I’ve talked before about why I created my most popular workshop, Bulit on Purpose, before. In short: this workshop aims to address the mismatch between traditional 9–5 models and how a lot of us actually think and work, and why starting a business doesn’t automatically fix that. If you want that longer backstory, I’ve written about it here and here.
This time, I want to do something different. Instead of explaining the philosophy again, I want to walk you through exactly what happens if you sit down in the room on October 7th at the Akron Summit Public Library. I think the actual experience of a Built on Purpose lab is more convincing than any description of it.
You Start Before You Think You’ve Started
When you walk in, you’re not handed an agenda. You’re handed a zine called “Trust the Route You Took,” along with some drawing supplies. This activity gets you start mapping four landmarks: the moment you decided to do this, where the road got hard, where you are right now, and what’s next.
Most people assume this is a warm-up, but it’s not. It’s the first data point of the day. Whatever you draw in those first ten minutes is something we’re going to return to at the very end, once you’ve been through everything else. You’re not going to remember what you drew, and that’s kind of the point. Here are some examples of other entrepreneur’s routes.
Naming What You’re Actually Chasing
After I share a little of my own route we move into the first working session: Your One True Sentence.
You’ll get four cards. On the back of each one, you write a word or two. This activity is meant to be quick to avoid overthinking. Those words then get dropped into a mad-lib style sentence on a worksheet, and that sentence becomes your working mission statement for the day. This mission statement is different than your tagline or something written for a pitch deck. It’s your North Star to help guide you on this journey. Something built for and by you.
This is the piece people are usually most surprised by. It’s not unusual for someone to look at the sentence they just built and realize it applies just as much to how they want to show up in a job interview, or a side project, or a conversation with their kid, as it does to their business.
The Tower Always Tells the Truth
This is the one people talk about afterward. In this activity, you get a set of wooden blocks. You’ll write a single word on each one. The blocks represent something that takes your time, energy, or attention. That could be: client work, family, admin, health, rest. Whatever’s actually true, not whatever sounds responsible.
Then you stack them, in no real plan to the order. Then the tower falls (or you stop right before it does) and we look at what happened. What ended up on the bottom. What you protected without thinking about it. What almost didn’t make it onto the tower at all. Here’s an example of someone working through that activity.
This activity gets paired with a worksheet I’m calling Plan for the Human You. Most planning tools ask what your business needs. This one asks what you, the person running it, need in order to keep showing up. It’s the piece that turns “I should probably think about capacity at some point” into something you can see on paper.
I’m making this one available as a free download in advance. You don’t have to attend the workshop to use it, though it’ll land differently if you’ve just watched your own tower fall.
Coming Back to Where You Started
In the last five minutes, we’ll go back to the Trust the Route You Took zine with the same questions you answered walking in. Except now you’ve named your mission statement, watched your own capacity tower fall and get rebuilt, and had ninety minutes to really think about your thinking instead of just reacting to your week.
I ask people if they’d answer any of the four landmark questions differently now. Almost everyone does. That’s the whole arc of the workshop in one moment. The workshop gives you just enough distance from your own week to see it clearly.
What You Leave With
You walk out with your zine, your worksheet, your mission statement sentence, and a version of your capacity tower you actually chose on purpose instead of stacking on autopilot. No business plan required to be in the room, and no business plan required to leave it. Though if that’s the next step you want, I’m always happy to help you take it.
In the meantime, I’d love to see you in class.
Built on Purpose runs October 7th, 12:00–1:30pm, at the Akron-Summit County Public Library’s Small Business Resource Center.