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Einstein wasn’t a “lone genius” after all

by ARTICLES
  • In the history of science, perhaps no theory was as revolutionary, both immediately and long-term, as Einstein’s General Relativity. 
  • In order to incorporate gravitation into the theory of relativity, an entire new set of developments were required, and Einstein alone was incapable of making them. 
  • Instead, it was only through the idea-sharing that took place with the rest of the physics, astronomy, and mathematics community that the final theory came to be.
  • Below is as featured on https://bigthink.com/ on April 12, 2020.

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Perhaps the biggest myth in all of science is that of the lone genius. Someone, somewhere, with a towering intellect but no formal training wades into a field and can immediately see things that no one else has ever seen before. With just a little bit of hard work, they find solutions to puzzles that have stymied the greatest minds prior to them. And perhaps, if you had the good fortune of coming into a field just like that, you could make those great breakthroughs that the world’s greatest professionals had all missed.

That’s the myth we frequently tell ourselves about Einstein. That he, an outcast and a dropout, taught himself everything he needed to know on his own and revolutionized the field of physics in a number of ways. In the early days, his work thinking about light gave us the photoelectric effect, special relativity, and E = mc2, among other advances. Later on, his work alone gave us General Relativity, arguably his greatest achievement. All by his lonesome, Einstein single-handedly dragged the field out of Newtonian stagnation and into the 20th, and now the 21st, centuries. Here’s why that couldn’t be farther from the truth.

This 1934 photograph shows Einstein in front of a blackboard, deriving Special Relativity for a group of students and onlookers. Although Special Relativity is now taken for granted, it was revolutionary when Einstein first put it forth, and it isn’t his most famous equation; E = mc^2 is.

Yes, it’s true: back in 1905, Einstein published a series of papers that would go on to revolutionize a number of areas of physics, and we call this his “miracle year” because of those publications. But those substantial advances could hardly have been said to have occurred in a vacuum, or that Einstein in some way was an outsider to the field of physics.

Quite to the contrary, Einstein himself, although German-born, moved to Switzerland specifically to study physics and mathematics. At the age of 17, he enrolled in the mathematics and physics teaching diploma program in Zürich, where he graduated in 1900. That might not sound impressive, but today that University is known as ETH Zürich, and has had a total of 22 Nobel Laureates come through it.

Yes, it’s true that he went to work at the Swiss patent office, but was concurrently continuing his studies in Zürich at the same time. Moreover, it was his friend and classmate, Marcel Grossman, whose connections (through his father) got Einstein the job. (Grossman didn’t need it, having secured teaching positions to finance his graduate education.)

Additionally, there were a series of pieces of evidence that had been known — for decades, at that point — to go beyond what the ideas of Newton could hope to explain.

Heavy, unstable elements will radioactively decay, typically by emitting either an alpha particle (a helium nucleus) or by undergoing beta decay, as shown here, where a neutron converts into a proton, electron, and anti-electron neutrino. Both of these types of decays change the element’s atomic number, yielding a new element different from the original, and result in a lower mass for the products than for the reactants.

Newton’s Universe was deterministic. If you could take any system of particles and write down their positions, momenta, and masses, you could calculate how each and every one of them would evolve with time. With infinite calculational power, you could compute this to arbitrary precision at each and every moment in time. Maxwell’s equations brought electromagnetism into the same realm as Newtonian gravity and Newtonian mechanics. Those were the foundational pillars of physics at the time of Einstein’s birth.

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But puzzles arose, and were well-known for those final few decades of the 1800s. Radioactivity had been discovered, and the time at which any atom would decay was known to be random. Additionally, the law of mass conservation was violated for certain radioactive decays; mass was actually lost during beta decay. It was known that objects did not obey Newton’s laws of motion when they moved close to the speed of light: time dilation and length contraction had already been discovered and described. The null results of the Michelson-Morley experiment had been robustly determined.

And, perhaps most importantly, when the precession of Mercury’s orbit was calculated in detail — accounting for the gravitation of the planets and moons as well as the periodic change in Earth’s equinoxes — it came up short of observations by a tiny but significant amount: 43 arc-seconds per century.

