A life with meaning and purpose...

When I think of all the books that I've read throughout my lifetime, there are a few that stand out as having an enormous impact on my life for one reason or another.  There are others that I just really enjoyed.  I would have to say that Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl is one of the most important books that I've ever read.  I can measure the impact that it's made on how I've come to view the world in which we live by the sheer number of posts that I've written about it.  Frankl was an Austrian neurologist, psychologist, philosopher, and Holocaust survivor.  He developed an entire philosophy and form of psychotherapy called "Logotherapy" (literally meaning "healing through meaning") based largely upon his Holocaust concentration camp experience, first at Auschwitz and later at Bergen-Belsen.  Frankl talks about the three fundamental tenets of "Logotherapy" in his book.  First, life has meaning, even under the most miserable of circumstances; second, our main motivation in life is to find meaning in life itself; and third, we are free to find meaning in who we are, what we do, and what we experience.  If you are searching for that elusive "one thing" that captures the essence of what it is to live with purpose and meaning, these questions are a great place to start.

Studies have consistently shown that psychological well-being is a key determinant for living the good life.  Individuals with positive well-being live longer and suffer fewer health problems compared to those without positive well-being.  Frank Martela and colleagues recently published a study ("Which predicts longevity better: Satisfaction with life or purpose in life?") that compared "satisfaction with life" (subjectively determined using a validated measure) and "purpose in life" (again, using a validated measure) and mortality.  Having a purpose in life was a much better predictor of living a longer life than simply being satisfied with life.  In other words, having a sense of purpose not only makes us happy, it helps us to live longer lives with fewer health problems!

  

Both Western and Eastern philosophical traditions suggest that finding your purpose in life is one of the keys to a happy life.  For example, Buddha said, "Your purpose in life is to find your purpose and give your whole heart and soul to it."  Viktor Frankl said, "Don’t aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself, or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself."  

Another one of my favorite authors, Mark Twain, said that "The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why."  As it turns out, finding your personal "why" is perhaps one of the most important things that you can do in life.  It is the key that unlocks both our happiness and our success.  Finding one's purpose is a highly personal journey, but thankfully there's been a lot of great articles that can certainly help pave the road and make the journey a little easier.  Stay tuned for a summary of the articles that I've found most helpful in my next post.

The third place no more?

I just read that McDonald's just overtook Starbucks' near decade-long run as the world's most valuable restaurant brand.  According to a report by the global marketing consultant firm Brand Finance, McDonald's brand value rose 7 percent in 2025 to US$40 billion, while Starbucks brand value declined 36 percent to US$38 billion.  Jason Aten, writing for Inc. magazine (see "McDonald's just got big news in its decades-long battle with Starbucks"), McDonald's has been playing the long game by investing heavily in its McCafé brand by improving the quality of its coffee and adding free WiFi.  He writes, "In doing so, McDonald's made a bold move: it started positioning itself as a viable third place."

Let's go back in time to talk about what Aten meant when he referred to McDonald's as a third place.  Several years ago, I happened to be speaking at the Risky Business Patient Safety Conference in London at the same time that my sister and her family were touring England.  We decided to meet up and see some of the sights together.  We had a fantastic time!  There's even a picture somewhere of all of us recreating the Beatles' famous Abbey Road album cover.  We had planned to meet at a specific location (I can't remember the exact location), and we had to travel separately via the Tube in order to meet ("Mind the Gap").  Apparently my youngest nephew was just a little too late jumping on to the train at the last minute, and so the rest of my sister's family inadvertently left him at the station and went on without him.  He was already in high school at this point, but his mobile phone didn't have an international plan.  He went to a Starbucks close by and used the free WiFi there to text my sister and find out where they could meet.  Very resourceful!

