How would you answer the question What is the future we will make? Here’s my answer, and here’s how you can share your own answer with TEDxChange and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

In our future, passion and purpose pays.

What do I mean?

In our future, doing good is good business, because …

… a business without a “social good” is not a sustainable business. And I’m not talking about environmentally, culturally or morally sustainable, but strategically, economically and financially sustainable.

I’ve written and talked about the role of humanity, meaning, ethics, passion and purpose repeatedly over the past year or so, heavily influenced by John Hagel and Umair Haque.

These principles span many of the Millennium Development Goals. An economy that allocates returns based on meaning, ethics or purpose directs attention, effort and money towards things that matter: it promotes gender equality, it allocates food and basic services better to eradicate extreme hunger, reduces child mortality, values environmental sustainability, and creates a strong base for countries and organizations to partner on economic development goals.

Think about the work you do: Is passion or purpose a source of a competitive advantage for you and your company? Are profits tied to passion? Is the purpose of your job or company aligned with the source of revenues or profits? Is passion a valued asset at your company? Can you true back your work to supporting a larger purpose?

No? Why not?

In our future, to create a thriving, sustainable economy, passion and purpose have to pay. Meaning, passion and purpose have to play a meaningful role in allocating profits, as important as access to inputs like land, labor and capital, as important as the level of education, knowledge and information, as important as product/market fit, as important as any other input in a business’s equation.

And how does that happen? To start, we have to care. We create a demand for products and services through what we buy, talk about, read about and do. Our individual consumption decisions create market demand; companies create products and services to fit markets demand. If enough of us demand passion and purpose, then companies will have to find a way to embed humanity, passion, ethics, meaning and purpose into what they do.

“When we have low-quality demand, we have low-quality jobs.” It starts with us. Care about what you buy. Invest your time, money and attention in things you believe in. Talk with your friends and colleagues about things you’re passionate about. Invest in yourself. Make the decision to reward passion and purpose, and passion and purpose will pay.

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View this photo on Flickr, and view the rest of the submissions to the project in the Flickr group pool.

Building on Why we create for free (and why it’s hard to get paid), leveraging @Julien’s perfect how-to counter-point, and thinking about how we fund the gap between purpose and profit with sweat and tears.

Alone in Public, Charlottesville, Virginia, June 2010

So, a couple weeks ago I posted a quick riff about why it’s hard to get paid for what we do for free. Based on the response, it appears there are a more than a couple people out there thinking along the same lines.

For many of us, simply indulging our passions, creating and publishing for ourselves is enough. But for the rest of us, we harbour the belief that creating and publishing is an investment in ourselves, developing intellectual rigor, learning new skills and mediums, developing relationships, leveraging the communicative margin. We put in the time and effort to make the transition from passion to paid.

That’s a different mindset. We do “fake work” and “make work” because for us, it’s real work. We get serious about getting paid, even though it may not look obvious to the outside world. We do the seemingly ridonkulous, because we know the routes we take matter.

We invest in purpose, even as we fund the gap between purpose and profits with our blood, sweat and tears.

We know that every project, every action, every emotion, has an opportunity cost. And we know that the opportunity cost of not following your passions and interests is tremendously expensive, and usually much higher when viewed in retrospect than the here and the now.

We do. We build. We learn how to listen to the market rather than just ourselves. We learn to decern the difference between being stubborn and being determined. And if we’re good (and we tell people about it) and the market is functioning, then what we build will scale, we’ll bring others with shared purposes together, and we’ll have the impact we’re meant to have.

But still, sometimes we don’t know how to proceed.

Cue Julien, and his post How to get paid for what you do for free, a more tactical response to my more vague “link, build, recycle, shift” advice, focusing on “gaining credibility, changing context and applying leverage”.

Three methods:

• Method #1 focuses on building testimonials and word of mouth, or at the very least facilitating word of mouth.
• Method #2 is all about profiting from asymmetries: your easy = their difficult, or your knowledge = their lack of knowledge:
  

  What you do isn’t magic in your circle, so you have to go somewhere where it is.

  Meaning: translate one realm to another. It may seem easy to you, but that’s because you’ve built the knowledge, credibility and support to translate between realms.

• Method #3 is about creating and leveraging social proof:
  

  This final method is a third form of social proof, one that completes the equation with the other two: proof from others, proof from the environment, and proof from yourself. When you put together all three, you have evidence on all sides telling everyone that you’re worth a premium. Apply enough pressure on each of these, and you’re golden. But don’t apply enough, and there will be a lack of congruence when people look around, so they won’t believe it.

• But of course, it’s not just about doing the right things, but doing it the right way.
  

