less on goals to strive for and accomplishments to achieve and focused more on the kind of person that we want to become. 

And this means that purpose isn't something that we discover so much as we develop it. It doesn't hit us like a bolt of lightning where all of a sudden everything makes sense. 

Purpose emerges over time. We cultivate it. We develop it. It emerges as a product of our values. And that's not a one-time thing. This isn't a one-time something out there someplace that if I could reach for that, or if I could attain it, or strive for that thing out there some place, then my life would be successful. 

Purpose emerges as a by-product of our inward reflection of our inward work of who we are as a person. 

So purpose is about values. 

This episode is a reflection on the the first podcast is our series, "The Purpose-Grounded Life." In this episode, we want to pick up from that first podcast where I brought up two different kinds of concepts. The first one of those is the difference between technical and adaptive solutions to challenges we might have. And then the second will be this concept of agency. And we want to talk about that and introduce the concept of creative agency. 

The example we use to talk more about these concepts is a thing that most of us have done--we create a New Year's resolution to get in shape, be more healthy, etc. We jump in it with eagerness at first, but then after a short while that initial enthusiasm fades and we drop it. Why? Well, change is hard, of course. And we also tend to apply a technical approach to the question of getting in shape, but that is an adaptive challenge. That means, it really needs an adaptive solution.

The Purpose Quadrant is a tool to help us to step back and see the big picture of where our energy is going. What am I really focused on? How big are the different quadrants in my life? 

Think about these four quadrants as four spaces of your life. All of us spend energy in all four of these spaces, all four of these quadrants. 

One of the things I hear from my students all the time is a phrase like this, they say, "I feel like I'm working hard, but I'm not really getting anything done." I think that's generally a pretty common feeling. We're working hard, but we're also bouncing around. We're not really focused, so we're having a hard time feeling like we're accomplishing important things. And what's probably happening is that we're focusing on a lot of things simultaneously. Not all of them are important things that we really need to be paying attention to. 

And it's hard for us to separate those. What are the important things that I really need to be focusing on, and what are the non-important things that still keep bouncing in and taking over?