Starbucks used to be a place to hang out and work while enjoying a great cup of coffee.  The company actually encouraged customers to come and spend free time in their stores and had done so almost from the beginning.  There's a well-known story of how former CEO Howard Schultz wanted to re-create the ambience and experience of a European coffeehouse.  Starbucks was originally founded in 1971 by Gerald Baldwin, Gordon Bowker, and Ziev Siegl, primarily as a small coffee shop in Seattle's Pike Place Market.  The store specialized in selling whole arabica coffee beans to a niche market.  Schultz joined the marketing team in 1982, and during a business trip to Europe, he became fascinated with Italy's coffee culture, particularly the important role that neighborhood espresso bars played in the everyday lives of the individuals living there.  When Schultz returned to Seattle, he was excited to recreate the same environment at Starbucks.  The small company set up an espresso bar in downtown Seattle, which would serve as the prototype for what Schultz envisioned was the future of the company.  

Schultz described his vision, saying, "The idea was to create a chain of coffeehouses that would become America's third place.  At the time, most Americans had two places in their lives - home and work.  But I believed that people needed another place, a place where they could go to relax and enjoy others, or just be by themselves.  I envisioned a place that would be separate from home or work, a place that would mean different things to different people."

The three founders didn't want to become a restaurant business, so Schultz left the company to start his own company, Il Giornale (apparently the Italian word for newspaper).  His coffee shop quickly became popular, and to close the circle, Schultz eventually purchased Starbucks from its original founders.  Over the next several years, he built Starbucks into what it is today - a global brand developed around the concept of a third place.  

Schultz served as Chair and CEO at Starbucks from 1986-2000, 2008-2017, and again as Interim CEO from 2022-2023.  Over the years, Starbucks has occasionally lost its way by de-emphasizing the third place concept.  Schultz famously came out of retirement in 2008 to resurrect the brand and the company by returning to its roots as a third place for people who love coffee.  Schultz famously wrote an open letter to all of the company's partners (what Starbucks calls its employees) in 2018, "Great coffee and our stores will always be catalysts for community.  Now more than ever the world needs places to come together with compassion and with love.  Providing the world with a warm and welcoming third place may just be our most important role and responsibility, today and always."

As it turns out, always doesn't always mean forever.  Over the last several years, Starbucks, under new executive leadership, began to prioritize goals like efficiency and volume over the customer experience.  The legendary (often mythical) third place was de-emphasized.  As B. Joseph Pine II and Louis-Etienne Dubois write in an online article for Harvard Business Review (see "How Starbucks Devalued Its Own Brand"), "Starbucks is in trouble again...Going to Starbucks isn't what it used to be, and the brand itself isn't what it used to mean.  The fundamental problem: Starbucks has been commoditizing itself."

The meteoric rise of Starbucks as a company has been covered in a number of Harvard Business School case studies, articles, and books (see in particular "Starbucks Coffee Company: Transformation and Renewal" by Nancy Koehn and colleagues, as well as Schultz's book, Onward: How Starbucks Fought For Its Life Without Losing Its Soul).  What is remarkable is the fact that prior to Schultz and the third place, coffee met almost every definition of a commodity.  Any business person in their right mind wouldn't have predicted a company built around specialty coffee would become one of the world's best known brands.  The secret recipe for the success of Starbucks really comes down to the third place concept.  As Schultz himself suggested in an open letter on LinkedIn to the company leadership, Starbucks has lost its soul.  Starbucks, as Vetha Varshini Kavya Alam writes on Medium, has become just another coffee shop.  As a result, McDonald's has taken over as the world's most valuable restaurant brand.

Daniel Kline writes (see "Starbucks CEO sounds the alarm on coffee chain's problems") that "Starbucks seems to bounce between two types of CEOs: those who care about coffee and atmosphere and those who worry about efficiency and operations...Laxman Narasimhan and Kevin Johnson, both of whom followed Schultz in the top spot, always seemed more concerned about operations than coffee."  Starbucks' new CEO, Brian Niccol, who was CEO of Chipotle prior to becoming CEO at Starbucks on September 9, 2024, appears to be a hybrid of the two.  He wrote in an open letter shortly after taking over the company, "We're refocusing on what has always set Starbucks apart - a welcoming coffeehouse where people gather, and where we serve the finest coffee, handcrafted by our skilled baristas."

