The roaring music, the dancing and cheering teenagers, the adults running around keeping everything under control—it all seemed appropriate to the mission of the day. The teenagers in the Edison Ballroom had traveled from some of the roughest neighborhoods in cities like New Haven, Detroit, Newark, and Philadelphia to attend DreamCon, the daylong event where all seven hundred of them would present their dreams, and the progress they had made on achieving them over the past few months, to a panel of adult judges.
Teenagers spend most of their waking hours at school. But most schools are designed to teach kids to solve algebra problems and write essays, not to help them discover what their individual callings might be. As a result, many students graduate without a real sense of what they want to do. Others drop out because school feels pointless. Mangino and Balakrishna want to change that. They want to catch teens—especially at-risk teens—at this critical moment in their lives and help them find their purpose.
Every school, Mangino and Balakrishna believe, should have a Dream Director, a person like a guidance counselor who sits down with kids and encourages them to think big about the contribution they want to make to society. Then they help each student create a step-by-step plan to achieve that goal. Plenty of people have dreams, after all, but many do nothing to actually accomplish them. The Future Project has placed Dream Directors in dozens of public schools across the United States. In the years since the organization’s founding, those Dream Directors have helped thousands of students get on a purposeful path.
At DreamCon, I met one young woman from New York who dreamed of becoming a cop in order to bring safety and order to communities like her own. Her Dream Director suggested that she do some more research about the different law enforcement roles that she could pursue. After she looked into it further, she decided that she wanted to become an FBI investigator and is now researching the steps she needs to take, in terms of education and additional training, to reach that goal. I also met a high school senior from New Haven who was a single father. The mother of his baby daughter, he told me, “wasn’t really around.” His dream, he said as he showed me pictures of his little girl on his cellphone, is to create a community of single dads to support each other as they transition into fatherhood. He’s currently organizing meetings in New Haven with single fathers he knows. The next step is to expand that community to other cities and create a national network.
Mangino and Balakrishna have found that when students pursue their purpose, the benefits spill over into other aspects of their lives. Students who worked with Dream Directors became more excited about learning, had higher attendance at school, and reported higher levels of empathy and leadership. Four out of five said that they “accomplished something they did not think was possible,” and nearly all of the alumni of the program report still being positively affected by it and say that they are thriving in college, a career, or an entrepreneurial endeavor. They also reported a stronger sense of purpose. At the conference, one high school freshman told me that pursuing his purpose made him more confident. Another said that working with his Dream Director to pursue his calling as an artist kept him off the streets, where he would have been selling drugs. A girl who wanted to become a doctor said pursuing her dream helped her get better grades and inspired her younger brother to take his studies more seriously, too.
Mangino and Balakrishna’s efforts are part of a broader turn in our culture. Over the last two hundred years, society’s interest in purpose, as measured by one social scientist, has never been stronger than it is today. This preoccupation with purpose has taken root not only in education, but also in business, where companies are increasingly defining their missions in terms of contributing to society rather than merely making a profit.
One such company is Life is Good, an apparel brand founded by brothers Bert and John Jacobs in 1994. As Bert and John tell it, the story of Life is Good begins not with the company’s founding but in their childhood. The boys, who were the two youngest of six children, grew up in Needham, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. Life in the Jacobs household was, by many people’s standard, hard. The second floor of their small home had no heat. Their dad had a temper. And they couldn’t always afford basic necessities. Their mom, Joan, joked that she bought them food they didn’t like so that it would last longer.
Despite all of this, Joan was a resilient and cheerful woman who focused on the positive. Every night at the dinner table, she asked all six children to share one good thing that happened to them that day. As the kids talked about finding a Rolling Stones CD at the dump, hearing a funny joke, or learning something cool in school, the energy of the room transformed. Everyone started laughing and smiling. Joan’s optimism lifted them all up. “I like running out of money,” she would tell them, because “then I don’t have to worry about what I need to buy.” From her, the boys learned that joy comes from your mindset, not just your circumstances. That lesson eventually inspired Bert and John’s vision for Life is Good.
In 1989, when they were in their twenties, Bert and John started a business designing printed T-shirts, which they sold on the streets of Boston. They also traveled up and down the East Coast, selling the shirts door-to-door on college campuses, each time making barely enough money to fund the next road trip. They slept in their van, ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and showered where they could.
On the road, they spent a lot of time talking. During one trip, they discussed the way the media inundates the culture with stories of murder, rape, war, and suffering day after day. Though bad things happen and it’s important to know about them, they agreed, the world is also full of good news. They thought of Joan and her ability to turn a light on in a dark room. They decided they wanted to promote her values in their work, to create a symbol that would serve as an antidote to the cynicism they saw in the culture—a superhero whose power was optimism.
John sketched a grinning stick figure on a T-shirt. He called the character Jake. When they got back to Boston, they threw a party and pinned the new T-shirt on a wall. Their friends loved it. One of them wrote on the wall next to the T-shirt, “This guy’s got life figured out,” with an arrow pointing to Jake, who would become the main symbol of Life is Good.
