I discovered my purpose in 2020, sitting alone in a quiet lab at 2 PM, when I finally admitted the truth I'd been hiding for 13 years: I was living someone else's life.

Looking back, I realized my purpose was just behind the unaddressed limiting beliefs I'd been carrying.

I've also realized this insight has been true in helping others find their purpose.

The Golden Cage

It was 2020.

I was staring at a mountain of data I had no desire to go through as the fog from my glasses clouded my vision.

In that moment, I realized I'd spent 13 years becoming someone I didn't even recognize.

For over a decade, I had climbed the academic ladder with relentless determination.

Each research publication, each grant, each promotion was supposed to bring satisfaction.

Instead, I felt more hollow with every achievement. I was living someone else's definition of success, desperately trying to prove I was enough.

The truth I couldn't admit was this: I was secretly terrified I wasn't worthy of any of it.

Imposter syndrome, fueled by shame and fear, propelled my career forward. But it left me feeling hollow and empty inside.

I had built my entire identity around what I accomplished, not who I was. Without my lab coat and title, I had no idea who I'd become. I was a high-functioning impostor, working for approval that never lasted.

Then came the pandemic and the mandatory (and racist) "anti-racist training" meetings at work.

I sat in those Zoom meetings, and witnessed some of the most progressive and privileged people on the planet disparage and demonize white people.

My tongue tied by political correctness, feeling like a stranger in my own workplace.

I immediately realized identity politics was not a game I wanted to play. Nor did I want to play games with others who played that game.

I began to understand that I simply didn't share basic values about truth or merit.

I felt suffocated.

It felt as if I had given other people control over my voice.

I wanted to escape, but after 13 years of being committed to this path, I was terrified.

"What if I fail and can't make it work on my own?"

The Quiet Revolution

Everything changed when I discovered two practices that changed everything.

First, I started meditating for an hour every morning. Initially agonizing, but slowly I began to hear a different voice—not the anxious narrator that usually ran the show, but something quieter, wiser.

Second, I learned contemplative wisdom practices from my coach John McMullin. He taught me to question my stories:

"I need others' approval to be valuable."

"Leaving academia means I'm a failure."

None of it was true.

As I examined the beliefs I had long considered true and real, they began to crumble like paper in water.

I realized I'd been living in a prison built from lies about my worth and purpose.

As I inquired into these beliefs, I felt something physically release in my chest.

The fear that had driven me for over a decade... dissolved.

The Leap Into Purpose

Several months later, I quit. Not just my job. But my career. Thirteen years gone, but for the first time in years, I felt alive.

Through these contemplative practices that freed me from the inside out, I discovered my real purpose: helping others find freedom by breaking free from the same mental shackles.

Starting a business wasn't just about making a living—it was a vehicle to offer transformation.

Today, I wake up with genuine excitement. Instead of working for others' approval or sitting in unproductive, pointless meetings predicated on virtue signaling, I work from my own sense of purpose.

The scientist in me had studied the truth of external phenomena; now I help people find truth in themselves.

Sometimes you have to lose yourself completely to find out who you really are.

Modern work strips away meaning

In today's society, cheap dopamine reigns supreme. It's at your fingertips.

Every time you feel that uncomfortable agitation or subtle discomfort, dealing with the same BS at work, we have instant access to the numbing agent that is our screens.

It creates the illusion of satisfaction and temporary content.

Meanwhile, our souls are craving a dragon to slay and a greater challenge than asking ChatGPT to create an Excel file so that you can keep playing Candy Crush.

John Vervaeke has called this The Meaning Crisis.

At its heart, it's a war being waged on our attention.

Our attention is fragmenting and degrading every single day without us realizing it.

I believe that in order to make it through the meaning crisis, we need to build a business that is in alignment with our purpose so that we channel our attention in intentional and meaningful ways.

