My Business On Purpose

You are not your business.  I own The On Purpose Group, the entity that holds Business On Purpose, but that is not who I am. I heard a late-middle-aged woman recently say something that made me sad, “I wouldn’t know what to do if I didn’t own this business… this has been my identity for so long.” It is ironic that amount of time and focus that we spend trying to protect our digital identity (identification, credit cards, passwords, etc.) and yet spend very little time trying to maintain a distance between ourselves and the identity that is created from our work. You are not your work.  Today you can serve ice cream, tomorrow lead a class on pottery, and the next day lead a congressional hearing.  Of course acumen in any trade or profession is, in part, gained through right repetition over long periods of time.  So if you wish to have impact through your work, then it will likely require longevity and focus. Where we must be careful is when longevity and focus begin turning into obsession and idolatry along wi