“I’ve Made Hundreds of Millions… But I Still Don’t Know What My Life Is For.”
Written by: Brad Pedersen
Recently, I sat down with a friend of mine who is a highly accomplished founder and CEO. He had just closed his third major transaction; this one resulting in tens of millions in liquidity, stacked on top of the hundreds of millions that he had already accumulated over the years.
As we unpacked the transaction and what it meant for his future, he paused, looked at me thoughtfully, and said something I won’t soon forget: “I’ve achieved more than I ever imagined in business; but I’m still not sure what my life is really for.”
Despite his extraordinary financial success, there was a noticeable restlessness beneath the surface. He had climbed the mountains of business and financial achievement, yet stood there wondering if he had ascended the right summit.
As we gear up for a new semester of the Full Spectrum Mastermind, his words continue to echo in my mind. His struggle reflects something I’ve experienced firsthand and something I see often in other high-achieving leaders: the gap between what we've currently achieved and what we were actually meant to create. A problem created by confusing a goal in business with our purpose in life.
The Three P's That Start Every Enterprise
Most businesses (and most careers) start off in transaction mode; you identify an opportunity in the market, develop a solution, and exchange value for money. There's nothing wrong with this approach; it's an essential part of how any enterprise gets a start.
In fact, I have come to learn that there are three "P" reasons why we start a venture:
1. Passion - We have something that we love or have a passion for and we determine if there is an opportunity to turn it into a career.
2. Problem - We see a problem in the market. Often it is a personal problem we experience and we ask if there's a way to solve it not just for ourselves, but for others who face the same challenge.
3. Profits - We identify a trend in the marketplace, like a wave swelling in the ocean, and we see an opportunity to intersect with it to try and ride the wave.
Ultimately for a business to be enduring it will need all three, but usually it is one of these that gets it going.
The Transaction Trap
The problem is that these starting points usually lead the business in a direction of becoming solely focused on being transactional. It is about efficiency, optimization, and extraction. The questions they ask are: "How can we do this faster? How can we do it cheaper? How can we maximize our margin?"
These are important questions needed in the beginning to create a sustainable and profitable enterprise. However, transactional work on its own often leaves us feeling like we're on a hamster wheel; busy, productive, even successful. Along the way we get the dopamine hits from the wins, but like coming off a sugar high, we find they are not long-lived and somehow end up afterwards feeling empty. So we do it again, and repeat it over and over, but with each win we experience less and less satisfaction.
It's a phenomenon known as the arrival fallacy: the idea that if I do this thing or if I have this outcome, then I will finally feel contentment with my life. The truth is, by focusing our value on what we do or what we have, though seemingly taking one step forward we are actually moving the goalposts two steps further out.
What I have come to learn is that until we get clear on the purpose of our life and align our thinking, feeling, and actions with it, we will never be able to enjoy true satisfaction at the deepest level. Your purpose is understanding your “why” or the true calling in life…the reason you were created.
The Four Ingredients of Purpose
Through years of working with leaders and reflecting on my own journey, I've found it helpful to think about your purpose as comprised of four essential ingredients:
1. Your Identity This is about understanding who you are at your core. Your identity isn't your title, your company or your accomplishments. It's the unchanging essence of who you are formed by your beliefs, your values and your virtues. It is understanding who you are when everything else is stripped away.
When I stepped away from the toy industry, I was leaving behind 27 years of my life. It was the only professional world I had ever known, and it had deeply shaped my sense of identity. Without the familiar title or the industry experience to define me, I found myself facing a new challenge: discovering who I truly was beneath the role. That’s the real work of identity; uncovering the person beyond the position.
2. The Fit - Your Gifts and Talents in Meaningful Application This is about our natural skills and talents. It is the intersection of what you're uniquely good at and what the world needs. It's not enough to be skilled; you need to apply those skills in ways that align with your deeper values and create genuine impact.
As Frederick Buechner beautifully put it, "The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet."
3. The Value of What You Do This isn't just about just the economic value you create, but the meaningful contribution your work makes to the world. What problems are you solving? What products or processes are you improving? What positive change are you creating?
One of our mastermind members owns a development business where they design and create new subdivisions and communities. He discovered that understanding his value as an architect of exceptional living spaces has much more meaning than simply building houses and complexes. He's not just constructing buildings, he's crafting the foundations where families will create memories, where children will take their first steps, and where neighbors will become lifelong friends.
