Why Bother? Purpose Drives Creative People to Minimize Distraction, Recruit Buddies, and Build Success

Mindful Agility

Our clumsiness in life creates most of our suffering. We haven't practiced the skills we need to be happy. We don’t see what’s going on around us. We don’t see the causes early enough to prevent a train-wreck in work or life. And when we don’t know how to distinguish truth from delusion, well that leads to a world of hurt.
But if we don't have a purpose, should we or anyone else care that we mess up?

Mindfulness skills help us reduce the dumb stuff we do to ourselves. When we get more comfortable and skillful just living in our existing situation, then we can contemplate why we are here and how to actively live. Knowing where we're going, means agile skills can get us there, finding creative solutions to the tough stuff.
So, here's one way to think of our journey to higher purpose and fulfillment:

1. Mindfulness skills
2. Purpose
3. Agile skills

A couple of months ago, Dan Greening was interviewed for another podcast, called 10,000 Heroes, by his pal Ankur Shah Delight. If you’ve wondered what the hell those Mindful Agility people were trying to do, Ankur asked the right questions. Here’s that 10,000 Heroes episode, in its entirety. If you like the idea of exploring purpose, 10,000 Heroes is a nice thing to check out.

Credits

• Ankur Shah Delight was our guest host for this episode. He is host of the 10,000 Heroes podcast. The original of this episode is
  #00039 The curious offspring of Agile and Mindfulness with Dan Greening. If you're curious, check out the follow up episode
  Nate signs up for Yet Another Challenge – this time applying Dan Greening’s Mindful Agility to his professional life.
• Tom Looy, Ron Lussier, Amelia Hambrecht, Divya Maez were our beta reviewers, for whom we are super grateful. Early beta review is an agile staple: we make changes to our episode based on feedback. If you ever want to give it a try, reach out to us. If you are reading this, you are in our target audience.
• Stinger sound Swing beat 120 xylophone side-chained by Casonika licensed under Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) to Mindful Agility
• Image of anime bear with a purpose list by DALL-E

Staff

• Daniel Greening, host, agile consultant, software executive
• Mirela Petalli, co-host, meditation guide, and neurocritical nursing instructor
• Dan Dickson, business coach, executive and management consultant

Links

• Mindful Agility Substack ("The Mindful Sprint" weekly brief)
• Mindful Agility web site
• Mindful Agility Community Facebook group
• Mindful Agility Youtube channel