ISSUE No. 10
Purpose Series · Part 1 of 3
There's a phrase that shows up every few years in sports. You've heard it. The 1980 U.S. hockey team beating the Soviet Union. Leicester City winning the Premier League at 5,000 to 1 odds. Fairleigh Dickinson, a 16 seed, knocking off top-seeded Purdue in the 2023 NCAA Tournament, only the second time that's ever happened. Anytime a team or person does something they had no business doing on paper, someone calls it a David vs. Goliath moment.
It's one of the most used phrases in sports broadcasting. Most people don't know where it comes from.
It comes from a shepherd.
The Philistines had a warrior named Goliath, and no one on the Israelite side would face him. By most accounts he stood somewhere near nine and a half feet tall, armored head to foot, a spear shaft as thick as a fence post. He'd been issuing the same challenge for forty days. The whole army was afraid.
Then a teenager named David, who had been sent to deliver food to his brothers, asked why nobody was doing anything about it.
They tried to put armor on him. He took it off. It didn't fit. It wasn't his.
He picked up five smooth stones from a stream and reached for the sling he had been using for years, the one he carried every day watching his father's flock. He had used that sling to fight off a lion. He had used it to fight off a bear. He had thousands of hours of practice with this instrument in the quiet of the fields where nobody was watching and nobody was keeping score.
Historians and archaeologists have noted that practiced ancient slingers were among the most effective fighters in the ancient world, capable of accuracy at distances that spearmen couldn't match. David wasn't improvising. He was simply doing what he had already done a hundred times.
The answer to what was in front of him had been in his hand the whole time.
Purpose gets oversized in our minds. We imagine it arriving with some kind of announcement, like a grand opening, a clear sign, a moment that feels significant enough to name. But most purpose doesn't arrive that way. It's already there. It's the thing you've been practicing in the quiet, the thing you reach for without thinking about it, the thing that feels ordinary to you and uncommon to everyone else.
The question isn't whether you have what you need. It's whether you recognize it.
THIS WEEK'S FIELD TOOL
One question. Take your time with it.
What's the thing you've quietly gotten good at, that you haven't yet reached for?
Don't aim for the big answer. Write the small, honest one. That's usually where it lives.
Next issue: what happens when purpose starts in a basement, and why that's not a small thing.
— Jason