Frances Glessner Lee And The Truths Behind Discovering Real Purpose
If you were a new cop in the 1940s, there wasn't a whole lot of training. The FBI opened the first-ever National Academy for police, and it offered standardized classes on behavior, forensics, law, and communication. But even basic stuff like law and behavior was reserved for high-ranking officers. Most cops in the 40s passed their basic aptitude test, and afterward, they just kind of learned on the job. Wouldn't it be strange then to be a Chicago beat cop discovering that you had been invited to a banquet at the Ritz – a banquet where the police of every rank and station, from recruits and captains, are eating filet mignon and watercress salad on eight-thousand-dollar dinnerware.
Street cops from the roughest neighborhoods and the poorest backgrounds are eating the most expensive meal of their life while guest speakers from Harvard Forensics lecture you about crime scene detection, criminology, and sleuthing. This was often more accurate and in-depth than the FBI taught at their fancy high-ranking Academy. Stranger still is that at the head of the table, you might see a kindly looking grandmother in a shawl peering at everyone through coke bottle glasses and quietly observing the lecture. Keep in mind that this was the 40s and reading about birth control was considered legally obscene for women and talking about violence in front of women was absolutely forbidden by polite company. And discussion of a grisly murder in front of someone's grandma could get you chased out of town. And here was Frances, in her pen black hair and polka dot dress, listening to the forensic pathologist describe the natural state of decay after a bludgeoning murder or the blood splatter patterns on drapes.
If you are a new cop, you'd be confused by her presence or concerned for the sensibilities of this short, plump matron listening to murder facts. But if you ever voiced your concern, one of the veterans would lean over and set you straight. That grandmother in the glasses, that's Frances Glessner Lee, the first female police captain in United States history. Also known as the Grandmother Of Modern Forensics and the woman who paid for the classes that educate the cops on how to process a crime scene. And the diorama that The Harvard Forensic Professors are using as a teaching tool, Frances built that by hand to educate Chicago cops. Slide projectors wouldn't be invented for another 20 years. Murder documentaries wouldn't be around for another 70 years, but Frances knew her true purpose was Criminology, and she would use every single tool in life to get her there – even sowing her own murder scenes by hand when she needed to.
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Purpose isn't something you're born with. Purpose isn't a lightning bolt that picks you out in the field. Purpose isn't a calling or voice you just start hearing one day. True purpose really is accidental. Purpose comes from being exposed repeatedly to new experiences and then deciding which of them is both lucrative and meaningful. If you don't find your life purpose early, you're not alone. Colonel Sanders delivered babies and practiced law before he finally opened the KFC in his 60s.
James Lewis Craft didn’t start StarCraft cheese until he was in his 30s, and he probably wouldn't have taken that leap into starting his own company if Craft's previous business partners hadn’t dissolved the company while he was on a business trip. Left stranded in Chicago with just 65 dollars in his pocket, James Craft bought a horse and wagon, and he started shipping his own cheese. Momofuku Ando was almost 50 when he invented ramen noodles. He saw people starving in the streets of Japan after World War II, and despite the abundance of wheat flour being shipped from America as wartime relief, the Japanese didn't eat bread; they ate noodles. So, Momofuku turned American wheat into dehydrated noodles and found his calling. Today we are busting myths about finding a purpose in life. Myths like:
Myth One: Are we flawed if we don't have a purpose? What if I was too depressed to find our purpose? What if I never been chosen by a purpose? Is there any hope?
Joe: Out of curiosity, during your life in certain periods, have you ever gone through depression?
Todd: Yeah, long stretches of it. It was usually situational after a breakup, a job loss, health, etc.