The hypothetical location of the planet Vulcan, presumed to be responsible for the observed precession of Mercury in the 1800s. As it turned out, Vulcan doesn’t exist, paving the way for Einstein’s General Relativity.

Yes, in 1905, Einstein made quite a splash with his series of published papers. But it’s not like he hadn’t been working and studying continuously since his graduation. His patent office work largely consisted of examining electrical and electro-mechanical devices, including the transmission of electric signals and synchronization devices. He studied physics independently with a group of physics and mathematics friends, including the works of Ernst Mach and Henri Poincaré. And, owing to his studies, he was awarded a Ph.D. from the University of Zürich for his dissertation, A new determination of molecular dimensions, with Professor Alfred Kleiner.

Einstein’s 1905 achievements, which included:

  • the discovery of Brownian motion,
  • the derivation of E = mc2 and mass-energy equivalence,
  • the discovery of the photoelectric effect,
  • and the derivation of special relativity,

were no doubt momentous, but they didn’t occur in a vacuum. Quite to the contrary, Einstein benefitted from friends, colleagues, teachers and mentors, the collaborative efforts of his first wife (whose contributions will likely never be fully known), and the input of many others during this time. His papers didn’t come out of nowhere, but rather built upon earlier ideas of Planck, Lorentz, FitzGerald, Thomson, Heaviside, Hasenöhrl, and Poincaré. In fact, Poincaré had independently derived E = mc² back in 1900; it’s possible that Einstein read that very paper as part of his study group.

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A light-clock, formed by a photon bouncing between two mirrors, will define time for any observer. Although the two observers may not agree with one another on how much time is passing, they will agree on the laws of physics and on the constants of the Universe, such as the speed of light. Most importantly, time always appears to run forward, never backward, and that by applying the proper relativistic physics, any observer can calculate what any other observer will experience.

But what about General Relativity? Einstein, according to the legendary stories you might have heard about him, simply had what he referred to as “his happiest thought” around 1907 or so, and the rest was history.

What was “his happiest thought,” then? It was to consider what difference there would be between an observer who was locked in a windowless room on the surface of the Earth, and experienced the force of gravity pulling everything down towards the center of the Earth, and an observer who was locked in a uniformly accelerating room in the vacuum of space.

For the observer inside, Einstein reasoned, there was no way to tell the difference between the two scenarios. Everything inside would accelerate “downward” at 9.8 m/s2; the floor would push “upward” with a restoring, normal force to balance the downward pull; even light, if shone from one end of the room to the other, would travel in a curved path as dictated by either acceleration or gravitation. Known today as Einstein’s equivalence principle, it provided the conceptual link between motion, which was described by his (earlier, developed in 1905) theory of special relativity, and gravitation, which up until that point was a purely Newtonian phenomenon.

The identical behavior of a ball falling to the floor in an accelerated rocket (left) and on Earth (right) is a demonstration of Einstein’s equivalence principle. If inertial mass and gravitational mass are identical, there will be no difference between these two scenarios. This has been verified to ~1 part in one trillion for matter, but has never been tested for antimatter.

But even with this, Einstein was not operating in a vacuum at all. Einstein’s former professor during his undergraduate days, Hermann Minkowski, became enamored with special relativity, and was shocked that the same Einstein he had taught had developed it. “For me it came as a tremendous surprise, for in his student days Einstein had been a real lazybones. He never bothered about mathematics at all,” Minkowski wrote, but then it was Minkowski who developed the idea of spacetime based upon Einstein’s work. By placing space and time on the same mathematical footing, he set the stage for the mathematical development of General Relativity.

Conceptually, Einstein’s “happiest thought” may have been preceded by some fascinating work by Henri Poincaré. Poincaré realized that Mercury’s orbit didn’t only require corrections for Earth’s precessing equinoxes and the gravitational influence of the other bodies in the Solar System, but also for the fact that, as the fastest planet, Mercury’s velocity with respect to the speed of light could not be neglected. With the advent of special relativity, he realized that Mercury would experience dilated time, and that there would be length contraction in the direction of its motion around the Sun. When he applied special relativity to the orbit of Mercury, he found that he could account for about ~20% of the observed extra precession just by adding in that one effect.