4. The People You Are Serving Purpose becomes clear when you can identify exactly who benefits from your work. Not just your customers, but the broader ecosystem of people whose lives are touched by what you create.
One of our mastermind members runs a logistics company. On the surface, it's about moving products efficiently. But as he dug deeper into his purpose, he realized he was actually supporting and connecting people; starting with his own team, including family members he employs, then empowering them to help small businesses reach customers they never could have served before, enabling families to receive goods that improve their quality of life. This shift from focusing on transactions to focusing on transformation happens when you begin to see the faces behind the numbers; the real people whose lives are changed by what you do.
The Frameworks That Miss the Mark
There's no shortage of tools and assessments designed to help you find your purpose. Some focus on personality types, others on strengths, still others on values alignment. While these can be helpful starting points, they often miss the deeper truth: purpose isn't something you discover through an assessment; it's something you reveal through alignment. The real magic then happens when your work and your output in life become aligned with your purpose.
When what you do during the day reflects who you are at your core. When your professional activities serve people you genuinely care about. When your unique gifts are being used to create the kind of change you believe the world needs.
This kind of alignment isn’t a one-time event; it’s a continuous journey of self-discovery and self-mastery. And that journey begins with awareness.
Awareness grows when we create space for two things: intentional reflection and meaningful relationships: both of which are foundational to what we cultivate in the Full Spectrum Mastermind.
I’ve had the privilege of witnessing this transformation unfold in real time. There’s always a moment when something clicks; when someone moves from grinding through their work to finding a sense of flow in it. The demands don’t disappear, but the energy shifts. Instead of being drained by the weight of their work, they’re fueled by a deeper sense of purpose within it.
One mastermind member described it this way: "I used to dread Monday mornings. Now I wake up excited about the problems I get to solve and the people I get to serve. The work is still challenging, but it feels like I'm finally using my life for what I was meant to do." This is the shift from transaction to transformation in action: when your enterprise becomes an expression of your purpose rather than the definition of it.
The Call to Transformation
As we begin this new semester of the Full Spectrum Mastermind, I'm excited to dive deeper into these concepts with the incredible group of leaders we have curated; people who are ready to move beyond just being successful to becoming significant.
The work we'll do together isn't about abandoning ambition or everything we've built. It's about infusing what we've built with deeper meaning by gaining a clearer understanding of our skills and identity, then using them as a force for good for the people we're meant to impact. It's about maximizing the impact of our lives by ensuring that our considerable talents and resources are directed toward what we were made to do.
The transition from transactional to transformational isn't just a business strategy; it's a life strategy. It ensures that when we look back on our career’s, we can say with confidence that we used our life force and our gifts to create the kind of change we believe the world needs.
Maya Angelou captured this idea beautifully: "A person's life purpose is nothing more than to rediscover, through the detours of art or love or passionate work, those one or two images that first caused their heart to sing."
Final Thoughts: Your Turn
If you're reading this and feeling a stirring; a sense that there might be more alignment possible between who you are and what you do, I recommend you pay attention to that feeling. It might be the nudge you need to start to explore how to point your trajectory towards your next chapter.
This week, I encourage you to reflect on these four ingredients:
- Identity: Who are you when stripped of titles and achievements?
- Value: What meaningful contribution does your work make to the world?
- People: Who specifically benefits from what you create?
- Fit: How are your unique gifts being used to create positive change?
Building a life of meaning comes down to knowing that your output in life is aligned with your purpose. Not perfectly; none of us achieve perfect alignment. But progressively, intentionally, and with growing clarity, understanding why you're here and what you're meant to contribute.
The world needs what you have to offer. Not just your skills or your resources, but your unique combination of identity, gifts, and calling applied to the people and problems you're meant to serve.
The question isn't whether you have a purpose…..you do. The question is whether you'll have the courage to discover it and align your life and work with it.
If you are curious about what it means to live your life to the full, then we invite you to apply for the Full Spectrum Mastermind. This is a curated experience for accomplished leaders ready to move from striving to understand how to truly thrive in life. You can apply by clicking the following LINK—this isn't for everyone, and that's by design.