Some years ago I was talking with a priest about the plan heaven has for each of us. The idea works even if you’re not Christian: just call it destiny. What does destiny want from me?
For multipotentialites, people with many talents and many interests, that’s a brutally hard question (by the way, they deserve a post of their own, and they’ll get one in the coming months.)
His answer was simple. The plan is to live. The simple act of living is the plan.
At the time, it didn’t convince me. But his words stayed with me, and a while later they sprouted. It happened when I started thinking about purpose, a word anyone who reads my blog knows very well. The plan lives in heaven, purpose lives in the office. And yet they talk about the same thing.
People who work a lot (sadly/not sadly, I’m one of them) tend to identify themselves, and their place in the world, with their job. And that’s dangerous. Very dangerous.
On one side, research tells us that having a purpose is good for us. It gives us a mission, makes us enthusiastic, keeps us up late and gets us out of bed early, helps us put first things first. On the other side, work is ephemeral. It can change, it can disappear. And today it can do both very fast.
A few days ago, “The Daily“, the New York Times podcast, released an episode everyone seems to be talking about, at least on my LinkedIn feed: “When A.I. Comes for Your Purpose in Life”. The guest is Steven Strogatz, a mathematician at Cornell and one of the great storytellers of his field.
In a matter of months, AI has solved some of the most famous open problems in mathematics, Navier-Stokes included, which I wrote about in Eighty-Eight Hours. Strogatz talks about the excitement, and the sense of loss, of watching a machine do the work that gave his life meaning. The clip from the episode has a title that leaves little room for interpretation: “Why A.I. Has This Mathematician in Tears”.
And this risk concerns all of us. If we work in services and our purpose coincides with our job, we may lose it. My guess is that we are heading toward a world where knowledge will be worth almost nothing, and curiosity will be worth more than knowing. The future will belong to the learn-it-alls, the people who never stop learning, far more than to the know-it-alls, the ones convinced they already know everything. That goes for people, and it goes for companies.
So what is the purpose?
I keep thinking about those tears. Strogatz was crying for the man who spent a lifetime looking for proofs like that one. But the meaning was in him all along. The equations were just the place where it showed.
A machine can solve Navier-Stokes in eighty-eight hours. Fair enough. What it can’t do is become you. Nobody can do that on your behalf: the person you turn into, day after day, choice after choice, mistake after mistake.
Silicon Valley loves to talk about the singularity, the moment machines surpass us. I’m more interested in a different one. Each of us is a singularity: one version, no copies, no backup. Getting better at being that, one day at a time, might be the only purpose no machine can take away.
So, what if you’re the purpose?
Maybe the priest was right all along.