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This illustration shows the precession of a planet’s orbit around the Sun. A very small amount of precession is due to General Relativity in our Solar System; Mercury precesses by 43 arc-seconds per century, the greatest value of all our planets. Elsewhere in the Universe, OJ 287’s secondary black hole, of 150 million solar masses, precesses by 39 degrees per orbit, a tremendous effect!

How, then, would it be possible to construct a physical theory that married gravitation to this new concept of spacetime, explain the precession of Mercury’s orbit, incorporate special relativity, and still be able to reproduce all of the earlier centuries of success that Newtonian gravity had?

It wasn’t Einstein’s idea at all, but rather that of his friend and former classmate, Marcel Grossman. While Einstein had the idea of the equivalence principle, it was Grossman who had the idea to describe the Universe with non-Euclidean geometry as its spacetime fabric.

After all, this was Grossman’s specialty: Riemannian geometry, where two parallel lines did not necessarily always remain parallel, but could converge and meet or diverge and get farther and farther apart, as dictated by the underlying geometry. Differential geometry and tensor calculus were precisely the language required to describe the Universe that Einstein was trying to picture, and Grossman was the one who put it all together. The paper, Outline of a Generalized Theory of Relativity and of a Theory of Gravitation, was the first of two fundamental papers that would establish General Relativity as the theory of gravity.

Countless scientific tests of Einstein’s general theory of relativity have been performed, subjecting the idea to some of the most stringent constraints ever obtained by humanity. Einstein’s first solution was for the weak-field limit around a single mass, like the Sun; he applied these results to our Solar System with dramatic success. Very quickly, a handful of exact solutions were found thereafter.

But even this specialty was not unique to Grossman and, through him, Einstein. Absolute differential calculus, as a field, had been introduced by Elwin Christoffel in 1869 and was only recently, at the time, completed by Gregorio Ricci and Tullio Levi-Civita in 1900. (These last names will be familiar to anyone who’s studied General Relativity.) There were numerous mathematicians studying precisely this field at the time, and one of them, the legendary David Hilbert, almost arrived at the equations that would describe gravitation in the Universe before Einstein did.

In every physical theory where you have mechanical motion, there’s a thing you can define — the action — that must be minimized in order to figure out what the path of that object will be. In Newtonian mechanics, it was Hamilton’s principle of least action that led to the equations of motion; in the context of a general theory of relativity, a new action principle would have to be discovered. That action principle was formulated independently by both Einstein and by Hilbert at around the same time, and is today known as the Einstein-Hilbert action. It’s this action principle, when correctly applied to the physics of the system, that leads to the modern Einstein field equations.

A mural of the Einstein field equations, with an illustration of light bending around the eclipsed sun, the observations that first validated general relativity back in 1919. The Einstein tensor is shown decomposed, at left, into the Ricci tensor and Ricci scalar. Novel tests of new theories, particularly against the differing predictions of the previously prevailing theory, are essential tools in scientifically testing an idea.

None of this is to diminish the genius of Einstein, nor to take credit away from him for the breakthroughs that he himself made. Rather, these stories are to better provide context as to how these great advances were made. Einstein was not, as the common narrative often goes, a lone genius who was working outside of the strict confines of academia, who was able to revolutionize the field precisely because he was an outsider, unconfined by the dogmatic and restrictive teachings of his day.

Rather, it was precisely because Einstein had the education and background that he did — his own unique toolkit, as it were — that he was able to approach this variety of problems in a self-consistent, non-contradictory way. It was because of his friends and collaborators that he was exposed to ideas that helped him to progress, rather than stagnate. And it was because of his willingness and even eagerness to rely on the input and expertise of others, and to take inspiration from them and incorporate it into his own work, that his excellent ideas, many of which were profound but were mere seeds, were able to sprout into the towering achievements we reflect upon today.

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Last year, I wrote an essay entitled, What if Einstein never existed? At the end, I contrasted the narrative of the lone genius with the attempts made to solve many of the outstanding problems of their time by other, less heralded scientists, and found that most advances would have occurred even without the person who made the key breakthrough. Georges Lemaître and Howard Robertson each put together the expanding Universe independently of Edwin Hubble. Sin-Itiro Tomonaga worked out quantum electrodynamics independently of both Julian Schwinger and Richard Feynman. Robert Brout and Alexei Starobinskii each published papers with key realizations concerning what we now know as cosmic inflation well before Alan Guth’s revolutionary paper.