  Here’s the thing though: You actually have to be good at this thing you’re doing for free. You can be average and apply all of these methods I mention and still get paid, but people only feel good about it once they’ve gotten great value from your work. So you might be able to convince a few people, but then you’ll quickly go back down the ladder again. When you start to get paid, realize that you need to up your game very seriously and it’ll keep you up there. That’s when it’s even more important to work your face off.

Three keys on how to be better than free. Points for consideration of your current and future path. And hopefully, a rejuvenated conviction that the you can actually see the future you want. The inner and outer selves will align, just around the bend.

You just have to fund that gap between purpose and profit with a little more blood, sweat and tears. Trust: purpose pays. Doing good is good business. It just takes the marketplace some time to realize it sometimes. And sadly, we can’t pay the rent with tears in the meantime.

But you have it. Pick your spots, build, and keep pressing go.

Thank you, Brian, for the spark. Maybe this is why I blog.

Continuing to think about meaning, passion, stories and community.

Highlighting a comment by Michael Lewkowitz on Closing tabs, opening minds:

Meaning is what get’s us up in the morning. Passion is what makes us jump out of bed.

Stories are very effective ways to express meaning and passionate stories are the ones that are most compelling. Stories are rich in feeling, emotion, nuance, and literal ambiguity, allowing people to interpret, relate, and even engage/change/adopt. They are a medium for spreading it.

I do think products/services are media as well… in fact every interaction ultimately is. The difference between meaning and passion comes out in the difference between dell and apple products.

Where I think business, or maybe better institution/organization fail in this area, is their stifling of passion in favour of control – in having ‘customer service’ operators following scripts to deliver consistent message vs being enabled with information and tools to improve the customer’s experience because the company is passionate about their experience, not manipulating lowest call-centre cost and maximum upsell. Meaning gets people show up for work. Passion infuses/infects them to make the company great.

A thought: does meaning = direction, passion = fuel?

Fighting a backlog of interesting things to comment on, dealing by quoting bits that resonated with me…

• Michael Lewkowitz, Into 2010:

  Looking back at last year, it’s clear I can’t predict what will come of the year ahead, but I am pretty sure the direction it will follow.

  Thankfully it will be a journey of many. Without that, it wouldn’t be much fun.

  Hopefully it will make the world better. Without that, it wouldn’t be worth doing.

  Certainly it will be an adventure. Without that, it wouldn’t be much of anything.

  I know the feeling…

• Grant McCracken, Recycling: adding value by adding meaning:
  

  What if objects straight from the factory seemed somehow orphaned, smaller and less interesting for the fact of their pristine condition.  If we care about recycling, we want objects to be better at absorbing and recording and reporting their histories. Of course, some objects will be incapable of telling stories: bottles and newspapers for instance. But clothing, furniture, technology, these could be storyful. And they could spared the landfill for one or more cycles of ownership by the stories they bring us.

  Resonates with the thinking about culturematics and the role of narratives in marketing, leading to…

• Joshua Glenn, Which exposition strategy adds the most value?
  

  Our experiment has answered the question of whether narrative adds measurable value to near-worthless tchotchkes with an emphatic YES. But how does narrative do so? Is every form of narrative exposition, for example, equally effective in encouraging the reader to regard a thrift-store castoff as somehow meaningful?

  Read the rest of the post for a better understanding, but of the three types of narrative – description, sequence, classification – sequence proved to the most effective form of narrative in their experiment.

• Stowe Boyd, It’s Betweenness That Matters, Not Your Eigenvalue: The Dark Matter Of Influence:
  

  The subtle, dark-matter mystery of social networks is that influence is oblique, and not easily determined by the sorts of tools we have today.

  … It is not your follower count, or who you follow, per se. But, instead, do you have short paths into other social scenes, both incoming and outgoing? That is the deep structure of being truly connected: bridging over different social scenes, acting as a conduit, a vector, a filter and amplifier for ideas good and bad, the best insights, and deadly viruses.

  via David Cushman.

• John Hagel, Reshaping Relationships through Passion:
  

  Relationships built on passion are extremely strong and often defy the incentives of traditional bond formation.

  … passion provides a pull-based foundation for community building that liberates, for those who may feel alienated or different in traditional community settings.

  In a constantly changing world of shift and flows, finding (or founding) a passion-based community may be one of the most significant factors to staying oriented, rooted, and poised to grow. 

  The dynamics of passionate relationships are powerful elements of success in an era of continuous instability. Passion trumps inhibition in the service of new connections; shared passion provides a foundation for diverse relationships; and these relationships provide both stability and inspire growth for its members.

  Read the entire post for one of the most personally meaningful things I’ve read this year so far.

  Seriously, right now.