The Excitement, Ideas and Effort of Purpose
Albert Camus once remarked that the most serious problem facing the world is conformity. This is why Matthew Piepenburg encourages everyone to ask a few important questions: what do you enjoy? what defines you? and what really matters to you?
Author of five books, including What Matters, Rigged to Fail and Gold Matters, Matthew Piepenburg followed a brief career in corporate law Matthew by founding a highly successful hedge fund during the dot com bubble and subsequently managed a hedge fund based at a leading Wall Street bank. Living between Europe and the US, he is an active principal at the Swiss-based Von Greyerz AG and writes and speaks regularly around the world on market risk and wealth preservation. When not tracking markets, his guiding joys are a beautiful family as well as a string of horses and a loyal Labrador.
"In a 2006 letter I originally wrote to my children (which was later published as a book entitled, What Matters), I opened its lofty and romantic pages with the simple yet essential question raised by Michel Montaigne in the 16th century, namely: “How does one begin the art of conducting one’s life”?
Of course, this may be a simple question, but the answer(s) is (are) as diverse and complex as the human condition itself. Nor was I in any particular position to pretend expertise or offer any final answers on the “art of conducting a life,” as mine was not altogether that exemplary by age 34…
Wisdom, at least the kind I was aiming towards, did not come from fancy schools or a life on Wall Street, which has far more anti-heroes than actual heroes. As I wrote then, “I have succeeded and failed in a variety of the chapters of life: From throwing the winning pitch in little league to striking out on the NASDAQ.” I am, like Walt Whitman said of all of us, “a contradiction, a pell-mell of strengths and weaknesses.”
Knowing this allows for a certain humor, humility and even compassion - for ourselves and others.
In other words, what did I know about life, or even “purpose”?
Supported, however, by a library of books and mentors like Harvard’s Cornel West or Ralph Potter, I endeavored to address themes and templates borrowed from centuries of great professors and timeless authors, philosophers, and artists to help make that “art” more enjoyable for my children than just the rantings of a know-it-all father. Toward that end, I opened with following observation:
The whole process, I feel, begins the moment we concern ourselves with the question of how one becomes what one is. We ought to spend some time asking why we live and how we make our lives meaningful. You won’t find the answers outside of yourselves, and you WON’T find it from dad.
In particular, I worried about my children falling into that pattern of carrying out lives marked by what Thoreau described as “quiet desperation” - that sad trap against which the poet, Jane Mayhall, warned: “Don’t let me dream/doze and deny like a TV slob.” Instead, I asked my beautiful young children to follow Ernst Stadler’s cry, “Man! Be substantial,” - Mensch! Werde wesentlich.
But what does that even mean?
Perhaps part of this internal process, and part of this lofty search for the “substantial,” includes what I later addressed some 140 pages into the “letter” as “the value of vision,” that is: finding one’s own purpose, one’s own “sleeping prince.”
Kierkegaard underscored this point in his early journals, declaring that, “The thing is to find a truth for me, to find that idea for which I can live and die.” Again, this is a highly personal “thing” to discover, and involves far more than just Joseph Campbell’s exhortation to “follow your bliss.”
As men and women far more thoughtful than myself have discovered, this search for purpose is equally a matter of grasping the essence of responsibility. St. Exupery wrote that “To be a man is, precisely, to be responsible,” which is why Vaclav Havel and Victor Frankle also wrote that “our humanness is grounded in our sense of responsibility.”
Stated more simply, it is exclusively up to each of us, and us alone, to be responsible for our own lives, and for making them meaningful through discovering our own purpose. I described this to my children as a “fantastic duty, but also a fantastic realization.”
The stakes, after all, are high, for a life without purpose is like the Flying Dutchman, that is, a ship without a rudder, wherein one becomes, as Ortega Gasset warned, a “mass man,” whose life lacks any purpose “and simply goes drifting along.”
We ought, therefore, to beware and chose wisely when it comes to the responsibility of deciding upon our own purpose, our life’s own North Star. Many confuse whims and emotions for callings and passions. Too many of us, I warned my children, “have given preference to external guides over internal guides” in what the poet, Robert Bly, described as “a celebrity mad population of idiots…” The modern world of mass information (and media) “has all kinds of suggestions—both overt and covert—of how we should live our lives.” This has danger embedded within. Like Flaubert’s Madam Bovary who read so many novels that her life became a fiction, “we mimic the imagery and ideas of others before defining our own paths.” As such, our purpose is lost, because we have followed something or someone outside of our own hearts.
Such mimicry places each of us at risk of role playing rather than adhering to what is otherwise an extremely important and personal purpose. It was precisely such risk which William James described as man’s greatest problem - “the habit of inferiority to our full selves.” James concluded that the solution required three ingredients: Excitement, ideas and effort.”
So, there we have it: Excitement, ideas and effort. But again: What does this mean?
What excites you, is what gives birth to ideas, and those ideas, can only be realized with effort. Without that initial excitement, however, the ideas, and hence the effort, never comes fluidly; and if the idea is imposed from outside rather than born from within, it feels forced, laborious and exhausting. But when we hear, decipher and select our own exciting ideas, the subsequent effort feels almost effortless, for loved labor is not the same as imposed labor.
From an early age, I therefore decided never to “work” or give “effort” to an idea or office in which I did not otherwise believe. No salary, no prestige, and no acclaim could ever justify the cowardly but seductive cry of taking the easy route of following a crowd, career or consensus-cry rather than a conviction.
All of which brings us back to this mysterious and amorphous concept of “purpose.”
By now, my view is that such a concept is far too individual to be universal. The paths, and purpose, I chose (from universities, stock markets, and silly polo fields to the absolute priority I give to my family, my God and my convictions) are paths carved by excitement, ideas and effort that work for me. What works for you, of course, may overlap and converge in varient ways, but what matters most is that one honors one’s own purpose to give meaning to every effort that follows.
And those efforts, of course, will includes failures and mistakes - some minor, yet some that bring us to our knees. But in the end, and if we are responsible to whatever purpose we dedicate ourselves, even the failures will be rewarding, as they remind us of the equal responsibility of being accountable for our mis-steps so that they do not become repeated steps. This accountability teaches us not only the immense power of forgiving ourselves, but the far greater power (and subsequent relief and lightness) of forgiving others, even if, as Christ says, “they know not what they do.” Perhaps this explains why figures from Dostoevsky to Russell Brand have an almost magical preference for the fallen, as they often have more to teach us than those from on high.
Alas then, we owe it to each of ourselves to find a purpose that speaks to our instincts, which intuitively knows right from wrong, not only in our association with others, but within our own struggles with ourselves. There is no template for determining the precise form of that purpose, but there is a template for honoring that purpose—and the ideas formed around it-- with the excitement and effort which James prescribed above.
For what it’s worth, and regardless of the immense diversity that defines “purpose,” I have found through a lifetime of watching others, as well as studying centuries of biographies (be they of soldiers, traders, teachers, saints, sinners, athletes or artists), that the most memorable of them were all marked by a purpose which was greater than their own personal interests. Their paths involved, of course, private goals and visions, but the most content and “successful” figures I have known both in the flesh or studied in pages, all recognized a peace and power that only comes from dedicating themselves to a purpose beyond just themselves.
Perhaps this is what separates the merely ambitious from the truly visionary. And based upon what I see today in the markets, politics and screens of the modern era, we have far too many of the former and not nearly enough the later. But even as the world struggles through its cyclical yet hopefully evolving growing pains, the sole purpose of these words today is to encourage any who make the noble effort of honoring themselves and their purpose, and hence by extension, honoring something greater than themselves."
