Purpose: Design a Community and Change Your Life---A Step-by-Step Guide to Finding Your Purpose and Making It Matter

By Gina Bianchini

WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER

WHAT IS YOUR PURPOSE AND HOW DO YOU MAKE IT MATTER IN MODERN LIFE?

In this thought-provoking and actionable book, Silicon Valley social software pioneer Gina Bianchini offers a step-by-step guide to finding your purpose and translating it into action through the power of community and new approaches to technology.

She offers a unique take on purpose discovered through her popular Community DesignTM Masterclass that has helped thousands of people crystalize their purpose and deliver impact-one community at a time.

Purpose: Design a Community and Change Your Life will show you new ways to create a practice around your purpose, craft your Future Story, and harness modern tools to make it matter in modern life.
If you don't yet have a purpose, this book will help you find yours.

If you're hungry to share your purpose with more people, this book will show you new strategies and techniques to capture people's imagination and expand your impact.

By consciously designing a life with purpose, community, and the best of new technologies outlined in this book, you'll find more joy, energy, and meaning in nearly every area of your life.

Your journey starts here.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gina Bianchini
• Release date: Nov 26, 2022
• ISBN: 9798987191415

Book preview

PREFACE

This is a book about finding your purpose and making it matter in modern life.

You may have picked up this book because you’re searching for your purpose. Or you may already believe you have something important to offer the people around you, and you want to make it matter to more people.

You may have read the mounting research showing that finding meaning in life is not about generic happiness or entertainment but through having a purpose. You might have a religious inclination that feels necessary but somehow insufficient. You may feel the demands of daily life are too overwhelming to dedicate time to an inward journey, and yet still hope there’s a way to uncover, solidify, and act on your purpose.

What I have found after years of exploration and thousands of interactions with people on their purpose journey is everyone has the opportunity to capture a clear intention for their time, talents, energy, and the power to set it into motion.

In this book, I want to offer you a concrete path to crystallizing your purpose and turn it into the most rewarding and impactful actions you can take in modern life.

Together, we’ll explore what it means to have a clear, positive intention for our time, talents, energy, and focus during our brief time on Planet Earth . . . what it means to have a purpose.

Here’s what I’ll share upfront. Your purpose may feel like it is uniquely yours, but it is not a solo endeavor. It’s not meant to be kept to yourself. Whether your purpose is genetic research or making pottery, political activism or urban beekeeping, the single best thing you can do for yourself is to build a community to support and amplify your purpose. Even silent prayers feel more powerful when we say them together.

The key is coming at your purpose on purpose—with intention. Intention harnesses your time, talents, energy, and focus toward impact.

Purpose is a practice and impact is the reward

I’m excited to show you a concrete step-by-step path to capture your purpose and translate it into amazing impact. First, I’m going to give you one simple practice that, when done consistently, can put you on a path to purpose faster and more easily than anything you’ve tried before.

Then I’m going to make the strong case for translating your newly clarified purpose into not just action, but specific action needed today more than ever before—bringing people together with intention. Because the skills involved in bringing people together with intention are getting increasingly lost in modern life, I’m going to share a set of obvious and not-so-obvious ways to do it. When done well, it has the potential to change your life.

I am not a clergyman or rabbi, a professor or politician, a psychiatrist or shaman. I am neither a TikTok star nor YouTube creator. I am not a famous billionaire entrepreneur. I am not a celebrity with a massive following.

What I do bring to this book is a deep curiosity and passion for helping people put their purpose into motion through the power of community. I’ve been a community platform entrepreneur for the past two decades. In this role, I’ve had the great fortune to meet people all over the world who have built incredibly rich and rewarding lives by crystallizing their purpose across different interests, passions, and goals. They then translate these purposes into impact with well-designed communities, both online and in the real world.

Through my company, Mighty, I see people every day around the globe find focus where they had been distracted, take on challenges they had previously considered too scary, meet amazing people when they have been lonely, and touch people’s lives one relationship, one community, one purpose at a time.

These are folks like Martinus Evans, who turned the indignity of a doctor calling him fat into a thriving community of back of the pack marathon runners with the Slow AF Run Club.

Or Sarah Lucas, Juliet de Baubigny, and Nick Jonas (yes, that Jonas), who saw type 1 diabetes not just as a chronic condition but as an opportunity to build a positive, life-affirming brand and community with Beyond Type 1 for those whose lives are touched by diabetes.

Or Larry Harvey and Jerry James, who turned an intimate summer solstice bonfire with a few close friends into a massively transformational global gathering every year called Burning Man.

Or Zak Foster, who after twenty years as a public school teacher and ten years as a quilter opened the Quilty Nook for the nicest, kindest quilters on the internet.

Or professor, futurist, and game designer Jane McGonigal, who turned planning for seismic shifts in the future into a game and community, Urgent Optimists, that introduces resiliency and has proven participants are better equipped to handle change.

As we explore and seize our purpose, community has an essential role to play in each of us living our absolute best, most rewarding, and most meaningful life.

Whether it’s how we show up for the community we were born into, the one we have chosen for ourselves as we grow up, or one we are designing online right now to bring people together, our purpose runs through community.

While I want you to find an overarching purpose that defines the arc of your future, I’ll also declare victory if, after reading this book, you simply start treating your time, talents, energy, and focus with more care and greater importance. It’s what each of us has been given. And it’s the gift we have to share with others.