Joe: We had an episode on depression, and this is not going to be our depression episode. We had a one about Abe Lincoln and how vulnerable leaders are usually the best types of leaders because they know what it takes to pick themselves up and move on. I'm so used to hearing people talk about beating an illness and coming back feeling invigorated, like they take a beat, take a bit of time to recover, and then come back with a new lease on life. A close friend of mine beat cancer, and he has the opposite experience. He came back and told me that he realized that he hadn't had a purpose for a long time and that the cancer kind of highlighted that. Because of that, we already had this episode on our to-do list. We had notes about purpose and notes about what makes somebody find purpose and what highlights their purpose. But to really start this episode, I think it's the topic of depression or what robs your purpose. Now, we're not just going to take this from 0 to 60. We're in a backward crawl, and then we'll start going forward to when depression turns into hopelessness. With that being said, how does not just depression but setbacks affect your purpose?
Todd: It slows me down; it's roadblocks. At the top of my head, I think about the businesses I started, and those setbacks are usually financial – not having the resources or the timing is off and I just can't align them up, so I have to start over. And how different people handle those life-or-death situations without a choice, it's certainly not easy.
Joe: Yeah, certain things will take your purpose away from you or temporarily rob it. I mean, it sounds silly to say that having your purpose taken away isn't always a choice, but sometimes getting it back isn't a choice either. Like you can have your purpose go away from cancer or life scare.
Todd: Let's talk about you. You are a born and bred writer. Has depression ever set your career back?
Joe: Oh, absolutely. I don't know any writers who haven't had bouts of depression that made them stop. The most frequent one is not making any headway and not writing in a caliber high enough to get attention or to publish anywhere. It made me stop. I got depressed, and I told myself I had been fooling myself into thinking this was my purpose. And so, I set it aside for about a year.
Todd: If you listen to our Abe Lincoln episode, that's what depression is supposed to do. It lets you stop, take two steps back, recalibrate, and move forward.
Joe: I'm not going to speak for anyone else, but my takeaway from the depression episode was that it's built into a certain percentage of us, and it isn't necessarily a bad thing. It turns you into a brooding, calculating, emotional machine for a while, and it makes you look inward. Certainly, that can be negative and come with a whole host of problems, but it's not something that exists in almost all mammals for no reason. I do believe it actually can be helpful. I found out during that period of my life that I just shifted my attention to something else. I wrote the most elaborate tabletop games for my friends that they've ever seen. I was writing but I was putting it somewhere else. So, I realized I had to get back to it, but people who have never found their purpose in the first place or people who had purpose but feel like it was misplaced, that's kind of what we want to cover today.
How do we rev the engine to start with, and then how do we identify what a true purpose is versus just a mission? The big key here is the reason behind why you are doing it in the first place, and it all stems from passion. Studying purpose and going through these articles led me to believe that you will have dabbled in your purpose before you actually go for it for real. I went looking for the benefits of purpose. Frances made it so long, and a spoiler for anyone who thinks that this podcast would end in Frances is dying young, she made it so long. I don't know about the retirement part, but according to a Yilan study, they measure grip strength and walking speed for when you start aging; those are physical signs of vitality. Grip strength as you age is like an indicator of how strong you are. I think if an old guy at the bar is breaking your hand, that's just him being mean. But there's truth to the fact that if you have strong grip strength, it is an indicator of overall body strength. Now that, of course, doesn't count if you sit around using a grip strengthener all day, but it's pretty closely linked - the same thing with walking speed.
This Time article talks about how a Harvard study went looking for adults over 50, and for a couple of years, they monitored their grip strength and their walking speed. They found that people who self-reported higher purpose in life had a 13% decreased risk of developing a weak grip and a 14% decreased risk of dull developing a slow walk. It doesn't mean go find purpose for your health. I just thought it was an interesting correlation that there might be a 1 in 10 chance that purpose helps you live longer and encourages you to take better care of yourself. You and I are both fans of School Of Life. He talks about how depression is kind of a purpose killer. In one of his videos, he says that depression can be sort of protect you from confronting a deeper lack, and depression might be protecting you from looking deeper into that lack. It might be something you're not physically or mentally equipped to solve yet.
