About

Professions on Purpose’s reason for being is to occupy liminal spaces: that is, the space between places. Those spaces include:

The journey between having a career and a calling, the travails between being called and professing a response.

The path between being a faux pro and a true pro.

Being at the threshold of entrepreneurship, education, creative and other communities and other professions. It’s for those who feel beckoned, but not yet welcome, when you have an invitation to a party where you know not a soul. We aim to help them ready themselves for that party, accompany them, show them around, make introductions… and if in the wrong place, take them elsewhere… Read more

Mission

Professions on Purpose’s mission is to help individuals cultivate self-knowledge, connect with their callings, and pursue fulfilling lives from and through their work.

Vision

PoP envisions a world where:

“Profession” returns to its original meaning: a response and commitment to one’s own personal calling, integrating each’s natural gifts/talents, values, and ways of being, rather than being merely what one studied, is certified or paid for.

Everyone sees they have the most important job in the world, after trading in their numerous concerns for very few causes.

More work on the world’s biggest problems.

Values

Do good > look good (& feel good)

We all are driven to do both, yet we live in a society, an economy, and especially with technology that makes it much easier to look good (and to feel good) than it is to do good.

We can best reverse this optics-over-ethics phenomenon through the parts of our lives where we spend the most time and put in the most effort: our work.

Make things as simple as possible—but not simpler

Push back between two trends:

Sounding smart with big words and complicated ideas—without doing the work to simplify.
Dumb down without acknowledging the mystery and absurdity and other well-deserved complexity

Oneness: Unique + Universal

Uniqueness is the ways you are like no one else.

Universality is the ways you are like everyone else.

Focusing on those requires de-empathizing that in between: the ways you are like some and not others. This is the path of categorization and tribalism and parochialism—all of which the world has too much.

YMMV

“Your Mileage May Vary” is an underused warning.

Too much advice comes from a works-for-me perspective, which might include the advise giver’s clients, research subjects or other particular reference group.

What “works for me” is based on what “works with me”: one’s own talents, values, and ways of being: how we process information, deal with others, see the world…

Diagnose before Prescribing (Dx ⇒ Rx)

“If I had an hour to save the world, I’d spend 55 minutes defining the problem”, said Einstein (probably apocryphally).

As in medicine, it’s malpractice to prescribe treatment before a full diagnosis.

Be useful, usable, and used

This is the simplest definition of service journalism—plus of great design. “Interesting”, “inspiring” or learning isn’t enough. PoP content and conversations aim to put theory to work for its readers, so they can invite more purpose into their lives.

Types of Pros

Faux Pros

See “profession” as simply something they are paid to do or studied.
Their identity is given to them by their employer, their education, and/or their certification.
They are immunitas : “Immune from duty”. They are out of the loop, by their own accord
Their communities of practice are places to increase status

Frank Pros

Are in this liminal space
Their identity is torn. They feel ambiguity—meaning “both”: one foot in their existing role, one foot forward tapping, testing in the darkness towards the next.
They sense calling(s), but not yet sure how to respond.
They benefit most from Communitas

True Pros

See their profession as a response and public commitment to their calling.
It integrates their talents, values, tendencies, ways of being…
Their work is a Call-&-Response type conversation
Communities tend to coalesce around their work. They need this less themselves, but still appreciate it.

Communitas

About Communitas

With: gift + duty

The root of community is the Latin word communitas.

It comes from cum munas, meaning “with obligation/duty/gift”.

Q: How can munas be both a duty and a gift? One seems like a burden. The other a bonus.

Life’s essentials are dutiful gifts. Children best embody this. And other living things received—a pet or even a houseplant—carry obligations to care for them.

So, do heirlooms. As does the often-accompanying traditions—so this applies to not only things we can touch, but to the abstract.

“With great power comes great responsibility”, Peter Parker (of Spiderman fame) realized—and it took a tragedy to do so. His “Spidey Sense”—like other superpowers—are munas. The noblesse oblige concept is too.

So are our natural gifts and talents, those individual values we cultivate, our tendencies, our ways of being: that is, how we process information, relate to others, and see the world.

Be(com)ing

an Essential Worker

Munas is a paradox. As is a “calling”, which is also a duty + gift. Such a vocation (a vocatiō) means to “call forth”. It summons our talents and tendencies: both those we embrace and those we seem to be unaware of:

talents that lay latent or ignored.
our values we flout
natural tendencies subsumed by how others dictate things be done.

Such a summons is an invitation of sorts, but as with court summons, we’re obliged to respond to it.

That response to a vocatiō is called a professiō, the root of our word profession. To profess is to commit to our calling. So, “professors” would hone their talents with study. Institutions evolved to ensure those earned a living, so they could focus on their gift/duty. We can see how our modern, common sense of profession, being trained in or paid for work came about. Of course, a true profession is deeper than credentials and paychecks.

“Community” vs. Communitas

Q: So, why not just use the word “community”?

Communitas is a special type of community, both more and less than what we typically think of:

Most communities are built upon accidental conditions like geography, ethnicity, or even affliction. There’s more intention in communitas
Though this still differs from declared “intentional communities”. They, among other communities. seek to encompass most areas of its members’ lives. Communitas doesn’t aim to be comprehensive.
Many claim the “community leader” mantle. Communitas aims to be leaderless. It eliminates hierarchy and bureaucracy. We often see this in examples of pilgrimages, if you ever read Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, or talked to people trekking El Camino de San Sebastian in northern Spain or going to Mecca on The Hajj, you’ll see and hear how status differences are suspended.
Not long-term/permanent; communitas holds “liminal space(s)”. Liminality, as you probably guessed, has the same root as “limit”: limens, meaning threshold. The whole point is that individuals pass through this liminal space, that they “graduate” to the other side.
Fostered, not forged. People talk of “building community”, often with ample references to infrastructure—both literal and figurative. Communitas is more organic. It grows—around the work we do anyway. That growth can be nurtured.

The Founder

Stefan Bielski has helped individuals create meaning in their work lives for over 20 years. His ventures include 2bschool (2001), for those applying to top MBA programs and CareerDesign (2013), which uses Design Thinking-inspired processes and tools for those considering, or in the midst of making scary and meaningful changes in their professions.