Deep Purpose

More About Deep Purpose

The length of each episode is 30 to 45 minutes. It’s a short series with all of the episodes available now. 

FPG giveaway

I wanted to say thank you for listening to the podcast as we approach the first birthday of FPG. It has been so much fun to launch the podcast. And meet all of you mostly virtually this past year. As a thank you, I wanted to give one of my listeners a $25 Amazon gift card. All you have to do is fill out a quick demographic survey, and I’ll choose one of you to win the gift card at the end of the month.  Thank you so much for filling out the survey. It’ll help me find podcasts that you’ll enjoy and find sponsors that align with your wants, needs and desires. Thank you so much for a great first year, and I can’t wait to give away that Amazon gift. Now we get to hear from Ronay as he helps us understand that everyone’s journey to find their purpose looks different.

Introduction to Rajai

My name is Rajai Gulati. I’m a professor at the Harvard Business School and I study organizations and leadership. And this is what I have done all my life.

How Deep Purpose Got Started

You know I just finished a book. During Covid I decided to write a book. It was a great thing to do. You know, you’re sitting at home and I interviewed about 250 people. Across 18 companies about this idea of having a purpose. You know, we studied purpose for individuals that all of us should individually have a purpose, but can an organization have a purpose too?

And how do companies connect their organizational purpose with individual purpose? Who are people working in the company? And does that make it different? Does it make the vibe of the place different? So I finished the book, I was done, but I started to get inter interacting with all these leaders who I never interviewed for the book, who had amazing stories to share, saying, oh, Rajai, I read your book, but lemme tell you my story.

And it’s interesting when you start talking about purpose, they would talk about their own personal,  and leaders normally don’t open up so easily over you know about themselves. So I thought, amazing. I gotta document these stories. So the book is done, but I still need to talk to these people.

And so that’s how this podcast was born. I decided then to interview leaders in every corner of the world to in Africa, to in South America, to win Europe, to in Asia, to win North America. And it was amazing to hear their personal journey. Because when you talk to somebody about purpose, they can’t not talk about themselves.  Like how did they come to their purpose? How did they come to be a leader, and how do they then bring that to what they do at work? It was really inspiring to hear these stories. 

What to Expect From Deep Purpose

You know, I want people to understand that having a purpose, individual purpose, first of all. Is a huge unlock. It unlocks human potential even among athletes. By the way, I’ve, I’ve written a case on Pete Carroll, another one on Nick Saban, and these coaches talk about how they unlock human potential by engaging people in thinking about why are you here when we contemplate our existence in a larger context.

We start to look at ourselves and what we do differently, it unlocks human potential. At the same time. You can start, they start to understand that, oh, I wanna work in an organization where, where my work is not a job, where I get meaning out of what I’m doing. That is part of it helped me feel like I am working towards my own life purpose.

Now, I’m not saying work is life, but work is one part of. , and so work shouldn’t just be a drag. It shouldn’t be a job. As we say,  work can also give us meaning. How do we connect that and make a coherent story for ourselves about why do I do what I do? Purpose is and unlock because it allows you to think clearly, allows you to prioritize, it inspires you to do things differently.

We show up differently in whatever we’re doing because it is part of my own story. You know, I’m doing what I’m meant to do. And I think it just changes the conversation with ourselves and with the world around us.

The Vibe of Deep Purpose

I think the vibe of the show is storytelling.  It’s really stories about great people. Who’ve done great things and asking them like, who are you, by the way, first of all, how did you get to be who you are? Why did you do what you did? What animates you? What can I learn from you? I want to be, I want to be like you if I can. What do I need to know about people like you?

What makes you tick? You know, I think the purposeful conversation led them to be really open.  and reveal a lot more than I’m used to hearing from company CEOs about themselves, about their families, about their lives. And I think if you really wanna walk in the shoes of leaders to understand what it was like, I think that’s what I found myself doing and being really deeply inspired to really understand what makes these people tick.

