Three Excerpts from the PURPOSE issue of the journal
In Character
That Special GlowbySam Schulman
In 1992, StanfordUniversity education professor William Damon published Some Do Care: Contemporary Lives of Moral Commitment, a study of the lives of “moral exemplars” who had demonstrated a moral commitment for at least forty years. Damon reports he was fascinated by the case studies his team conducted of men and women who had devoted their lives to charity, civil-rights work, and environmentalism. He says they were “incredibly happy and fulfilled and glowing – glowing with purpose.” But he still had one big unanswered question. What caused these amazing men and women to be the way they were?
Damon, who now directs the StanfordCenter on Adolescence, decided the time had come to study purpose among children and young adults. At the time he entered the field about ten years ago, Damon noticed, there were a few theologians who had written on the subject but no social scientists. Why? Well, to begin with, purpose is something that is hard to demonstrate through scientific experiments. “The idea of purpose is such a broad concept. It’s hard to put someone into a room and evoke it,” says Damon.
But through a survey of almost five hundred kids in four different communities, Damon is trying to put some science behind this concept of purpose. The data analysis is not yet complete, but he offers some preliminary findings. First, though kids “who believe in something larger than themselves,” usually have the support of their families, they are not generally introduced to that purpose (whether it be raising money to cure cancer or bringing water to poor African communities) by their parents. More often, they discover it on their own and then introduce it to their families. Second, rather than this purpose drawing their attention away from other aspects of their lives, kids with strong purpose tend, for instance, to do better in school.
Finally, even though some parents are concerned about the well-being of kids who become too narrowly focused on one thing early in life, Damon thinks they have little to worry about. If purpose can help them develop into adults like the ones he encountered in his earlier research, they’ll be “glowing” soon enough.
Out of the Mouths of BabesbySam Schulman
Ever wonder about those fifteen-year-olds who seem to have it all figured out? Cynics who meet adolescents with a serious sense of purpose often assume that those young people who are so sure of themselves and their place in the world now will fall apart later on. But are mid-life crises really brought on by having too much purpose at a young age? The answer is no, according to Paul Wink, a professor of psychology at Wellesley College who has been working with a sample of one hundred eighty-four men and women who were born in California in the 1920s and who have been studied from adolescence into their late 70s. Wink has found that purpose, which entails having a firm set of goals and the capacity to realize them, is pretty consistent over time. Purposeful adolescents grow into purposeful adults. He even found a positive correlation between purpose and life satisfaction, social engagement, physical and mental health, as well as altruism. With all those benefits, it seems that when it comes to purpose, it’s best to start young.
Dear Diary: What the Founders’ Journals Tell Us About Their Purposes...And Ours
by Richard Brookhiser
The founders were a generation of writers. What they wrote for public consumption was meant to inspire and persuade. “My arguments will be open to all,” Alexander Hamilton declared in the first Federalist paper, “and may be judged of by all.” In their letters to each other (and to their spouses) they shared their more personal hopes and fears. “God is a refuge for us,” Abigail Adams wrote her husband John in 1775 as war lapped Boston, just miles from her house, then added, “Charlestown is laid in ashes.” Faith and terror, compressed in two sentences.
But the founders also produced diaries or lists of resolutions that were for their own eyes only. In public documents or letters they communicated with the world, or with some slice of it. In the privacy of their notebooks they communed with themselves. Like people of other times, they filled their journals with fleeting thoughts, and events of the day. But because they were ambitious, for their own careers and for their country’s good, they were most interested in instruction: in fixing a purpose before the mind’s eye, and in recording their progress towards fulfilling it.
In 1784, the seventy-eight-year-old Benjamin Franklin looked back, as he wrote his Autobiography, on a youthful course of self-instruction he had undertaken half a century earlier. As a teenager, he had moved from his native Boston to Philadelphia, hoping to become a printer. Through hard work and good contacts, he succeeded.
Then in his late twenties young Franklin adopted a new goal. “I conceived,” as he put it in the Autobiography, “the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection. I wished to live without committing any fault at any time.” Franklin’s tone should not deceive us. He knew that his youthful self had set an impossible task; his account of what followed was flavored, like much of his writing, with humor. But if we see only the humor of it, then we deceive ourselves.
Young Franklin’s first thoughts on moral perfection were simple. Since he knew what was right and wrong, he decided that he should do the first and avoid the second. He soon found, however, that this was not so easy. “Habit took advantage of inattention; inclination was sometimes too strong for reason.” Good behavior required repetition, and concentration: doing the right thing again and again, and being mindful of the task.
Franklin accordingly made a list of twelve virtues – Temperance, Silence, Order, Resolution, Frugality, Industry, Sincerity, Justice, Moderation, Cleanliness, Tranquility, and Chastity – with brief descriptions of each (“Temperance – Eat not to dullness, drink not to elevation”; “Cleanliness – Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, clothes or habitation”). But his first list of virtues was incomplete: “A Quaker friend having kindly informed me that I was generally thought proud… I added Humility,” with the description: “Imitate Jesus and Socrates.”
Franklin next made a chart, with the virtues on one axis and the days of the week on the other. Every day he ticked off a mark in the relevant box for any infraction he had made. His most interesting innovation, however, was to concentrate on one virtue per week. A man weeding a garden, he explained, “does not attempt to eradicate all the bad herbs at once, which would exceed his reach and his strength, but works on one of the beds at a time, and, having accomplished the first, proceeds to a second.” After thirteen weeks, having tended to each virtue in turn, he would begin again at Temperance; in a year, he would run through all the virtues four times. When the frequent erasing of old marks made holes in the paper of his chart, he transferred it to the ivory leaves of a memorandum book, drawing the lines with ink that left a permanent stain, and penciling in marks that could easily be wiped off.
Franklin never perfected himself. The most elusive virtue for him was Humility. “There is,” he concluded in his Autobiography, “no one of our natural passions so hard to subdue” as Humility’s opposite, Pride. “Disguise it, struggle with it, beat it down, stifle it, mortify it as much as one pleases, it is still alive, and will every now and then peep out….” The best he could do was to acquire a humble manner, avoiding assertive words, such as “certainly” and “undoubtedly,” and saying instead, “I conceive, I apprehend, or I imagine a thing to be so and so.” “This mode,” he explained, “which I at first put on with some violence to natural inclination, became at length so easy, and so habitual to me, that perhaps for these fifty years past no one has ever heard a dogmatical expression escape me.” Franklin attributed his success in public life to his mildness. “I had less mortification when I was found to be in the wrong, and I more easily prevailed with others to give up their mistakes and join with me when I happened to be in the right.”
Franklin biographers know that this manner was put on, for he was a proud, angry man who remembered every slight and waited, sometimes for years, to exact revenge. But he retained the appearance of humility all his life, employing it most famously in his great speech at the end of the Constitutional Convention in September 1787, when he urged delegates who were refusing to sign to learn, as he had, how often one could be mistaken in life, and “to doubt a little of [their] own infallibility.”
Franklin’s serious conclusion, in his Autobiography, is that the effort had been worth it. “Though I never arrived at the perfection I had been so ambitious of obtaining, but fell far short of it, yet I was, by the endeavor, a better and happier man that I should otherwise have been if I had not attempted it.”