Most leaders treat purpose as a destination — something you arrive at and then possess. The Yoruba philosophical concept of *ori* — roughly, your personal destiny-force that must be actively cultivated rather than discovered — turns this assumption inside out. You don't find your ori; you feed it. The 16th-century Yoruba philosopher-priests encoded in the Ifá corpus a striking structural claim: purpose is not a noun but a verb, a living relationship between a person and their choices, maintained through practice or eroded through neglect. What this reveals about leadership specifically is almost architectural in its clarity. An organization that locates purpose in its founding myth — the story of why we started — but fails to enact that purpose in daily operational decisions isn't storing purpose safely. It's starving it. The Ifá framework suggests purpose degrades like an unexercised muscle: quietly, invisibly, until the atrophy is already severe. Today's practical edge: if you lead anything — a team, a family, a fitness practice — ask not 'what is our purpose?' but 'what did we actually do yesterday that fed it?'

Looking at your actual calendar from last week — the meetings, the workouts, the conversations you chose — what does the evidence say your purpose is, regardless of what you'd claim it to be?

Drawing from Yoruba Ifá Philosophy — Ifá corpus (Yoruba philosophical tradition, oral codification c. 15th–17th century CE)