The Paradox of Purpose

Strategy is about getting what you want; it’s about achieving a purpose, generally as quickly and efficiently as possible.

I’ve found an odd paradox in this thought. Ten years ago I started seriously studying strategy, though as I did I realised it had always been the filter through which I’d tended to see things.

More recently I started studying and practicing mindfulness and meditation. How I got into that is a long story but I soon found many ways it was applicable for building and delivering better strategies.

One of the key parts of a designing a good strategy is getting past your own biases – optimism bias, “halo” effect, and a host of others. Mindfulness is the best tool I’ve ever found for identifying and removing biases.

Developing a good strategy often requires patience, or letting go of past assumptions and seeing the world in a new way. Again, this is bread and butter of mindfulness.

Delivering on a strategy requires you to have a considerable degree of self-control – not being panicked into breaking with your strategy when you go through a rocky patch, or letting go of it to try to grab every passing shiny thing. Again, enhanced self-control and mastery over unhelpful impulses are among the first results of practicing mindfulness.

Delivering a strategy also (and in tension with the previous point) requires you to have the mental agility and clarity of vision to change the strategy, or deviate from it, if circumstances require it. Again, this uses core gifts of mindfulness, clear-sightedness, lack of attachment to the past, presence in the moment.

There are plenty of other ways in which mindfulness can help you design and deliver a strategy; it can regulate you energy levels, control your focus, make you more persuasive, and give you plenty of other enhancements.

So where’s the paradox?

Practicing mindfulness changes you. It doesn’t just give you a series of optional-add ons like (to chose a lurid example) Tony Stark’s Iron Man suit, which he can take off at any time, leaving him the same person. It’s more like the super-soldier serum injected into Steve Rogers, making him Captain America: it changes you permanently, and from the inside out. (Unlike the super-solider serum, the effects of mindfulness wear-off if you don’t keep up the practice. It can also have negative (though usually temporary) side effects as you cross certain mental thresholds.)

One of the changes it tends to deliver is sometimes termed “wantlessness”.

I’m not planning on writing a whole essay on this here, but the summary goes something like this:

Mindfulness has its roots in Buddhism. The first two noble truths of the Buddha are, 1 The nature of existence is suffering and 2 The cause of suffering is attachment (various translations and interpretations of this exist.)

Though an ancient truth, this is reinforced (and often rediscovered) by plenty of modern psychology and science.

In particular, most of these “attachments” (or “desires”, or “wantings”) are not fully conscious. Most of what compels us is unconscious (neuroscience shows that the part of the brain that instructs our hand to pick up a cup (for example) fires fractionally before the part of our brains that “storifies” for our conscious mind why we want to pick the cup up (eg, because we want to drink from it, or wash it up, or hand it to someone).

There are many different definitions and understandings of mindfulness, but one of my favourites is that it allows you to surface impulses from your unconscious brain to you conscious brain, observe and amend them, and then I return them to your unconscious to serve you better, or if you prefer to discard them altogether.

Practicing mindfulness, even from a purely instrumental, practical point of view, will have tend to take you down this path.

So here’s the paradox

Overtime spent practicing mindfulness, people generally come to realise that what they have previously thought as their character or personality is just a hitherto unexamined collection of these unconscious impulses or attachments. “I like chocolate ice cream”, “I don’t like scary movies”, “I’m just a workaholic”, “I can’t help myself when I see a book I want to buy”. All of these are just unconscious impulses. Once you realise that you can edit (or “hack” in modern parlance) these unconscious impulses you realise there is no core “personality” that is “you” and that none of your wants or desires are fixed.

In fact if you “want” that one more promotion, or that great pair of shoes, or to spend more time with your hobbies, and you set out using mindfulness as part of your strategy the achieve that purpose, you may find after a while you realise that the purpose was just another attachment, and you can let go of it just like that!

You start using mindfulness to get what you want, but if you use it enough you find you don’t want anything after all.

That is the paradox of purpose – the best tool I’ve ever found to achieve your purpose eventually stops you having a purpose at all.