Channels
Themes & Topics
PoP’s Channels dig deep into work that matters
If PoP’s Guides are the tip-of the pyramid, the above-the-surface iceberg presented to the marketplace, then our Channels represent all the work that is done in support of those products. Part think tank, part R&D department, they include:
- curation of the existing assumptions, discussions, and research out there
- original perspectives, syntheses, and some in-house research
- conversations that contextualize and integrate PoP’s DNA
Productivity
on Purpose
Technology serving Teleology
Tools & Tech, Tactics & Techniques to Converse with the Work that Calls to You.
Telos is the ancient Greek term for aim, goal, fulfilment. This often gets lost in a world pursuing productivity for productivity’s sake.
This channel explores the pitfalls of this pursuit: “productivity porn”, premature optimization, noise drowning out signal…
See the channel here:
$elf knowledge
Financial awareness
Exploring our relationship with money
This channel looks at how money helps—or impedes—our ability to do the work that calls to us. This includes:
Our culture’s mixed money messaging and how our upbringing/how our environment shapes us.
Knowing to which money tribes/financial archetypes (e.g. “Money Monk”, “Empire Builder”, “Underearner”, “fulfillionaire”) we belong.
How we use money to signal to others, both direct (consumerism/materialism) and indirect: forsaking meaningful work to e.g. maintain our neighborhood, send kids to private schools…
Psyche & Soma
Meaningful Work and Healthy Body, Mind & Soul
Attention must be given to helping individuals discover their own life mission as an integral part of health care…” -Professor Brian Costello
We live in a culture that forces the body to yield to the brain–and within the brain, forces the holistic right hemisphere to yield to the detail-oriented left one (see Ian McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary). We try to compartmentalize, yet the body keeps score.
Listening to what calls to us to guides us toward fulfilling work: likewise, how can we learn to listen to our bodies to hear what work is not working for us?
“When one is pretending the entire body revolts.” ~Anaïs Nin
This channel explores stress (both distress and eustress), trauma, and the psychosomatic connection.
The Wisdom of Wantrepreneurs
How Even Unworkable Ideas Offer Meaning & Well Being
The desire to bring an idea to market is evidence of a calling. It signals what is missing from the ideator’s life and work.
All entrepreneurs were once “wantrepreneurs”. Yet, the term is often ridiculed by Startup communities.
They call wantrepreneurs: poseurs, pretenders, wannabes, and not even as good as “failures”–who are lionized in startup culture for having at least tried.
This channel argue for using this term endearingly (respect the difficulty for most to become true entrepreneurs) and inclusively (many current, successful entrepreneurs wonder if they should instead be pursuing another entrepreneurial idea).
e-examine and rehabilitate the term “Wantrepreneurship”. Commonly it’s used pejoratively:
Multipurposed
Harmonizing a Cacophony of Callings
Multipurposed is not about being well-rounded, it’s about being fulfilled: you pursue those things that call to you.
Being forced to chose (including forcing oneseelf) is an act of coercion
“I am large, I contain multitudes.” -Walt Whitman
Problems on Purpose
Calling, Creativity, & Fulfillment through Embracing Problems
The world’s biggest problem is that there are not enough people working on the worlds biggest problemS. Instead, we too often give fleeting attention to the latest cause célèbre, “first-world problems”, or label and dismiss something as “problematic”. Worse still, our culture’s discomfort with problems, leads us to prematurely chase solutions.
The best thing that can happen to a human being is to find a problem, to fall in love with that problem, and to live trying to solve that problem, unless another problem even more lovable appears. —Karl Popper
This channel will explore: methodologies like Design Thinking that happily and creatively dwell in problem spaces, the challenge of “wicked problems“, movements like Effective Altruism (EA) that advocate evidence-based practices to choose focal areas — as well as EA’s critics, and expansive perspectives like Longtermism.
Professional Identity
This channel examines how we understand our work selves and portray them to the outside world: including to (potential) colleagues and other collaborators, employers, clients, trade and affinity groups.
- Read more:
https://professionsonpurpose.com/identity/