[This is the story of the start-up and app Purposely™. Each week I’ll chat about its purpose, progress, and possibilities. Let’s consider this the memoir of an app <smile>. If you’d like to be in touch, please drop me a line to [email protected]. And please take a peek at my latest book, Choose Your Life Purposes, which spells out the principles upon which Purposely is built.]
Not hardly.
It has been said that each of us has three lives, a public life, a private life, and a secret life. If that’s true—and I believe it is—then a life navigation app like Purposely ought to have some way to coax users to share with themselves that secret life, so that they can navigate their whole life and not just its public and private parts.
Here’s what I mean. Say that you’re a musician. Publicly, you perform. Those performances can be scheduled. Privately, you practice. Those practice sessions can be scheduled. But what if, secretly, you hate performing? How can you effectively navigate your life if that secret isn’t somehow ventilated and “dealt with”? Mustn’t you allow Purposely to help you with that?
Our job in developing the app must be to invite you (and maybe coax you) to do exactly that. Then your job would be to bravely do exactly that. And that won’t be easy for either of us. People do not reveal their secrets easily—or ever. They may go a lifetime never telling their intimate other what they crave in bed, never telling their child who his father really is, never admitting to violent revenge fantasies. Human beings are defensive by nature—and when it comes to secrets, powerfully defended.
If what’s important to you connects to a secret, especially a deep, dark one, how likely are you to want to “share” that secret with an app? Say, for instance, that you want to watch less porn. That’s among the important things at this moment. Too much porn. Okay! A laudable goal. But are you going to type into an app box as one of your life purposes, “Watch less porn”? And type into the action box, “Only one hour of porn a day, and no porn on Mondays and Fridays”?
How embarrassing! How humiliating! How … secret!
Who might be watching while you type? Really, who knows what is sacred, safe, and secure any longer? And do you yourself even want to see those words in print? Memorialized who knows where? What a hurdle for we billions of less-than-perfect creatures, to have those kinds of secrets that are so hard to face. And doubly hard to drop them into an app!
Those secrets are challenges that you and we face. We want you to face your alcoholic drinking. We want you to face your abusive nature. We want you to freely talk to you, you to you, so that you can do more than “grow” and “improve” but actually save yourself. That’s what we want for you. But all those secrets!
We do not want Purposely to be used only for achieving goals that aren’t embarrassing to disclose. We want it to serve you better than that. On our end, that means that we need to speak to this reality, the reality of secrets, in some way that penetrates your defenses and registers. On your end, that means braving your own embarrassment, your own unwillingness, your own humanness, and stepping out of the darkness where those secrets reside.
Those are very high-bar challenges. Good luck to both of us!
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[Purposely is slated to appear November, 2024.]
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If you liked From Strength to Strength, How to Ikigai, or Creating a Life That Matters, you’ll love Choose Your Life Purposes.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
