I took a short detour from this series last week because I wanted to make sure that I’d at least touched on some nuts and bolts application stuff before the end of the year. Now that that’s out of the way, I’d like to get back to setting down some foundational stuff about Margins, Message and Method.
So far, we’ve been talking about margins because you have to have space in your life in order to think about message and method. We’ve talked about what margins are, why they’re important, and how to create them. We’ve also looked very briefly at how Jesus spent his time and how that relates to margins. Now we’re going to move on to the second of the three – Message.
The cornerstone of understanding your message is to understand your purpose. If you don’t know where north is, you can’t plot a course on a map. If the first brick on your wall is out of square, you will end up building a crooked wall. If your spine is out of alignment, you won’t be able to function until a chiropractor sets it right. In the same way, if you aren’t clear on what your purpose is, then your actions will be out of alignment and your message won’t make sense.
I know, this doesn’t seem like rocket science. And it isn’t. But you’d be surprised how easy it is to get misaligned to your purpose. We start off with a clear enough reason for doing something, but somewhere along the line we either forget or get confused about what that reason was. We can see this with the Pharisees in the Bible. In their eagerness to have and lead others to relationship with God, they confused adherence to rules and regulations for the actual relationship. When Jesus was asked what the greatest commandment was, he responded “The greatest is to love God with all your heart, mind, and soul. The second is to love your neighbor as yourself.” He was revealing that the Pharisees had forgotten that the law makes no sense without the context of relationship – the purpose of the law.
Even the best of modern day “purpose, mission, value” driven companies can go wrong. Take Starbucks as an example. In their words, they exist to be the “third place” – a place to gather that is neither home or work. But somewhere they got sidetracked into maximizing profits and started doing strange things, like charging people for wireless internet and up-selling their customers at every sale. It got to the point where managers were reprimanding their employees for missing an up-selling opportunity. They were no longer the “third place” where people could relax. They became a place to get your caffeine fix on the run. Starbucks got confused about it’s purpose.
I’m convinced that we all have a specific purpose we were created for. If we don’t spend the time to discover it, then we don’t even know what course to chart. If we know our purpose, but don’t bother to check our actions against it, then we’re in an even worse place. But if we discover our purpose and then check our activities and plans against it, we can be confident that we are heading in the right direction to fulfill that purpose.
To look at this in the other direction, purpose provides the foundation for your activities. Your activities provide your message. So, in order to get your message into alignment, you need to get your actions into alignment; to get your actions into alignment, you need to get to the bedrock of what you are doing – your purpose.
Sorry for beating this horse to death, but getting your purpose right is absolutely important. It’s worth the pain and agony. You can’t tell your story unless you know what the story is about. And you can’t gather followers unless you know where you’re leading them. In part five, we’ll be talking more about how our purpose influences our actions and message with examples from Apple, Compassion International, and Red Fridge Media.
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