The brothers distilled that phrase to three words: “Life is good.” Then they printed the image of Jake and the phrase on forty-eight T-shirts. When they set up their stand on a sidewalk in Cambridge, they sold all of the shirts in less than an hour—a first for them. That was in 1994. At the time, they had $78 to their names. Today, they run a $100 million lifestyle brand.
As the business got going, the brothers declared that its purpose was to leave a positive mark on the lives of others, the way Joan had on them. Then something unexpected happened. They started receiving letters and emails from people who had faced and were facing difficult life circumstances, including cancer, the loss of a loved one, homelessness, and natural disasters. They wrote about how they wore Life is Good apparel to get through chemotherapy or an amputation, or, in the case of one woman, the loss of her husband in 9/11, a firefighter whose personal motto had been “Life is good.” They wrote about how moved they were by the Life is Good message, and how they had emerged from their adversity with a deeper appreciation of and gratitude for life.
Bert and John did not know what to do with these letters at first. “I don’t think we quite understood the depth of our message when we first created it,” John said. As they tried to keep their small business afloat, they read and savored the letters—but then stashed them in a drawer. Then, in 2000, they decided to share the letters at staff meetings and company-wide gatherings so that everyone could see that their hard work was making a tangible difference in the lives of others. The letters remind all of the employees that their efforts serve the larger purpose of spreading optimism. “When the daily grind of activities begins to obscure the value of our work,” Bert and John write, “these inspiring stories lift us up and remind us we are members of a much bigger tr
ibe.”
Since 2010, Life is Good employees have had another source of meaning to tap into. That year, the company launched a nonprofit arm called the Life is Good Kids Foundation, devoted to children who are living with illnesses, violence, abuse, poverty, and other adversities. The primary program of the foundation is called Playmakers, an initiative that offers training and enrichment workshops to childcare providers like teachers, social workers, and hospital workers. During these programs, they learn about research on optimism and resilience, and how they can apply that research to improving the lives of the children they care for. Every year, Life is Good donates 10 percent of its net profits to help kids in need. Since its founding, the foundation has trained over 6,000 Playmakers who are working to improve the lives of over 120,000 kids every day.
The commitment to helping kids means that employees at all levels are working not just to spread the power of optimism to their customers, but to help children facing adversity live better lives. Everyone in the company knows, Bert explained, that the quarterly and annual sales goals are tied not only to profitability and growth as a company, but to helping kids who really need it.
“I spend most of my time unloading boxes from a truck and doing other manual labor,” said Ian Mitchell, who works at the Life is Good warehouse in New Hampshire, “and I know that just by doing my job well, I am helping the kids.” Craig Marcantonio, a graphic designer based at the company’s Boston headquarters, felt the same way. “Sometimes you’ll get caught up in your daily tasks,” he said, “and then you’ll hear about what Playmakers is doing at one of our monthly design meetings, and it reminds you that your work is pushing the needle forward on spreading optimism and being a beacon of hope for others.” Allison Shablin, the Life is Good receptionist, said that even when she’s fielding calls and greeting visitors, she knows she’s part of something bigger. “I work for a company that does so much good for other people, and that makes me feel very proud,” she said.
Life is Good is part of what entrepreneur Aaron Hurst has called “the new purpose economy.” Just as the agrarian economy gave way to the industrial economy in the nineteenth century, the information economy is today giving way to an economy focused on purpose, argues Hurst, the founder of the Taproot Foundation, a multibillion-dollar marketplace that connects marketers, designers, and other professionals with nonprofits that could use their help. The purpose economy, Hurst writes, “is defined by the quest for people to have more purpose in their lives. It is an economy where value lies in establishing purpose for employees and customers—through serving needs greater than their own, enabling personal growth, and building community.” Beyond niche companies like the New Belgium Brewing Company, The Container Store, and Virgin Atlantic, which call purpose the backbone of their business operations, traditional companies like Pepsi, Deloitte, and Morgan Stanley are rebranding themselves around purpose, too.
That might come as a surprise, but there’s a good reason for corporations to embrace these ideas—by pursuing purpose, companies are also helping the bottom line. In their book Conscious Capitalism, John Mackey of Whole Foods and Raj Sisodia of Babson College point out that purpose-driven firms that create cultures of meaning among their employees, customers, and society at large are on the rise, and they are financially outperforming their peers. That’s in part because consumers are seeking them out. As Sisodia has written with his colleagues, “People are increasingly looking for higher meaning in their lives, rather than simply looking to add to the store of the things they own.” But it’s also because, as Bert and John found, having a purpose-driven culture actually makes companies work better.
Today, about 70 percent of all employees either are “not engaged” in their work—that is, they feel uninvolved, uncommitted, and unenthusiastic about it—or are “actively disengaged” from it, and less than half of all workers feel satisfied with their jobs. But when people have meaning at work, they are more engaged, more productive, and far likelier to stay at their organizations. They realize that their daily tasks, no matter how menial, are making a positive difference in the world—and that, research has found, is a very potent motivating force. As research by Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School has found, “Of all the events that can deeply engage people in their jobs, the single most important is making progress in meaningful work.”
