What Is a Purposeful Life—and How Do You Build One?

A few years ago, I was sitting in a chemo center next to my dad, holding his hand while he slept through one of dozens of treatments, and I looked around the room. Much to my surprise, many of the other patients in the room seemed about my age—far too young to be battling for their lives. They reminded me of the incredible Leila Janah. Leila was a founder I'd gotten to know when I interviewed her for the cover of our magazine in 2016. Four years later, she lost her life to a rare and aggressive cancer at age 37.

I drove home from the cancer center that day thinking about Leila and asked myself: "if this was the last year of my life, what would I regret?" 

The answer hit me square in the chest: that I hadn't nurtured my joy for as long as I could remember. But when I started thinking about what actually brought me joy, I came up blank. 

While I'd built a successful company, scaled it, sold it, and stayed on as CEO for years afterward, I was actually burned out, anxious, and quietly losing myself despite seeming so "successful." 

And I definitely couldn't tell you the last time I'd actually felt joyful because I'd been prioritizing my work for so long, and then my kids, and then helping my Mom caretake for my Dad. 

That moment cracked something open. Because if joy was missing—if I couldn't even name what brought me joy anymore—then what in the fresh hell had I been chasing all those years?

This piece is for the people quietly asking themselves the same question because much of the answer comes from building a more purposeful life. 

What is a purposeful life?

A purposeful life isn't a thing you find. It's a thing you cultivate—deliberately, often messily, by choosing what to keep and what to let go of.

The clearest definition I've found, after a decade of interviewing more than 1,000 business leaders for Conscious Company Magazine, my podcast Unbehaved, and my book This Isn't Working, is this:

A purposeful life is one organized around things that light you up, creating meaningful impact, and prioritizing your quality of life, instead of around what the world has told you to want.

That sounds simple. It's not.

Most of us spend our 20s and 30s organizing our lives around external markers: titles, salaries, achievements, the approval of people whose opinions we never even chose to care about. Those things aren't bad in themselves. The problem is when they become the whole point—when the chase becomes your entire life.

Why the old definition of success leaves you empty (the science)

When I started researching this for my book, the data turned out to be brutal.

Brian Knutson's research on dopamine showed that the surge our brains release when we anticipate a reward—a promotion, a paycheck, a like on a post—is the same physiological response that people with substance use disorders experience when they have access to the substance they're addicted to. Achievement hits like a drug. And like a drug, it requires more and more to deliver the same hit.

Deci and Ryan, foundational researchers in motivation science, ran a longitudinal study on college students after graduation. The students who pursued extrinsic goals—money, status, fame— reported the same level of life satisfaction as before and increased anxiety and depression, even when they hit the goals. The students who pursued intrinsic goals—purpose, growth, connection, autonomy—reported higher life satisfaction and lower anxiety regardless of outcomes.

Translation: when you organize your life around external achievement, you can win and still lose. When you organize it around something true, you can lose along the way and still win.

Harvard's Human Flourishing Program has studied this for years and identified five elements of a flourishing life: physical and mental health, meaningful relationships, purpose and meaning, integrity with your values, and feeling happy and satisfied. Notice what's not on the list: a corner office, a number in your bank account, your follower count.

This isn't soft science. It's the science we're collectively ignoring while we burn ourselves out.

The two kinds of ambition

Coach and author Amina AlTai, who I recently sat down with on Unbehaved, draws a distinction that has stayed with me between two kinds of ambition.

Painful ambition is externally driven. It's the chase of the title, the validation, the number that will finally make you feel like enough. It never does. There's always a next thing, a higher bar, a new reason this current achievement doesn't count.

Purposeful ambition is oriented toward something true—your actual values, the impact you want to have, the life you genuinely want to live. It's still demanding. It still requires hard work. But it fills you up instead of hollowing you out.

A purposeful life isn't about being less ambitious. It's about being ambitious for things that are actually yours.

The Three Elements of a Purposeful Life (aka Soul Success)

In my book, I call the new definition of success "soul success"—and I break it into three elements that all need to be present for it to actually work. When all three are showing up, the life feels sustainable, generative, and yours. When any one of them is missing, the whole thing starts to wobble.

1. Purpose

The work itself needs to matter to you. Not in a vague "I want to make a difference" way, but in the specific way that aligns with what you actually care about and what you're built to do. It's the answer to a question I keep coming back to from the leader Akaya Windwood: what's mine to do?

The research is unambiguous. Having a sense of purpose is correlated with greater happiness, better sleep, better physical and mental health, less stress, better cognitive function, and longer life. McKinsey's data shows that nearly 70% of employees feel their sense of purpose in life is tied to their work. We're not built to spend the largest portion of our lives doing things that don't matter to us — and the body and the mind both register that mismatch as a slow-burn stress that compounds over decades.

2. Passion

This is the second element, and it's the one most people skip. Purpose without passion gets you somewhere meaningful but exhausting—work that means something but slowly drains you anyway.