I know from my own experience that sometimes I will get depressed, and it is underlying something in life that I can't fix or that I am not equipped to understand yet. So instead of forcing myself to fix something I literally can't fix or do anything about, I will just get depressed about it. Happiness is a choice, and you have to choose to be happy every day because it's not that easy when you don't see how you're going to get through something hard. I guess this is the real message of the podcast, and one that I appreciate about depression, which is you may not want it, but it could be helping you prepare to solve larger issues later that you are not ready to do right now. It's okay to have your depression shield you from a deeper lack.
In which case, what should you do? Well, there's an advice list on the Huffington Post and I appreciate this. They say to speak to someone about your feelings, which is what we are doing right now. When you can clearly talk about depression specifically, it makes it more real, and you can realize it better. Speaking to somebody else about it puts it into context and it helps you open up, and it gives those emotions less power. There's a new one on this list that I really like, and it goes completely against everything I've learned in self-help on their list. They say think only in terms of today and don't worry about the future or regrets. You don't need to be perfect every day; just try to have more good days than bad. By focusing on the present, you kind of give yourself a little bit of freedom and forgiveness as well.
If you are suffering from depression, or if you are looking for purpose and you think you've lost out, it's still not too late if you are entering your 30s or 40s or 50s, etc. The grail will come again, and it is just a matter of time. And if you stick around, we will tell you the statistics of exactly how much time roughly you have before finding purpose. And I swear to God, it is way more positive than I thought it was going to be.
Myth Two: Okay, so we decide to hunt down our purpose. How do we go about it? It's not like there's a magical formula for finding your life's purpose, is there?
Almost anything you do in life is where you find your purpose; it just sparks when you finally look back and paint a target. You can be like, I knew I wanted to do that from a very young age, but you weren't able to pursue it or have the money or time to do it until later. But you can also totally pick up your purpose late after you've tried seven or eight other purposes.
Now, we mentioned something very interesting earlier, which is you might have found fool's gold as far as your life's purpose goes. While I was poking around online, I found an interesting term, and it is a Japanese philosophy that allows you to identify whether or not you are doing fool's gold as your purpose or if you have actually found a real purpose. This is a philosophy called ikigai. There are so many benefits to ikigai. I'm new to it. I've only seen a couple of videos, and I've read an article on Positive Psychology.
The phrase means a reason to get up in the morning or waking up to joy, and it kind of has a resignation with cognitive behavioral therapy. It puts emphasis on pursuing activities that produce enjoyment and gives you a sense of mastery of things that can alleviate depression disorder, which is interesting because we started out by talking about how depression robs you of purpose. Robert Greene's book refers to it as the flow state. Flow state feels like you already got the basics down, and you know this like the back of your hand. Things are just all clicking.
As far as purpose goes, life's purpose flow state is a huge part of it. I'm going to give you the equation for ikigai. There is a Venn diagram with four bubbles that intersect with ikigai in the dead center. The first requirement obviously is what you find purpose in - something you love doing. The second part of it is you are great at it. So, when you find purpose it's something you love and something you're also great at doing either upfront or with practice. Now the next part is you are paid for it, and it is practical long term. If you find your true passion but it is not sustainable, you won’t be able to do it forever. You will eventually have to give up your passion and your purpose if you're not getting sustained by it. And that brings us to our last part of the equation - the world needs it. If you do your life's purpose and no one needs it in life, then you've just been drawing with chalk that gets washed away at the end of the day. Whatever you're doing, it's eventually going to get forgotten.
In the end, whatever your purpose is, if you are great at it, the world will probably need it. With Frances, the world clearly needed her purpose. Do you feel like you can still miss your purpose even if you're great at it, you love it, you're paid for it, and the world needs it? Possibly if you are not paying attention or if you are too critical and you don't see any kind of promise of what this could become. However, the good news is that there's no maximum age for when you find your purpose. You just have to keep poking at things until you find something that will hit all four of those bubbles.
