In the last episode, we talked about purpose, and specifically we talked about purpose on a time scale. You know that this show is about finding clarity, perspective, and purpose. And we discussed the fact that very often purpose is mystical. We see it that way at least. But I want to help take some of that mysticism out and replace it with practical purpose. The definition that we talked about last time is applicable in this episode as well. This is purely assigning a reason to your actions. That is practical purpose, assigning a reason for your actions. Now, sometimes people take actions that are not necessarily going to achieve whatever their purpose is stated as. This is not all that uncommon. We take actions that we, for some reason, believe may take us to our purpose, may help us fulfill that purpose. But are incongruent with it. In any case, having a functional purpose, as we discussed in the last episode, this is not something that has to be tattooed on your arm. It's not something that you have to commit to for life. It's not even something that you have to commit to for this week. Now, eventually, as you begin to learn about yourself, it's likely that you may find yourself may find yourself may find yourself may find yourself may find yourself may find yourself that many of your clarity moments, many of the moments where you say, okay, yes, this seems like a purpose that I can attach myself to, those will likely converge. People tend to have relatively stable values, and their purpose tends to be tied to those values. Whatever your values are, it's likely that your purpose or your various purposes through life will revolve around those values. In today's episode, I want to talk about a different scale to think about your purpose on. Last time we talked about the time scale. You can think about that as one axis, but another axis is you, your identity, who you are, and how your purpose aligns, with that identity. We're going to talk about that right after we discuss today's sponsor. This podcast is brought to you by Split, the feature management and experimentation platform. What if your software release was exactly what it says it is? A release, a moment of relief, an escape from slow, painful deployments that hold back product engineers. You've probably been there. You can free your Teams and your features with Split. You can attach insightful data to feature flags. By doing so, Split helps you quickly deploy, measure and learn the impact of every feature you release, which means you can turn up what works, turn off what doesn't, and give software innovation the room to run wild. Now you can safely deliver features up to 50 times faster, and you can easily take advantage of the features you release. And finally, exhale. Split feature management and experimentation. What a release. See what they did there? Head over to split.io slash developer T. You can start your free trial and create your first feature flag. That's split.io slash developer T. Thanks again to Split for sponsoring today's episode of Developer T. When you think about your identity, what comes to mind? When you're listening to this podcast, you're likely to say, well, I'm a software engineer. That's top of mind for most people listening to this. But so many other aspects play into our identity. Some of them are things that we could never have chosen for ourselves, where we come from, who our parents are. Even the communities that we know. That we were a part of growing up. To some degree, that wasn't even our choice. But other things are absolutely things that we would consider within our realm of influence. Our choice. A choice of a career path. A choice of interests, values, hobbies. Whatever those things are, they all play into your identity. Your identity is not singular. This is very important to understand. Your identity is not singular. Everyone is made of multiple parts. We try to cohesively understand ourselves. And also to represent ourselves to others as a cohesive unit. In other words, we want other people to know who we are. Not the many things that we are, but to have a conception of who we are. And so we try to consolidate every single part of our identity. We try to consolidate everything into a singular identity. But at the end of the day, the reality of our identity is multifactorial. And interestingly, on a given day, some parts of that identity might be more present than on other days. You may be more excited or energized by your career work. By being a software engineer. But when you go on vacation, you might go multiple days without even thinking. About that part of your identity. And so we should understand and respect that our identities are not singular, but a composition. And that they're always changing and moving. And so when we think about our purpose, we may be tempted to create an all-encompassing purpose that tries to capture all of those identities. Or even ignore those identities. We might be tempted to focus only on one of them. Allowing ourselves to believe that our purpose can't be a part of, say, our hobbies. That our purpose needs to only be a part of things that are professional. Or oriented towards our work and life. But the truth is that our purpose is only an extension of our identity. It is not something that governs our identity. But rather, an expression of our identity. And so if it is an expression of our identity, and if it is derived from that, then we should expect it, like our identities, to be a composition. In other words, we may not have only one purpose today. Or throughout the rest of our lives. And some purposes may wax and wane. They may change. Over time, our focus on that purpose might grow or it might dim. We should make space for this composition of many different purposes. Or perhaps for one purpose to be affected by another. We have different parts of our personality that are affected by other parts of our personality. What I am as a father is certainly affected by what I am as a software engineer. Or as a podcaster. As a pilot. Whatever my other hobbies are. They affect the other things that I do. And so this composition is not a bunch of insulated parts of our lives. That are encapsulated. So that we can cleanly identify all of those parts separate from each other. Instead, it is all meshed. That one part affects another. Another affects another. And so this composition, we should consider our purpose to look similar. Think about your purpose as a projection. Where your personality is perhaps the lens. Or the various lenses. And the projection through your personality is the purpose. I hope you walk away from this episode feeling more agency and freedom. To define your own purpose. And to not be so caught up in making that purpose look good from the outside looking in. Or feeling a sense of guilt for making your purpose something that is not necessarily just oriented towards a professional career. Of the things that you truly have in your grasp. Your purpose is squarely in your grasp. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks so much for listening. Thank you again to today's sponsor, Split. Head over to split.io slash developer T to get started with free feature flags today. You can create your account and get started today for free. If you enjoyed this discussion. If this is the first time that you've ever thought about purpose. Or maybe it's the first time you've ever thought about it in this way. I would love to hear your story. If you can join the developer T discord community. That's at developer T dot com slash discord. I'd love to hear from you about your. Experience your journey in your career and in your life. Exploring purpose. Thanks so much for listening. And until next time. Enjoy your tea.