Most people assume that just because they're good at something, they should build their life around it. That's a trap. There are skills I'm fully capable of executing—budgeting and forecasting come to mind—that I don't enjoy using. Building a career around them would slowly empty me, even if I were great at them.

Passion is the intersection of skill, joy, and growth. The work you can do well, that fills you up while you're doing it, in domains where you actually want to keep getting better. The leaders I interviewed for my book who described themselves as flourishing weren't just doing meaningful work—they were doing meaningful work they actually loved, in spaces where they were continuing to expand.

3. Quality of life

This is the part most high achievers leave out—and the reason so many people who have purpose and passion still end up burned out. Quality of life is everything outside the work that you also need to thrive: your health, your sleep, your relationships, the unscheduled time, the things you do that have no productive purpose at all.

The corporate culture of the last fifty years has treated this stuff as optional—something you do after you've earned it, after the project ships, after the round closes, after the kids are older. Burnout researchers Emily and Amelia Nagoski estimate that something like 42% of your time should go toward rest in order to optimize health, performance, and resilience. Most of us are doing closer to 5%. We have built a culture that treats life as the recovery room for work—and then wonder why we're miserable.

A purposeful life requires that quality of life sit equally weighted with purpose and passion. Not earned. Not deferred. Already happening, alongside the work.

When all three elements are present, you have a chance at the kind of life Harvard's Human Flourishing Program identifies as actually thriving. When any one is missing, the structure can't hold.

Three Practices To Help You Live A Purposeful Life

The framework above is the what. These are the how. If you searched your way here looking for a way to start, these are the three practices I've seen actually work across the leaders I've interviewed, in my own life, and in the conversations I keep having with leaders who are quietly questioning the playbook they've been handed.

1. Define enough

Most of us never define what enough looks like. So enough never arrives.

The job paying more than you ever imagined feels insufficient within six months. The salary that would have changed your life five years ago feels normal now. Without a defined "enough," you'll always be one promotion or one revenue milestone away from satisfaction. The line keeps moving because no one ever drew it.

Sit down—really sit down—and ask: what does my life actually need to look like to feel sustainable, fulfilling, and mine? What income would let you stop trading your evenings? What does a work cadence look like that doesn't drain you? And what about your weekends—what do they actually need to be?

My husband and I have done this. We know what enough looks like for us as a family. When work opportunities come up that would push us past it without giving us anything we actually want in return, we say no. That permission is purposeful.

2. Schedule joy

This is the practice that came out of the cancer center moment.

After I realized I couldn't answer what brings me joy? I made a list. Travel with friends. Long unscheduled mornings. Dinner parties with smart women I trust. A lot of laughing. Walks alone with no podcast playing.

Then I scheduled them, because this is a huge part of nurturing a better quality of life for myself. Once a year I take a "joy trip" by myself—last year was Prague. Once a week I do something on the list, however small. It's on the calendar like any other commitment.

Most of the leaders I've interviewed who described themselves as flourishing—actually flourishing, not performing flourishing—were doing some version of this. Erin Wade, who built Homeroom restaurant in Oakland, blocked Tuesday and Thursday mornings for surfing. It was on her shared calendar where her hundred employees could see it. She used to hide it; now it's a feature, not a secret.

Joy is not a luxury you earn after the next milestone. It's the thing that makes you sustainable enough to reach the next milestone in the first place.

3. Write an ideal life statement

This is the practice I keep pinned next to my desk.

Sit down and write—with no constraints—what your ideal life actually looks like. How you spend your days. How much time with your family. How much you work. What's on the calendar you're proud of and what's not. Then read it. Often.

I look at mine on the days when the high-achieving, prove-yourself part of my brain starts pulling me toward saying yes to things I shouldn't. It's the single most reliable tool I've found for staying aligned. When I'm being asked to choose, I read the statement and the answer is usually obvious.

A purposeful life isn't an abstraction. It's a series of small decisions that either move you toward what you actually want or away from it. The ideal life statement is what gives you the data to choose.

Akaya Windwood's question

Toward the end of my book, I quote a leader named Akaya Windwood—a longtime architect of social-justice work—and she said something that has stayed with me:

"The next five to ten years are going to be tumultuous. So it becomes really important, particularly for women, to ask ourselves: What am I here to do? What's mine to do? Then, only do that."

A purposeful life, in the end, might just be the practice of answering Akaya's question once, and then again, and then again and following the answer where it goes.

You're not behind. You're not broken. The system is set up to keep you running on the wrong kind of ambition, and most of us did exactly what we were told to do. The fact that you're here, asking what a purposeful life actually is, means you're already starting to look up from the treadmill.

The hardest part is what comes next: choosing to want something different than what you've been told to want.

It's worth it.

Want to keep going?

I wrote a whole book about this, called "This Isn't Working." It goes deeper into the research, the leaders' stories, and the practices for building a life and career that doesn't break you. My podcast Unbehaved keeps the conversation going every week.

More ways to keep going: 📖 Get the book |🎙️ Listen to my podcast Unbehaved | 📬 Grab my free TL;DR: 7 insights from my book | Get my essays on Substack👇