That’s the main theme. If you ask somebody, tell me your story, they’ll walk you through their resume. And then you go through resume and tell me what happened to you when you were in school.  Then you went here, he said, tell me about how have you come to understand your own purpose in life? How did it come to where? How did we. . So, oh, well, let me tell my purpose story right now. And they say, oh, my purpose story really begins when I was seven years old and this is what happened to me and this is what happened to me.

So it’s not a resume journey. It’s really a purpose journey into understanding how their own purpose got revealed to them through kind of crucible moments in their lives, through experiences they had, through interactions they had, through adversity they faced. Through setbacks. All of them had major setbacks and I also found them giving very practical advice.

Like if I hear are the lessons I have learned from my journey, and some of them talk about it in terms of their kids, what advice do they give to their kids? Others talk about what advice do they give to their mentor mentee. Others talk about just my life lessons. Here’s when I look back and see what were the most important highlights of what I’ve learned.

And then they talk about what they’ve done in the their organizations as well. So they also talk about, as a leader, what they have learned are the most critical things any leader should think about. So it’s really about personal growth and leader. Wow, did you hear that? Friends, we get advice from like the top leaders in the whole world by listening to deep purpose.

Rajai’s Favorite Episode

That’s a really hard choice. I, you know, I would say they’re all compelling. Each comes at the problem very differently. You know what I found amazing and what was fun for me, I was worried it was gonna get monotonous.  You know, after a while you’re asking the same question and you get the same answers. Each of them came at it so differently. Each of them has such a distinctive flavor to the conversation, which I think is important, I think for us to realize. We tend to portray the five key principles of great leadership , and there are five principles out there that I could probably rattle off to you as well.  It’s also really interesting to see how each leader discovered their own journey.

Deep Purpose & Little Ears

No, it’s open for everybody. Okay. Fabulous. Yeah. I like to tell my listeners that they can listen to it in the car with their kids , if it’s absolutely okay for little ears.  I think it’s, you know, there are gonna be some ideas that they’re gonna, the storytelling is always interesting to anybody and people talking about their own personal story was gonna be, I think, interesting. Broad array of people, and it doesn’t have to be, these stories are not just for business leaders.

You know, these are stories about humanity. These are stories about growing up. These are stories about learning, failing experiences and how then centering yourself around a purpose creates possibility, creates opportunity. And I think for people who are working, not working, moms, dads, I feel it’s never too early to think about having a purpose.

Final Thoughts on Deep Purpose

I wanna just add that having a purpose is not a purpose statement.  It’s more than words. It’s really an intention that you really dig deep inside you. The reason it’s called deep purpose and not purpose is a lot of us do what I call superficial purpose or convenient purpose. We can, oh yeah, okay. I’ll write down a line for myself. Oh yeah, I got it. I’m done. . , it’s how you choose to live your life.  It’s how you choose to kind of really take that deep with you. And I think that’s why it’s called Deep.

One of the interesting genesises of the ideas for this actually came from my mother, and so my mother, you know, was a working. And she was also doing a master’s in anthropology at Vanderbilt and living in India. And the teachers would come to Greece in the summer and all these school teachers who were doing a master’s in anthropology would con converge in Athens.

And her master’s thesis was about tribal women in India and how they hand print their fabrics. This is 1970 and she was, my mother did her thesis on this. She was very proud. She, her whole thing was showing the western. Indians are not primitive people. They have very sophisticated aesthetic sensibility and they’re very colorful, even poor people.

So anyway, she, after she finishes a master, she decides to start a business, takes her life savings, get some samples, takes two suitcases off to Paris. She goes and convinces two fashion houses to allow her to be set by her designs. And out of that is a businesses bond, but the business is not just to sell more things, it’s also to help women in the village.

Who basically are impoverished saying start a business. So she’s lending them money, she’s selling these clothes and, and the idea, if she was very purposeful about what she was doing, it was not only making money, it was about showing the western world that we have great sensibility helping these women in the villages and of course bringing delight and joy to the Western client who would say, wow, this is so beautiful. So, you know, I think people find purpose in what they’re doing at different moments.