For those who remember if not mourn an epoch of lost greatness, it may be impossible to accept that there is no return. But for those of us who were … - Pete Buttigieg

For purpose-driven people, this is the conundrum of client-service work: to perform at your best, you must learn how to care about something because you are hired to do so. For some, this is not a problem at all. A great lawyer or consultant can identify so closely with the client, or so strongly desire to be good at the job, or be so well compensated, that her purposes and interests and those of the client become one. But for others, work can only be meaningful if its fundamental purpose is in things that would matter even if no one would pay you to care about them.

Rawls became famous for creating a new definition of justice, which boils down to this: a society is fair if it looks like something we would design before knowing how we would come into the world. He imagined a fictional “original position,” the position we would be in if we were told we were about to be born, but were not told about the circumstances we would be born into — how tall or short we would be, or of what race or nationality, or what resources or personal qualities we would have. This vision of justice is often compared to being asked how you would want a cake to be divided if you did not know which piece will be yours: equally, of course.

As a military officer serving under Don't Ask Don't Tell and as an elected official in the state of Indiana when Mike Pence was governor, at a certain point, when it came to professional setbacks I had to wonder whether just acknowloging who I was was going to be the ultimate, career-ending professional setback. I came back from the deployment and realised that you only get to live one life and I was not interested in not knowing what it was like to be in love any longer. So I just came out. I had no idea what kind of professional setback it would be especially cos, incoveniently, it was an election year in my socially conservative community. What happened was that when I trusted voters to judge me on the job that I did for them, they decided to trust me and re-elected me with 80% of the vote and what I learned was that trust can be reciprocated and that part of how you can win and derserve to win is to know what's worth more to you than winning.