What would the world have been like without Einstein? Would we ever have had General Relativity? I think the answer, without a doubt, is yes. Many others, even at the time, were close behind him. And without listening to the inputs of the world-class minds around him, Einstein wouldn’t have had anywhere near the successes or the impact that he did. Although our culture loves soundbites, with perhaps the most famous from Einstein being, “imagination is more important than knowledge,” these sorts of advances absolutely require both. Regardless of the ratio of “inspiration” to “perspiration” required, there’s simply no way around the need, if you want to make a meaningful advance, for expertise and hard work.

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James Dyson Created 5,127 Versions of a Product That Failed Before Finally Succeeding. His Tenacity Reveals a Secret of Entrepreneurship.

by ARTICLES
  • Sometimes wrong turns are what lead you to success.
  • Below is as featured on www.entrepreneur.com/ May 23, 2022.

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“Failure is interesting — it’s part of making progress. You never learn from success, but you do learn from failure.”

James Dyson, British inventor

Imagine spending five years of your life creating 5,127 versions of a product that failed. That’s exactly what the inventor of cyclonic vacuum technology, James Dyson did. Until finally, one magical day, he hit gold — finally succeeding in creating the world’s first bagless vacuum cleaner.

In some ways, entrepreneurship can seem like a type of madness — not unlike the obsessiveness that overtakes artists. But in Dyson’s case, his patience and persistence eventually led to payoff: a multi-billion dollar company known for its creativity and forward-thinking designs.

Today, the Dyson vacuum cleaner is sold in more than 65 countries worldwide. In an interview with Entrepreneur, the inventor explained how he was able to accept a long series of failures without letting frustration overwhelm him. “We have to embrace failure and almost get a kick out of it,” he noted. “Not in a perverse way, but in a problem-solving way. Life is a mountain of solvable problems, and I enjoy that.”

Learning means being okay with not having all the answers

We live in a rapid-paced society where we access information with the click and point of our finger — which means we absorb data at an unprecedented velocity. You can ask me a question this instant and I will take out my smartphone and spew out random facts.

But is this…actually learning?

Sure, we can access Wikipedia and feel like we’ve become experts on a topic.

But true, legitimate learning doesn’t come with ease. I am not advocating you quit researching things online (reading from reputable sources does expand our mind). What I do want is to rid ourselves of this false notion that learning is separate from discomfort.

Failing is painful, it makes you insecure and doubt everything. I know a little about this myself, because I’ve spent 16 years growing a business that has been met with many stumbles along the way.

But here’s the secret to entrepreneurship few will say: You have to fall in love with failing. You have to fall in love with your hunger for learning, for discovery, for being an inventor.

I am a person who enjoys taking long hikes in nature alone. I’ve gotten lost on the wrong tracks more times than I can count. But the process of finding the right way out — of learning that there are many paths that can lead us to the right outcome, it’s a lesson that stays with me both in my career and in my personal life.

I’d like to share some practical tips I’ve learned from experts and my own experience to help you become a life-long learner unafraid of making a wrong turn.

1. Cultivate the passion of the explorer

Harvard Business Review contributor John Hagell III wanted to get to the core of what motivates lifelong learners. What he discovered in his research is that rather than fear being an incentive for learning, it was those individuals who exhibited a “passion of the explorer” who were able to learn and grow.

“Explorers have a long-term commitment to achieving impact in a specific domain that excites them,” hewrites. “Anything from factory work or financial services to gardening or big wave surfing.”

Hagel believes we all have the potential for this form of passion. “Go to a playground and watch children 5-6 years old. They have all of the elements required: curiosity, imagination, creativity, and a willingness to take risks, and connect with others.”

Doing this in practice, however, can seem tricky. The fear of making a mistake is so ingrained in us. But it’s possible to make these adjustments in our daily lives by making a conscious choice to experiment, test out new possibilities and adapt along the way.

The way of the explorer is to be comfortable with the unknown — because their curiosity surpasses their fears.