In my work, I see how introducing people to new ways to apply universal concepts of purpose and human connection digitally opens new worlds of opportunity and impact. The exploding demand for Mighty’s cultural software, which allows people to build and run their own digital communities, tells me there’s a hunger for this purpose online. And people will pay for it. Last year, customers on our platform across 100 countries made $70 million by building communities with purpose, a number that is growing every month.

Therefore, in the final portion of the book, I’m going to offer a different way of thinking about the positive power of technology. If I’ve done my job right, this is a book that brings you hope about the future. I passionately believe technology can be a much better influence in our lives than it is for most of us today. We can take technology somewhere magical and build it to more easily bring positive intention, energy, and joy. We can use technology to harness each of our time, talents, energy, and focus, even under the most challenging conditions.

I see a world where purpose and technology intersect to create impact through millions of unique, vibrant communities that scale new digital cultures, build strong relationships between members, master something interesting or important together, and ultimately usher in a new era of purpose broadly distributed around the world.

PART I:

Finding Your Purpose

CHAPTER 1:

HOW I FOUND MY PURPOSE AND YOU CAN, TOO

Purpose is most often described as a singular endeavor. Yet, what I have found after years of exploration and hundreds of thousands of interactions with people on this journey is that everyone has multiple purposes. These purposes can be found through simple practices that I’ll show you how to surface a bit later in this book.

I’ll get to why finding your many purposes and the communities that go with them matters in the first place—and how the tools of our modern era are built to enable this exploration in beautiful and still emerging ways.

Yes. You read that right. Technology can help us find meaning in our lives and is one of the fastest paths to translating our purpose and purposes into richer, more rewarding, and more impactful action. I passionately believe that even after years of destructive social media habits and societal divides, the path to a different, more fulfilling future runs through our digital lives.

To shed some light on how I came to believe this, I want to tell you the story of where I grew up and how I came to understand the power of purpose, purposes, community, and technology through a unique lens. I’ll also share the story of what I saw as an entrepreneur at the advent of social media, where I was fortunate to be a part of the community of entrepreneurs and builders of that technology wave. My firsthand experience of that era continues to influence how I see technology evolving from here. Nothing is inevitable in the fast-moving and highly dynamic world of software.

It also influences my strong conviction that each of us has the power to design the role we want technology to play in our lives and the world around us. For skeptics of what I consider today to be late-stage social media—of which I am one—I want to paint a picture of a different future and relationship to technology. It’s one that starts with purpose, runs through community, and fundamentally challenges the status quo.

But first, let me share how I got here.

THE ORCHARDS

OF CUPERTINO

I was fortunate to grow up in a time and place rich with curiosity, potential, and wonder—and enough free time to explore and share joint passions with other people. From an early age, I saw people’s interests play out in tight-knit communities. Interests equaled communities and communities equaled interests. These were the social norms, not just of my hometown but many places across America.

Our place was Cupertino, California. You may have heard of Cupertino as the headquarters of Apple Computer, but when I was born there, it was still mainly fruit orchards. My grandparents moved to Cupertino with my father and aunt in 1950 to open a nursery to serve the surrounding orchardists, just as the area was starting to also attract the first semiconductor companies and defense contractors.

My grandparents, both from large Italian immigrant families, had a clear purpose: building up their new community to become a place of shared joy for all. Their old farmhouse and outdoor patio were the headquarters for our large extended family along the Bay Area peninsula. Their friendships were so far-reaching and yet intimate that I didn’t always know who our actual relatives were. My grandfather cofounded the Cupertino Lions Club; my grandmother became a core member of the Cupertino De Oro Club, a women’s social and service club. Coursing through these organizations was the idea of bringing service and purpose to the lives of others through fundraising drives for eyeglasses, civics lessons for elementary school kids, Christmas parties, and visits to the local convalescents’ home.

Growing up, my father took the spirit of community building to new heights. He was student body president of both his middle and high school, the first of his family to go to college on a football and wrestling scholarship, and president of his fraternity.

Later, when my father returned to Cupertino and became a high school history teacher, he fostered diverse groups of friends, each organized around a shared passion or goal. He restored classic cars from parts, so there were his Model A Ford friends and those who helped him restore a rare Mercedes called a 300SL. Then, there were the California National Guard friends he made during his weekends and summers in the Army Reserves. Lastly, the Cupertino High School community with whom he worked with during the school year—team-teaching freshman world history, coaching the varsity wrestling team, and performing in a band.

Between my grandparents, my father, and my mother, who dedicated herself to her own interests and brought us with her into a community of the faithful every Sunday, I grew up surrounded by people pursuing their passions with curiosity and kindness.

As a child of a family on a teacher’s salary, I experienced a rich, full life. We didn’t have a lot of money, but our time was filled with purpose—interests, passions, goals, and most importantly, a clear intention for our time, talents, energy, and focus. I was deeply fortunate.

This rich tapestry of close-knit communities was not just fun and interesting but mattered immensely given what came next.

WHEN COMMUNITY

MATTERED MOST

It was May and I was eleven. My father had left two days earlier for a California National Guard training program in Jackson, Mississippi. Coming home from dinner on the second night of the trip, a drunk driver veered across the highway and hit his car head-on. He was killed instantly. He was thirty-eight years old.

The initial outpouring of love and support was

Reviews for Purpose

[Ndadilepo M · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is a great book, purpose is a book one will use to discover themselves if you feel you have lost your way or you have no idea of where to start then this is a great tool.

[AnIncrediblyGinormousBookaholic · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Tons of engaging questions and far better than Jess Ekstrom's attempts at explaining how to find your purpose. I really liked the prompts, because they made me slow down and journal about what I want to be able to do and what I want to empower other people to do.