A Musing on Finding Purpose

Make&Model is in it’s 5th official year in business. That is pretty astounding to me. There is so much that we work hard for, every single day. There’s hope for the future, truly.

In the book The Poetics of Space, author Gaston Bachelard says a dream home should stay just that - a dream of your future. A vision you hold on to that keeps your inner fire alive.

They believe that the home becoming a reality, and having your dreams fulfilled directly, is not as poetic and inspiring as the dream itself. The joy found in your own imaginary wonder and love of your possible future is an expression of your own inspiration. It’s a love letter to a version of you that might never actually exist, but serves as ongoing motivation.

I didn’t start Make&Model for the money, and certainly not for the fame. I started this company to find a purpose, and if I’m being honest, finding that purpose was my only mission. “Purpose” meant a lot of things at the beginning. Too many things. I didn’t know how to narrow it. But, year by year, we narrowed. The thing about purpose is that your sense of it evolves fast, and as you find and deliver on new purposes, you learn more about what is truly driving you.

I’ve found it to be true that a part of me changes at each stage of my life, growing and, in many ways, experiencing what it actually means to try making my dreams a reality. I try my best to understand that growth, so that I might not only survive the change, but thrive because of it. A bit of me misses that past self, knowing that I’m no longer that person, but the vision I now have for my future is owed to the past self’s work. This is my experience of developing wisdom, essentially.

At Make&Model, I feel as though we’ve harnessed our wisdom to more genuinely define our purpose. We’ve started building the dream home, while knowing it’s going to change in the process of its construction, and that’s almost the point. We know what we think we want, and we have the will and experience to work towards it. We’ve figured out the levers to pull, the things to lean on to keep us not just afloat but fulfilled in an uncertain, difficult world.

I’m sure for some this is a highfalutin metaphor for just conducting boring old consulting services. But the truth is that’s just not how we view it - that’s not our dream home. Instead, it’s a purposefully caring and balanced relationship between us, our partners, and the world at large. This is what we dream of.

Looking back at The Poetry of Space, I find myself thinking: it’s true, I never stop dreaming of what’s next. And if I’m lucky enough to see a dream come true, that mostly serves to help me see the ways in which my dream was really only partially thought out to begin with. It’s a sliver of a galaxy of ambition that changes every time I get closer. I’d like to think human beings as a whole share in this experience of aspirational growth despite incomplete knowledge. Personally, as long as I have breath in my lungs, I’ll remain experientially and culturally hungry. Thoughts of what could be will forever fuel me. Our interests evolve, we evolve. Our dreams should too.