William Damon, who studied moral exemplars, says no one is on purpose all the time. Even people who make major contributions have flaws. The point is giving yourself grace about the gap between your big work and your small failures.
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Are we kind of on purpose 24 hours a day, seven days a week?
Is it?
Is it? I'm doing one purposeful thing towards what seems to be the and I don't know if there's a specific number scientific research around us, but that point at which we feel like we are living our purpose or living with meaning or continuing to make forward progress in a purposeful way. But maybe not every single moment of the day. Or is that possible? We're just different purposes at different times?
Again, that's a great question. No, I mean absolutely nobody is. This also relates to the work we did with moral exemplars, people, people like the Nelson Mandelas of the world. Who really are so admirable and have done so much and also been self sacrificing. And we've studied both historical moral exemplars and local ones, people that you wouldn't have heard of but are doing amazing things in their community. And one of the books that we wrote was called Some Do Care about Moral Exemplars. And we found that these are amazingly admirable people who have contributed a lot to the world, but they're not perfect and they're not going full time on one particular mission or cause. And in fact a lot of them have problems in other parts of their lives or all kinds of things that they do that they wouldn't necessarily be proud of. So people, you know, people are people are people, people are human beings and nobody's perfect and nobody is 100% anything. That's just not the way human nature is. But some people do find commitments that they stick with in the area that they stick with it. Whether it's medicine or science or art or or commerce or whatever it is, they do really good work or great contributions to their families, to their communities, to the public in that area. And that doesn't mean that if you follow them around for 24 hours, they're going to always have a totally flawless, 100% admirable existence. We're human beings.
I don't know if I can ever get tired of being reminded of that. And particularly when we look at some of the great exemplars and just to recognize the full spectrum of traits that they embody and they may have made really powerful, strong, world changing work in this domain. But that doesn't mean that they are. And giving ourselves a little bit of grace when we fall short. If you're going to have set big goals, you are going to fall short. And so being able to navigate that looks like.
Well, I'll give you an example. I mean, people make, I think, big mistakes in trying to discredit some of these people because they find inadequacies. And I remember there was a period back, I don't know, in the late 1990s when a bunch of people started writing about Mother Teresa from a kind of a cynical point of view of, oh yeah, you know, and the big thing that they found wrong was that she would sometimes be very cross with her secretary. She would yell at her secretary or be impatient or something like that, and they'd say, well, she's not so great. She yells at her secretary. But you know, that doesn't take away from the amazing work she did in Calcutta with the poorest of the poor and sick and dying infants and all the incredible things that she did. Even if, I don't even know how true that is, but even if it's true that she was impatient or hard on her assistant or something like that, it doesn't excuse that necessarily, but it doesn't take away from the wonderful things that she did. And that's the big mistake that people make. And you can be very cynical about people because you can always find something that anybody has done that's less than admirable. I guarantee you can always find that. But let's not lose sight of the big picture, which is some people are really doing amazing contributions to the world, highly dedicated and sometimes at great costs themselves. And we should admire that without trying to find that they have feet of clay.
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