Why do we assume work must be purposeful?

The rise of thought leadership has given us a few problems. I won’t enumerate them all.

Here’s one, though: every single article about business, business improvement, productivity, leadership, management, etc. contains some variation of this sentence:

“… lead from a place of purpose…”

or maybe:

“… set your North Star and point employees to the purpose of the work…”

This is actually becoming both troubling and tedious. Why? I will enumerate that.

Generally on purpose in jobs

You can pick out some professions and say “That must have a lot of purpose.”

Let’s try: doctors, disaster relief workers, (modern age) engineers.

They do.

All jobs have some degree of purpose, even the completely dead-end ones.

(More on that in a second.)

But all those jobs also have huge pockets of paperwork, tedium, politics, client demands, etc.

I’ve known doctors who say about 20–30% of their year max feels purposeful.

That’s a lot for some professions, sure.