Time will only tell whether Niccol can keep operations smooth and efficient, while at the same time emphasizing the quality of the customer experience.  It's a position (and predicament) that many leaders in health care know all too well!  At least for the moment, however, it seems that Starbucks can no longer claim to be the third place.

Squaring a circle

Once again, I learned a rather interesting bit of trivia about the number π a few weeks after (not before) International Pi Day (see another post from the past, "Pi and Infinite Monkeys" which I posted on September 3, 2023).  March 14th is always a fun day in our house, because my wife is a middle school math teacher!  She always celebrates International Pi Day by having her students bring in either pizza or pie, and there's always a contest to see which student can recite the highest number of digits in π.  While I am confident that almost everyone can remember that π is roughly equal to 3.14, I suspect that many of us forget that (1) π is what is classified as an irrational number (a real number that cannot be expressed as a fraction), (2) the decimal representation of π never ends and never repeats itself (although there are occasional short repeating elements, such as the six consecutive nines that appear starting at the 762nd decimal place, commonly known as Feynman's Point after the brilliant physicist Richard Feynman, (3) π is the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter.

What I didn't know is that my home state of Indiana almost passed a law in 1897 to change the value of π to 3.2.    

Since antiquity, mathematicians have tried to solve a problem known as "squaring a circle".  The problem can be stated as follows: Given a circle, construct a square with the same area as the circle using only a compass and straight edge.  Unfortunately, solving the problem has proven to be impossible, which is why "squaring a circle" is now an idiomatic expression used to describe a problem that is impossible to solve.  Here's where the Indiana law comes in.  Back in 1894, an Indiana physician and math enthusiast named Edward J. Goodwin believed that he had discovered a solution for the "squaring the circle" problem.  He was so proud of his proof that he asked his friend, Taylor I. Record to introduce a bill (Bill 246) in the Indiana House of Representatives under the title, "A Bill for an act introducing a new mathematical truth" in 1897.  Bizarrely, if passed, the law would have allowed the state of Indiana to publish his discovery in its textbooks for free, while everyone else would supposedly have to pay royalties to Goodwin.  I'm not sure that's exactly how copyright laws work, but that didn't seem to bother Goodwin or Record.

Interestingly enough, Goodwin's proof only worked if π was equal to 3.2.  The other state representatives in the Indiana House were confused by the topic and whether it was even appropriate for them to vote on such a bill.  One representative referred the bill to the Finance Committee, presumably because the bill involved numbers.  Another representative joked that the bill should go to the Committee on Swamplands, where it would "find a deserved grave."  The bill eventually made its way in the House Education Committee, which approved it and sent it to the General Assembly for a vote.  The Indiana House of Representatives voted by majority to approve the bill on February 6, 1897.

Before the bill went to the Indiana Senate, however, another mathematician caught wind of the bill.  Purdue University's Clarence Abiathar Waldo had apparently stopped by at the Indiana Statehouse in order to request funding for the Indiana Academy of Science.  Instead, he found himself teaching Indiana Senators on the finer points of geometry.  Waldo later recalled in the Proceedings of the Indiana Academy of Science, "A member then showed the writer a copy of the bill just passed and asked him if he would like an introduction to the learned doctor, its author. He declined the courtesy with thanks, remarking that he was acquainted with as many crazy people as he cared to know."

Despite Waldo's impromptu geometry lesson, the bill nearly passed the Senate.  However, the Senate agreed to postpone consideration of the bill indefinitely on February 12, 1897, narrowly avoiding what would assuredly result in widespread ridicule.  Waldo later wrote, "My state did not further this monstrosity, and it was probably the Indiana Academy of Science alone which prevented it.  That one act of protection was worth more to Indiana, jealous of her fair fame as she is, than all she ever contributed or can contribute to the publication of the proceedings of her Academy of Science."

It's an interesting footnote in the history of mathematics.  I wonder why I was never heard about this story when we were taught Indiana State History in grade school?  And even though I am posting this on April Fool's Day, as far as I can tell, the story is absolutely true (Goodwin even published his proof in the prestigious journal, The American Mathematical Monthly under the title "Quadrature of the Circle")!