2. Practice questioning the status quo

I’ve offered Dyson as an example of someone taking years to perfect his product — but I should also offer myself as an example. One of our latest products, Jotform Tables, which allows teams to collect, organize, and manage data in an all-in-one workspace — took us a whopping three years to develop.

So I am well aware of what it means to relentlessly pursue a vision.

But so much of this process started out and evolved by resetting our status quo and in asking ourselves, What else is possible? How might we make our customer’s lives even easier?

HBR co-authors Helen Tupper and Sarah Ellis advocate for making learning a part of our daily routine, and part of that involves asking propelling questions to explore different ways of doing things. Here are some examples the researchers recommend asking both of ourselves and our teams:

  • Imagine it’s 2030. What three significant changes have happened in your industry?
  • Which of your strengths would be most useful if your organization doubled in size?
  • If you were rebuilding this business tomorrow, what would you do differently?

3. Embrace the growing pains of relearning

It isn’t only failure that brings discomfort. At times it’s being swept up in the changing tides we have no control over. If we’ve learned anything from this pandemic, it’s that we’ve had to relearn how to do things in nearly every domain of our lives — parenting, communicating over Zoom, managing the endless fatigue of an ongoing crisis.

But these growing pains aren’t all bad, according to HBR co-authors Tupper and Ellis. “Relearning is recognizing that how we apply our strengths is always changing and that our potential is always a work in progress,” they note. “We need to regularly reassess our abilities and how they need to be adapted for our current context.”

So, how do we remain nimble in the face of change? A few things that have worked for me: counting every small success at the end of each day (even writing it down as a reminder), maintaining my focus on what’s working well and continuously being open to feedback.

For me, spending years on prototypes isn’t just about tenacity; it’s a question of faith. And it’s this faith that gives us the courage, confidence and hope to persevere against all odds.

Entrepreneur Editors’ Picks

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The 5-hour rule: How to turn a wasted day into a successful one

by ARTICLESLife Hacks
  • We each have the same 24 hours available to us. What we do with those hours varies by culture and gender, but we each have at least a few hours to spend in leisure. 
  • The 5-hour rule asks us to devote at least one hour a day to learning, experimenting, and reflecting. It’s a trick used by the richest and most successful people in the world. 
  • Here are three easy steps to start your own 5-hour rule.
  • Below is as featured on https://bigthink.com/ June 7, 2022.

like to make chit-chat now and then. One of my go-to conversation topics — most people’s go-to conversation topic — is TV. I might open with, “are you watching anything good at the moment?” This often opens a half-decent, mostly entertaining discussion. But sometimes, my opening salvo falls flat. The other person says something like, “Oh, I’ve not got the time to watch TV.”

It’s an answer that bothers me. For one, it’s laced with not a small whiff of condescension: If you’re watching TV, you must be lazy. But mostly, it bothers me because it’s not strictly true. What people mean is, “I’ve prioritized other things in my day.” And that’s fine. We each have our own personal values, concerns, and preferences.

“I’ve not got time to watch TV” means “TV doesn’t interest me as much as this or that.”

The fact is that we all have the same number of hours in the day, and it’s up to us to decide how we spend them. Some people will most certainly have more “free hours” than others, but for most of us, we have at least a few hours to spend as we want. And according to “the 5-hour rule,” how we choose to spend those hours might mean the difference between success and mediocrity.

The anatomy of a day

There are 24 hours in a day (or 1,440 minutes, if you really like to count your life away). The average person sleeps around eight hours (with the Dutch sleeping the most and the Singaporeans the least). That leaves 16 waking hours left to spend (I’m afraid those “learn while you’re sleeping” tapes aren’t likely to work). We need to subtract the seven to eight hours a day during which most people work, though those sleepy Dutch work a bit less. So, we’re down to nine remaining hours.

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Much of those nine hours are taken up by life administration: shopping, housework, unpaid labor (e.g. care work), and eating and drinking. Of course, there are massive cultural differences lurking in that category. For instance, as Our World in Data reveals that people “in France, Greece, Italy and Spain report spending more time eating than people in most other European countries. The country where people spend the least time eating and drinking is the USA (63 minutes).”

