Observing The Monkey | A Discussion About Purpose

I was sitting with a friend who was in the process of launching a game. He had been developing games for the past 10 years, ever since he was a child and I always loved his dedication to his craft. He is a true artist, purely creative, he loves doing his craft but didn't want to cash out to work at some software house. He felt that his talent and his art were to serve a larger purpose, something which was greater than him.

He tried to work at various software houses initially, but it was nothing more than average people doing average work, nothing which was serving a higher purpose. He felt like he had more to give, and going to this software house was not worthwhile. He could not continue working due to his depression, so he quit. He went to the UK to study and made his game the main purpose of his life, pouring his life's struggles, and his pain into his artform which was games. He had been increasingly getting depressed over his situation, his lack of satisfaction, he didn't know what the future held for him when he came back to Pakistan.

When I asked him one day, what he wanted to do with this game he was developing, he said that he just wanted to release it to the people for free along with the source code. When I asked him why he wanted to do that, he told me that he just wants to help people like him. I began to connect the dots and asked him whether he faced any issues when developing a game. He said that he did face a lot of problems with finding information for beginners. He said that making the game is the easy part, it's the finding the information of development took all his time.

When he was describing his problem he was constantly running around in circles around his room trying to meditate while listening to heavy metal. I asked him if he could somehow, come up with a way in which he could make a game, and also find a way to teach people how to make it. I asked him that if he would be interested in building a company that would teach people how to make the very game they just played. To break down the process of making the game from the beginning. Making the process of learning to make games easy for the person who's starting out.

He suddenly stopped and said that he always wanted to teach people how to make games, but he never realized that consciously. Suddenly his effort was connected to a larger purpose, which he could consciously articulate. He was finally doing something which served the larger purpose and something which made his years of effort fruitful. I can tell you by the looks on his face that he had just solved a mystery in his mind, about what he wanted to do suddenly this all made sense and he was happier than I had ever seen him.

He had found his brand purpose, which meant that he could finally put a finger on what his purpose was.

A few days later I got a call from him and he said that he is making his company a reality and they are set to launch the game in a few weeks and he'll be very busy with making the lessons and the website where he could teach all he learned during his process.

I have a very simple system of finding brand purpose. I ask the person two questions

Question 1: What is the problem that a person is facing during a project they feel passionate about?

Question 2: How can our product help in removing steps from that process?

One simple way is to observe your journey and to recognize the pain points.

I call this, Observe The Monkey. I call it that because when we are going through the process of completing a project or task, we are at the mercy of factors that are outside our control. We can't change the process, so we have to follow the process which others have laid out for us, we are nothing but people who are being pushed around by the currents of daily events, learning to walk as we stumble. It is only when we cross the path and achieve our goal is when we get to see the process from a more meta-perspective. The process is not just uncontrolled chaos, but an order within that chaos. To the untrained eye, it's chaotic, but to the seasoned observer, it's nothing but chaos. Observe the monkey is the act of taking inspiration from the pain points of the journey, identifying the places where the process could have been much shorter, much easier, and making the conscious decision to make the process easier.

As innovators and developers of technologies that make people's lives easier, your job is to identify where you might have had issues in the past. Perhaps with some project which made your life very difficult. And if you observe yourself in the past, try to identify where that process could have been a lot simpler and make use of technology as a force for good.

Finding your purpose is just the first step in becoming a great company. Channeling that purpose and value is the reason why your whole organization exists. Go do great things.

I recommend you read Bernadette Jiwa's Hunch. It's an excellent read for anyone who is looking forward to making a meaningful change in people's lives.