ISSUE No. 11
Purpose doesn't always announce itself. Sometimes it's just the thing you already know how to do.
Growing up, we ate out a lot. Busy house, busy life. I caught the cooking bug early, and I loved the vibe of a restaurant before I understood why.
Years later, none of that had gone anywhere. I changed my college major five times. Marketing. Education, I wanted to be a coach. Back to marketing before a short detour into finance. Then something closer to the truth: I don't know what the heck I'm doing.
I came from a divorced family, and for a long time I was trying to find where I belonged. College became a place to chew up time while I figured that out.
I landed an internship on the PR side of the Texas Rangers Baseball Club. Then I found myself in South Beach, bartending, having a good time and not thinking much about where any of it was going or who I was.
Somewhere in the middle of all that, one question actually stopped me. What am I good at?
I knew I loved food, restaurants and cooking. I knew how to be around people, partly because at twelve I'd started going to therapy to deal with moving between two houses and the fight underneath it. I loved people and I loved food. And I was living in Miami, right by Florida International University, home to one of the top hospitality schools in the country, sitting on Biscayne Bay. I was sold.
I wasn't thinking about the long hours. I wasn't thinking about the chaos a restaurant can hand you on a bad night. I was thinking about what I loved, how I actually wanted to spend my time. And it turned out the answer had been there the whole time.
A restaurant is a place to give. It's a place to help people feel like they belong, guest and team both. Growing up moving between two houses, belonging wasn't abstract to me. It was the thing I was actually looking for, like a steady floor I hadn't found yet.
Turns out that's not just a personal quirk. Psychologists Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary spent years studying this and found that belonging isn't a soft preference, it's a basic human need, closely tied to our overall wellbeing, right alongside things like safety and food. People who lack it don't just feel a little sad. They struggle in ways that show up across their whole life.
Which means the industry I stumbled into wasn't just a good career fit. It runs on one of the most fundamental things people need from each other.
Here's what I didn't know at the time: I wasn't inventing something small. Hospitality is one of the oldest values in human history. The ancient Greeks had a word for it, xenia, the sacred duty to welcome a stranger, feed them, protect them, ask questions later. Entire codes of conduct across the ancient world were built around it. Long before anyone called it an industry, taking care of the person in front of you was considered one of the most serious things a person could do.
I didn't choose something small. I just didn't know yet how big it actually was.
Here's what I keep coming back to: I didn't choose hospitality because I ran the numbers and it made sense on paper. I chose it because it was already familiar. I'd been practicing the real skill, understanding what belonging meant, since I was a kid learning how to adjust to two households. The restaurant didn't teach me that. It just finally gave me a place to use it.
We've been sold an idea of purpose that's too large and too loud. Purpose as a destination. Purpose as some defining moment you arrive at once. But most purpose is closer to what happened to me. It's already inside you, shaped by whatever you had to learn just to get by, and it's waiting for the right room to show up in.
The social media version of purpose says: look what I built. Mine says: I just kept doing the thing I already knew, until it became my life.
One of those leads somewhere. The other one just looks like it does.
THIS WEEK'S FIELD TOOL
What did you have to learn to survive, growing up, that quietly became a skill you now use every day?
Write it down. One sentence. Don't dress it up.
That sentence might be the start of something you can't see the end of yet.
— Jason
Research sources for this issue are available at btwnsystems.com/sources