Unsurprisingly, there’s a huge disparity in how care work or unpaid labor is divided across genders. According to the OECD, “Around the world, women spend two to ten times more time on unpaid care work than men.” This has a knock-on effect in how many leisure hours the genders have to spend. For instance, in Norway and New Zealand the difference is almost negligible. In Portgual and India, however, men have 50 percent more leisure time than women.

The 5-hour rule

Most people have at least a few hours to do with what they want. For more than half of the population, those hours are wasted away on non-work-related phone worship. But these are not the people who will become the entrepreneurs, innovators, and success stories of tomorrow.

Over the last few decades, a cottage industry has sprung up that examines and dissects the habits and values of “self-made” millionaires. One of the key findings that comes up again and again is known as the “5-hour rule.” In short, this is the rule where we spend one hour a day learning, reflecting, and thinking. The rule dates to Benjamin Franklin, who would devote (at least) an hour each day specifically to learning something new. Franklin would rise early to read and write. He even set up his own club of artisans and experimenters. Today, Elon Musk, Oprah Winfrey, and Bill Gates all employ some version of the 5-hour rule.

The idea is that devoting an hour of your day to education exercises the mind, improves your skills, and rehearses great discipline. In education-speak, the 5-hour rule gives us both knowledge and skills.

How to spend your hour

Even accepting the wisdom in the 5-hour rule, it can still come over as daunting. After a long day, with tired eyes and a throbbing headache, most of us will reach for the TV remote, not Tolstoy. But here are three “first steps” to the 5-hour rule.

Learn…however you can. Reading print on a book is one way of learning, but it’s not the only way. In fact, if you don’t enjoy reading that much, it’s likely you’ll learn less from it anyway. Today, podcasts, audiobooks, and spoken radio are all great ways to spend your hour. What’s more, the internet is full of educational, entertaining, and enlightening long-form articles, which are much more digestible than huge, hand-aching tomes.

Experiment. Bettering yourself does not always mean cramming your head with facts. The most successful people in life were not those who stumbled on some magic treasure in the woods, but who tried and failed, tried, and failed again. In his book Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure, Tim Harford says success means we “first, seek out new ideas and try new things; second, when trying something new, do it on a scale where failure is survivable; third, seek out feedback and learn from your mistakes as you go along.” Try something new. Try something differently. When we experiment, we both have fun and learn a great deal

Reflect. Failure is only valuable insofar as it improves the future. In the words of Samuel Beckett, “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Each failure is different, and each defeat is closer to victory than the last. There are many ways to reflect. For some, it might mean a diary, journal, or ten minutes spent simply ruminating. For others, it could mean talking things over and unpacking what happened. When we reflect on our days and our mistakes, we turn failures into learning experiences.

So, why not give the 5-hour rule a go? At worst, it will make you a bit more interesting at the next family gathering. At best, it might make you a few million dollars.

Jonny Thomson teaches philosophy in Oxford. He runs a popular account called Mini Philosophy and his first book is Mini Philosophy: A Small Book of Big Ideas.

BILL

Bill Gates Says Unhappy Customers Are Good for Your Business. Here’s Why.

by ARTICLES
  • Learning why your customers become unhappy teaches how you can improve the customer experience and build loyalty.
  • Below is as featured on www.entrepreneur.com/ October 22, 2020.

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“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”

Bill Gates

Entrepreneur Editors’ Picks

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Looking For A Business Idea? Start With Your Purpose

by ARTICLES
  • Here’s a completely different way of developing a business idea.
  • Instead of focusing on a problem worth solving, focus on the purpose that drives you.
  • Below is as featured on www.entrepreneur.com/ on June 29, 2021.

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Have you ever tried to come up with a new business idea? For some entrepreneurs, the idea comes naturally — perhaps it came from a familiar industry, or there was an unsolved problem that the founder experienced first-hand. But not every aspiring founder has a clear idea of exactly what that business should do. So, where to start?

Many business schools will recommend a set formulation: First, start by identifying a problem in the world or in your life. Then develop a solution. There are other methods, of course — like assessing personal skills and abilities, using design thinking, undertaking market research, and so on. But one element often gets overlooked, or left as an afterthought.

