What 'lost purpose' actually means for many high performers

Not what you are expecting.

I hear this phrase quite frequently in my practice. “I lost my purpose, help me find my purpose.” It usually comes from founders, but it also comes from senior leaders working in companies. Their profiles are quite similar. People who have been performing at a very high level for quite a few years, who reach out and tell me they need to find their purpose again.

I have to be honest with you. Most of the times I don’t buy that.

I’m not saying these people are lying. But there is a lot of hype around the term purpose. You can find purpose coaches, purpose content, retreats, the whole ecosystem. And I think 90% of it is nonsense. But that’s another conversation. The more important thing is this: you cannot lose something that you didn’t have in the first place.

I know that might sound a little aggressive or provocative, so let me explain what I mean.

What most people had was momentum, not meaning

What most of these people had was not purpose. It was momentum. They were winning, and winning felt like meaning. Sometimes easily, sometimes with a lot of effort, but the trajectory was positive, they were going up. When you are in a field and your hard work translates into results or money or progress, it’s quite easy to adopt this narrative that your purpose is to work hard and win, to build the biggest company, to have a huge exit, to build this amazing thing.

What I see more than you can imagine, and from people you would never suspect, is that these people build their whole identity around output. Around proving they can do the thing better than anyone else. And for years, even decades, it works. You get promoted, you get recognized, you get bigger titles, you raise money, you hire people. Whatever success means for you, you keep achieving it. And inside all of that there is always this quiet assumption running in the background that says: if I keep winning, I will eventually feel complete.

There is also another thing running quietly alongside it. A small entitlement. A little narcissistic monster whispering in your ear that you are special, you are better, you are not like everyone else. I know that because I was wearing that costume for quite a few years. It doesn’t happen consciously, but what it says to these people is that if they keep achieving, the restlessness will stop.

Of course it doesn’t stop. And the reason is that the winning was never solving the problem. It was a cover.

If this feels familiar, you’re probably the kind of person I write for and work with. Learn more about my work and set a 60’ free consultation.

The mechanism underneath

Here is how this works, and I want to walk through it carefully because it’s quite specific. When someone grows up learning, whether from parents or society or school, that their value is tied to what they produce, they build an identity that requires achievement to justify its whole existence. Nobody sits down at 16 and decides this. It gets wired in. And the wiring says: if I’m not achieving, I’m not worth attention, I’m not worth love, I’m not worth respect.

This is how many high performers feel, and I’m not exaggerating it. Achievement acts like a way to snooze that feeling, to postpone it, to avoid it. And the external world rewards you for it. You get good feedback at work, you get validation, you get the girl, you get the guy, you are more attractive, more confident, people admire you. But that validation is never enough. Because it is answering the wrong question.

The question was never “am I good at this?” The question was “am I enough without this?”

That question runs in the background, almost unconsciously, and most high performers never go near it. Going near it would mean sitting still and welcoming feelings, and sitting still is where all the discomfort lives. So instead they do what every high performer does. They work harder, they set bigger targets, and they tell themselves the next milestone is the one that will finally settle it. The ceiling always goes higher.

I had a client a while back running a company doing millions in revenue, great team, successful personal life. By any external measure this person was succeeding. He came to me and told me he felt like a failure. And I’m like, what? He gave me this incredibly polished answer about where he should have been by now, what his peers were doing, what the trajectory should look like. Everything external. Where I am versus where I should be.

The more polished the explanation, the more I’m convinced there is avoidance underneath. Actual self-awareness doesn’t look rehearsed. It’s messy, it comes with pauses and contradictions. When someone has a perfectly structured answer for why they feel terrible, what they’re showing you is the story they built to avoid looking at the real thing.

And the real thing in his case, and in most cases I see, was that he did not enjoy what he was doing. He enjoyed winning. Those are two completely different things.

The doing versus the winning

When you enjoy the work itself, you can have a bad year, a bad quarter, even a failed venture. It hurts, of course, I’m not going to pretend it doesn’t because you’d have to be in some Buddha state for nothing to affect you. But it doesn’t destroy you, because the work has meaning independent of the result. When you only enjoy the winning, a bad quarter becomes existential, because your whole identity is built around it. So if your identity is built around winning, who are you without it?

This is where most of the “I lost my purpose” language comes from. These people didn’t lose purpose. They lost momentum. And without the momentum, there is nothing underneath to hold them. The motivation is mostly extrinsic, coming from what other people are doing or some internal judgment about where they are supposed to be, like a third person pushing them from the outside.

What I want to leave you with

Purpose is an internal state. It’s like saying I’m happy or I’m in love, it’s subjective, there is no external measure for it. So here is the question I ask my clients and I want to ask you: if you removed every external validation from the equation, would you still do what you do? If you knew there would be no bigness, no huge success, that you would be a regular person doing regular work, would you keep doing it?

The people I have worked with who found something resembling real purpose did not find it by achieving harder. They found it by getting honest about what made it so important to achieve in the first place, and by facing the emotions sitting behind the construct they built to avoid those feelings. That kind of work is the most uncomfortable, painful, nasty work you will do in your life. But it is worth doing.

If this feels familiar, you’re probably the kind of person I write for and work with. Learn more about my work and set a 60’ free consultation.