I just finished rebuilding my keynote talk on Artificial Intelligence to be framed around “Anxiety About A.I.”
I’m not trying to say people are having panic attacks about A.I., although I wouldn’t blame anyone if they were. It’s more that I sense a persistent low-grade anxious “noise” happening around this topic.
I think for many of us there’s a tingling worry lurking in the back of our minds, taking up space and generating an annoying “hum,” kind of like a feeling of waiting for a call back from the doctor about a diagnosis, or a small business owner waiting to hear if they got the contract that will allow them to pay bills for the next few months. When we’re in these kinds of situations, we go on about our days and do our best to forget about “that thing,” but it’s never really gone. That feeling is always skulking around back there, creating a “disturbance in our personal force,” if you will.
Honestly, I’ve been feeling “nagged” by the topic of A.I. for a while now. It’s such a prominent work-related issue, of course, that it just seemed absurd for me to not have a defined and unique perspective on it… you know, with me being a “future of work” speaker and all.
But trying to uncover my unique perspective was just not happening. I was devouring podcasts and articles like mad, but I had no cohesive “container” for any of it.
Then, thanks to an amazing conference speaking opportunity from my friend Ludmila (and a challenge from her to re-frame things around anxiety about A.I.), I finally did what always helps me clarify my thinking: I started to write and create.
If you didn’t know, this is actually why I wrote my book years ago.
It wasn’t for you, really — it was for me.
I needed to clarify my thinking… to figure out what I actually thought about the changing world of work (at that time we were contending with the Great Recession).
Now here I was again.
I always create better when I’m creating for a specific deliverable, so through the process of re-crafting my keynote to address A.I. anxieties, I found I was suddenly able to define my perspective.
Something magical even emerged that I ended up calling “The 3 Keys of A.I. & Culture.” These were three counter-intuitive, yet incredibly vital, things I discovered I wanted to share about A.I., and they also somehow worked perfectly to illustrate what our work cultures need most from our humans in the world of A.I. — I frankly didn’t expect this to happen, so it was a delightful surprise.
And one of the 3 Keys ended up circling me back to a topic I wrote about many years ago: purpose.
“Purpose at work” became a somewhat popular topic over the last decade or so. And for the most part, this is excellent. It’s great to have more purpose-driven organizations, and it’s a wonderful thing for individuals to think about their purpose if they can focus their work in that direction.
But how does an energy-based approach to life and work intersect with the notion of purpose?
And can the idea of “Human Energy” help us find our purpose?
One of the first things to realize is that we don’t actually seem to “find” purpose at all — many times, it’s more “emergent” than it is “discovered.” Meaning, it seems we most often uncover purpose through movement in a direction that feels energizing to us. And as we keep moving toward it, it often feels like it is finding us.
It’s a bit like me clarifying my thinking about Artificial Intelligence.
I couldn’t seem to “find” clarity in my search for it.
The clarity came looking for me when I started creating things.
With purpose, too, I think it’s often a flicker at first, becoming a brighter flame as we move closer to it… even though the full fire is a forever-moving target as we grow, evolve, and continually learn more about what it is that actually burns inside us.
But what I keep learning is to find it, we have to move toward it.
This is where Human Energy comes in. As I practice paying attention to what energizes me, it illuminates a pathway I can follow in a more intentional and nuanced way, because I am deepening my awareness of what naturally moves me to be my most energized, best self. (As you may know, we often utilize an energy-based assessment to help with this process as well.)
In other words, I start creating things in a way that is energizing to me.
Some people say “start by starting.”
Some say “start before you’re ready.”
Some say “movement creates the plan.”
However you say it, it seems clear that action is a key element in the chemistry equation of purpose.
As I move towards what energizes me, I can “course-correct” to stay on the road that is most life-giving — and therefore, almost certainly more purposeful — for me.
Then, once we have a clearer sense of what our life-giving, energizing purpose might be, it becomes like the sun in our personal solar system — providing our “center,” and the “gravitational pull” that keeps us moving.
This is why a shared purpose amongst work colleagues is so amazingly powerful — it provides alignment and trajectory and magnetism to keep a group of people “in orbit” and moving in a similar direction.
But also like the sun, purpose frankly isn’t something we’re likely to think about all the time. Yeah, we’re vaguely aware that there’s a big ball of energy out there providing life to all of us and everything… but you know, I just don’t think about the sun constantly. I sure do appreciate it (!), but I don’t obsess about the sun itself all day long.
What I appreciate most about the sun is how it allows me to go on doing the things that are most important to me.
And purpose is a bit like this, too.
It provides light and illumination for the path I want to go down — and even though I don’t think about it all the time, knowing it’s there in the background, and all around, guiding me, might be exactly what it’s supposed to do.
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HOLIDAY GIFT! 🎁
If you’d like to go deeper exploring your purpose, please download our brand new Mission/Magnet worksheet! If you like it, please drop us a line at hello@workrevolution.org and tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you.