That element is a sense of purpose. It isn’t just the driving force of a business; it can also be the seed of a business idea.

Purpose before problem

In this alternative formulation, a sense of purpose — both individual and corporate — comes first, and helps to guide the rest of the process. Forget quickly drawing up your corporate mission as a last-minute addition to your pitch deck. Instead, try asking yourself the following questions before you even begin:

  • What is my personal purpose?
  • What purpose would I like my business to work towards?
  • Which ultimate goals drive my ambition?

Once you have a few initial thoughts, see if you can go deeper still. You may have heard of the Five Whys method, originally used in a corporate context to get to the core of an issue. Here, you can also apply it to your own purpose-finding journey. Ask yourself, “What is my personal purpose?” Come up with an answer. Then challenge that answer by asking, “Why?” Repeat that five times (hence the Five Whys), as a way of getting closer to the core of what drives you. This is essential — not just as a personal self-awareness initiative, but as a key aspect of your business plan.

For example, let’s say you start with the following answer: “My purpose is to be successful in work.” Why? Maybe it’s because you’d be happy if things went well with your work. Why? It could be that you can see how your work impacts others, and this gives you a sense of pride. Why? Because you want to do work that matters. Why? Because you want to feel like your work contributes to the world, or gives back in some way. Why? Maybe you want to feel like you left the world a better place, and it’s important to you that your work reflects the values you believe in.

There’s no right or wrong way to work through this method. It’s just a tool to help you explore your intentions in more depth. You don’t have to end up with an answer about changing the world, either. If it’s meaningful to you (for example, living with authenticity, taking care of your family, or connecting with your community), it should be included.

Back to business

Let’s say you’ve uncovered a foundational sense of purpose, or you’ve looked at your personal mission in a little more detail. What next? There are a couple of ways you can use a sense of purpose to guide a business plan.

First, you can return to the traditional model of finding a problem in an existing market and then searching for a solution — but this time, look at it through the lens of purpose. Taking a broad example, if your purpose was to “create happiness for others” (borrowing from The Disney Institute), you can look at your market problem through this lens. How could you find a solution to your problem that would not just serve a functional, profit-driven outcome, but also serve your purpose of maximising happiness? Applying the purpose lens might lead you to a different way of addressing the problem, or a different approach to the issue altogether.

Second, you can use your sense of purpose to actually formulate the business idea itself, and locate your market, problem and solution. Take beauty disruptor Glossier as an example. Their corporate mission statement is to “democratise beauty” and to “give voice through beauty.” The result, for Glossier, is a consumer-focused company with an emphasis on inclusivity. But by starting with the mission statement alone, you could brainstorm hundreds of other ideas that work towards the same purpose. This is a process of creativity, and — if you’re thinking about generating business ideas for yourself — you can use your personal sense of purpose as a starting point.

Finally, you can realign an existing business idea to reflect your personal mission and purpose. Let’s say you’ve already seen a market problem, found a solution, validated it with consumers and started to build. A sense of purpose is still an important part of your strategy, no matter what stage you’re at. At this later stage, try to work out exactly what need you’re meeting for your customers or users. This might go one level deeper than just a product or service. Think about values, experience and personal connection. From there, you can work backwards to see what kind of purpose your company serves.

The purpose of purpose

What’s the point of all of this purpose-finding work? When it comes to the entrepreneurial lifestyle — long hours, perseverance, exhaustion — does having a sense of purpose help? In fact, research indicates that it does.

A recent study by Harvard Business Review suggests that entrepreneurs with a sense of “harmonious passion” (i.e., motivated by the job because it brings a sense of satisfaction and personal identification) were less likely to report experiences of burnout than entrepreneurs with a sense of “obsessive passion” (i.e., motivated by the job because of the status, money or other external rewards).

From a practical perspective, building a strong corporate purpose into my own startup has given me clarity at every later stage of the process — in pitching to prospective investors, in formulating business strategy, and in giving me a vision for the future.

On a more personal level, having a sense of purpose can provide the energy and drive you need to continue working on your business, day after day, year after year. Once the initial excitement of a new project fades, and you’re left with the difficult, consistent work of building your business, you’ll have a solid foundation of meaning, mission and purpose to support you.

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