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Cultures of meaning can also have dramatic consequences for our health. This becomes especially clear when turning to those over the age of sixty-five, a rapidly growing segment of the population. Sadly, though, as older adults enter the last decades of their lives, they often find themselves shunted to the side—or worse. Research shows that elder abuse and neglect are serious problems, especially at long-term-care facilities like nursing homes. In one study, for example, 40 percent of nursing home staff members admitted to committing psychological abuse like swearing and yelling at residents, depriving them of food, or subjecting them to “inappropriate isolation.” In another, about 4 in 10 nursing home residents reported that they had been abused or seen someone else be abused.
I still viscerally remember the first time I visited a nursing home. The place was depressing. There were layers of filth on the floors and the surfaces. The food trays that were delivered to the patients were dirty. And a rank odor hung in the air. This grim environment was a reflection of the grim health of the patients themselves. They were helpless, confused, and aimless. Most of them received no visitors, and their cognitive and physiological health seemed to be in decline. There was no reason, after all, for them to remain sharp.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Healthy aging is possible, even in a nursing home, but it requires a radically different culture from the one many of us are used to. In the 1970s, two researchers, Ellen Langer and Judith Rodin, conducted what has become a classic psychology experiment that sheds light on what that culture might require.
After a life of independent living, elderly people often have a difficult time transitioning to a nursing home, where they’re often seen as helpless. As the months and years wear on, they predictably lose their zest for life. Langer and Rodin wanted to see if they could reverse that trend. They selected a group of nursing home residents and gave each of them a houseplant for their rooms. Half the subjects were told that the nurses on their floor would care for the plant, while the rest were given full control over the plant. Each in that second group was allowed to pick out the plant, choose where in the room to put it, and decide when to water it. It was their job to care for the plant.
After a year and a half, the psychologists followed up with both groups of people. They found that those who cared for a plant did remarkably better than those who did not. They were more social, alert, cheerful, active, and healthy. Most surprising to the researchers was that those who took care of a plant actually lived longer. Over the eighteen months of the experiment, fewer of them had died compared with the other group. A very small intervention had made a big difference in the lives of the individuals Langer and Rodin studied.
What was it about looking after a plant? The patients in the nursing home were responsible for their plant, which made them feel in control of their circumstances. The plant gave them a “thing,” as Camus might put it—a purpose in their otherwise monotonous lives, and this motivated them. More recent research bears this out: older people who report having more purpose in life live longer than those who report having less. They have a reason to get out of bed in the morning—a reason, even, to go on living.
Indeed, a growing body of research suggests that meaning can protect against numerous ailments. Having meaning in life, for example, has been associated with longevity, better immune functioning, and more gray matter in the brain. Purpose, in particular, has been shown to have a wide range of health benefits. It decreases the likelihood of mild cognitive impairments, Alzheimer’s disease, and strokes. Among those who have heart disease, having purpose diminishes the chances of having a heart attack—and people who
lack purpose are at higher risk for cardiovascular disease.
It’s unclear why exactly meaning and health have such a strong relationship, but some psychologists speculate that people leading meaningful lives may take better care of themselves. Research finds that they’re less likely to smoke cigarettes and drink alcohol, have better exercise and sleep habits, and maintain better diets. They are also more likely to use preventive health services. “If you invest in life,” as meaning researcher Michael Steger has put it, “you invest in health.” These findings have policy implications in a world where healthcare costs are rising, the population is rapidly aging, and people are living longer than ever. According to the World Health Organization, the proportion of individuals over 60 in the world will double by the middle of this century—and, in the United States, one fifth of the population will be over sixty-five years old by 2050.
Unfortunately, as people age, research finds that their sense of purpose declines. With retirement, their primary identities—mother, Little League coach, doctor, supervisor—weaken or vanish, and they often struggle to replace their old roles with new ones. Can cultures of meaning help these people live healthier lives? Many innovators think so. Marc Freedman, for example, is the founder of an organization called Encore.org, which does for older adults what The Future Project does for teenagers—inspiring them to craft a new purpose for themselves during retirement.
Many think of retirement as a vacation, a time when they can golf, spend time at the beach, or travel unburdened by the responsibilities of their younger years. That attitude is certainly understandable. After a busy life of going to school, raising children, and working, it’s natural to want a break. The problem, though, is that this mindset kills meaning. Purpose arises from having something to do. “Nothing is so insufferable to man as to be completely at rest, without passions, without business, without diversion, without study,” wrote the French philosopher Blaise Pascal in his Pensées. “He then feels his nothingness, his forlornness, his insufficiency, his dependence, his weakness, his emptiness. There will immediately arise from the depth of his heart weariness, gloom, sadness, fretfulness, vexation, despair.” When the elderly believe they still have a part to play in society, though, they maintain a strong sense of purpose.
The Power of Meaning Page 19