Myth Three: Getting a purpose late in life is well and good for Colonel Sanders and Frances Lee, but how late is too late? What’s our national average for finding our purpose?
We often say that people who find purpose are in the right place at the right time. I think it's more of people finding ikigai. I think that might be really what purpose is - you shove yourself into that place where you're going to be needed for it. And if you don't do that early, that’s fine. If you are good at something, you'll be sucked into a place where it's needed eventually. You have to go put yourself under the waterfall. You have to go seek out different things to see which one sticks.
Since we mentioned the statistics of finding purpose and meaning, I want to share with you the most groundbreaking thing that I found in my research for this podcast. Did you know that there was a study about when we find our purpose in life - when our life takes on meaning, and it revealed what the average age is that people will find purpose. In one of our earliest episodes (episode 14), we had a Time magazine article that stated self-esteem peaks at around 60. And that was a mindblower for Todd, and that was a mindblower for me. And that was a mindblower for most of the people we shared that with.
Well, on our show, I always thought that your prime is when you're healthy, you're strong, when you are the most attractive, and your career is going somewhere. So basically, the mid-20s or 30s. So, this gave me a lot of relief knowing that it doesn’t come until your 60s. I still have some time. Well, guess what? Your purpose in life peaks at about 60 as well. Coincidence? I don’t think so. This comes from the Journal of Neuropsychiatry called Meaning In Life and Physical, Mental, and Cognitive Functioning. Cross-sectional data was taken from about 1,000 adults who were asked about purpose and meaning and the presence of meaning in somebody's life versus the searching for meaning.
In general, it was a questionnaire of physical and mental well-being. And the short answer to this is when you're roughly 60, the presence of meaning is at its peak, and the presence of searching is at its lowest point. So, it's more of a sliding scale where somebody is either searching or feel like they have found meaning. I hate to say this, but the idea that you should listen to your elders, especially when they're talking about finding purpose, there is something to it. In fact, there's another article I looked up about why older adults feel like they have a lot of wisdom, and it is because they have their purpose figured out.
Joe: What did Frances Glessner Lee leave us?
Todd: She’s a very successful woman. She was the first female police captain in New Hampshire State Police. She was the very first woman invited to the International Association for Chiefs of Police, and she was humble through it – calling herself a hobbyist rather than a socialite.
Joe: That level of humility is crazy to me. Say you were just made an honorary police captain, you wouldn't wear a badge around and be like, that'll be Captain Todd.
Todd: Exactly, and then she'd go to all these things, traveling all on our own expenses and sitting through meeting after meeting and just wanting to train and make people better. Even though Frances made light of what her contribution was to criminology and forensics, the world knows her as one of the world's most astute criminologists. She was acquainted with and respected by all the top criminologists in the world.
Final Thoughts
If you feel like your life lacks purpose, if you feel you've missed your lightning strike, or everyone got an email about their true calling except you - don't worry; you are not alone. According to the philosophy of ikigai, true purpose is the intersection of four vital components: doing something you love, doing something the world needs, doing something you're great at, and doing something you can get paid for.
Those should be your four criteria to start searching for your calling. You love it, you're great at it, the world needs it, and the world will pay for it. Find that thing, and you found true purpose. And here's the best part; Purpose isn't a soul mate. There isn't just one true purpose out there for you. There are hundreds of jobs, hobbies, and invocations waiting for you to try a sample. As soon as you find the one that fits into the Venn diagram of ikigai, you're golden.
Frances was told she couldn't study law criminology. She was held back, kept in the house, and was force-fed domestic skills like sewing, knitting, and painting. But Frances was patient. She had a purpose, and she knew her grail would come again. When it did, she used those soft domestic skills to fulfill her purpose. Frances recreated murder and bloodshed out of flower drapes and needlepoint, and we can all sleep safer at night because of it.