Nicholas Pearce - The Purpose Path: A Guide to Pursuing Your Authentic Lifes Work

I began wrestling with questions of purpose and vocation in my early twenties, some sixty years ago. Across forty years of writing, Ive tried to share what Ive learned about those questions with my readers, especially about the importance of letting our highest values guide the work we do and how we do it. After all, most of us will spend most of our waking hours working: the way we spend our days will end up being the way we spend our lives.

In a society that is forever preoccupied with the pursuit of more, it becomes all too easy to spend our lives chasing a cultural definition of success, to disconnect our working lives from the better angels of our nature. But at age eighty, I know beyond doubt how important it is to seek a path more purposeful than one fixated on the pursuit of wealth, prestige, and power. Living what I call an undivided life means learning to listen more carefully for the still, small inner voice of vocation, recognizing our deep longing to join soul and role as closely as we can.

The invitation to journey toward an undivided life is an invitation to be made wholewhich means to be vulnerable, to wear our hearts on our sleeves against all the cultural advice to the contrary. Im ever grateful for people who inspire us to do exactly that through every kind of weather we encounter on the journey by walking their talk.

In his life, in his work, and in this book, Nicholas Pearce is one of those people. Like me, Nicholas was born on the bustling South Side of Chicago to hard-working parents who influenced the value he places on work and incubated in him an awareness of and a longing for the transcendent. Like me, he grew up going to churchbut unlike me, he began wrestling with questions of vocation at the tender age of seven. As a leading business school professor and expert in the field of leadership and organizational behaviorand as a pastor serving the very church in which he was raisedNicholas is a living, breathing example of an undivided life. For me, he is proof positive that vocation transcends careerand in this book, he shares some of his own experience with the tension between fidelity to the voice of ones vocation and the allure of conventional success.

Nicholas writes from the intersection of spirituality and work to communicate these essential truths with elegant simplicity and grounded authenticity. He writes to weary travelers on lifes road who long to be free from the burden of fraudulencethe burden of betraying true selfand want more faithfully to express who they are through their livelihood, not in spite of it. At the same time, he speaks to younger people who are trying to summon the courage to start down the path with soul and role conjoined, to bring light, joy, and purpose to all they touch. He calls this the purpose path, one marked by the bravery to align our deepest purposes with our daily words and actions.

In these pages, youll meet influential leaders and everyday peoplesome who have found their way onto their own purpose paths, some who are still struggling with the disorientation and dissatisfaction that come from living a divided life. Youll read stories of clarity, conviction, and courage and see why connecting soul and role is so critical to good leadership. Nicholas deftly connects insights about purpose from the individual level to the organizational level, sharing stories of organizations that are thriving on their own purpose pathsas well as some that, while profitable, are losing their souls by ceaselessly engaging in activity that is divorced from the organizations reason for being.

Accepting the invitation to the purpose path demands that we acknowledge our complicity in willfully working at jobs and engaging in activities that flagrantly violate our values. When we live divided lives, each passing day gnaws at the fiber of our very being: I know because Ive been there. I suspect that, like me, youve met many people who have grown numb to the hunger pangs of the soul that divided living can bring about. Inwardly, we know who we are and who we are meant to become, yet outwardly we ignore the voice of vocation and instead respond to the demands of others.

Even though we will never be able fully to harmonize our inward and outward realities, there comes a point at which the dissonance becomes too great a burden to bear, compelling us to give more weight on the imperatives of our hearts, liberating us to connect who we are with what we do. The need to align our daily work and our lifes work becomes an inescapable yearningnot toward perfection, but toward wholeness.

If thats your yearningor if you want that to be your yearningthis book is for you. Reading The Purpose Path is a wonderful place to begin or continue the exploration of what it means to connect your soul with your role and live an integrous, undivided life.

May the road rise to meet you on your journey.

Parker J. Palmer, author of On the Brink of Everything, Let Your Life Speak, A Hidden Wholeness, and The Courage to Teach