What meaning actually is

Meaning arises when pieces of your life fit together coherently so that you can "see through them" and participate in reality

The three aspects of meaning are:

1. Coherence: things make sense. They fit together intelligibly.
2. Significance: Things matter deeply and have importance and weight to them. There's a sense of connection to what's good, beautiful, true, and real.
3. Purpose: Life has direction, and you're going somewhere. Your story is a part of a larger story.

Meaning isn't something you have — it's something you do. It's an active process of conforming yourself to the patterns of reality

It's letting reality transform you and participating in something larger than yourself.

Meaning emerges from your relationship with reality - not from facts or beliefs but from how you participate in the world. This is where business comes in. Business is all about caring about others enough to find solutions to their problems.

For your business to be successful, it needs to solve a problem others actually have. One that's so painful, they'd rather give you the money in their pocket to have you solve it with your product or service than keep it.

Business connects you with others; it leads you to participate in something larger than yourself.

​

My journey from academic prison to purposeful work allowed me to see patterns about how we find meaning in general.

Most people don't yet realize that you can make a living by doing things you care about.

You're no longer required to be shackled to the golden handcuffs of corporate life.

You don't need to go to a job you hate and do work that bores you half to death.

In fact, living a life disconnected from meaning and purpose makes everyone around you worse off.

You can make a living by focusing your attention on what you find meaningful.

What you don't want is to wake up ten years from now in a moment of illumination and ask "what happened to me…" as the blue light from your screens slowly recaptures your attention for more mind-numbing stimulation.

Your purpose requires

• Deep focus over shallow stimulation
• Self-knowledge over distraction
• Courage over cowardice

What most people overlook about their purpose is that there are two dimensions to it.

Only one of these dimensions changes over time.

The inner purpose will remain the same throughout your life.

Your inner purpose is waking up to who you essentially are in the depths of your being.

Becoming aware of this understanding—of the fact that you are the knowing that is knowing these words—can only, truly, be arrived at through direct experience.

Sure, you can read philosophy and learn from others. But, to not just know who you essentially but to feel it requires a deep exploration of your direct experience.

This is where a mentor or guide can add tremendous value to your life.

I'll offer that all human beings share the same inner purpose.

After receiving a glimpse of this transcendent understanding, the next step is embodiment.

Your inner purpose becomes a beacon with which you live your life.

Our outer purpose is different.

And varies.

The outer purpose is the unique vehicle or pathway with which we express our inner purpose.

You might have a proclivity toward truth, therefore, a career in STEM fields could be a great fit.

You might have a proclivity toward beauty, so you might become an artist or a poet.

You might have a proclivity toward love, so you might become a healer or bodyworker.

The inner purpose remains the same, but its outward manifestations will change based on the unique makeup of your body and mind, and conditioning.

Moreover, your outer purpose will evolve over time as you grow and level up.

There was a point in which I was in alignment with my outer purpose of being a scientist, and a time came when I grew beyond it, and a new layer of my purpose revealed itself to me.

This sign showed up as a loss of meaning and significance in my daily work.

The path to purpose is the path you carve out yourself.

In our modern times, what this looks like is starting your own business.

A business is the modern vehicle to purpose.

Why This Happened: Brief Historical Context

The meaning crisis stems from the death of a cosmic purpose.

During the pre-modern worldview, everything was imbued with purpose.

Our ancestors viewed fire as "wanting" to rise upward. Rocks "wanting" to return to earth, and human beings had a clear place in a purposeful cosmic order.

In this ancient worldview, everything in the universe had a place and moved toward its natural purpose.

What happened

Several world-destroying discoveries took this cosmic purpose away from us.

• From Galileo's discovery that things move not because of an inner purpose, but due to random external forces (inertial motion), to matter being viewed as inert and lifeless without any inherent direction or meaning.
• To the Darwinian insights of evolution by natural selection.
• Friedrich Nietzsche spotted this pattern centuries ago and proclaimed "The Death of God" would send humanity spiraling downward into the abyss of nihilism and meaninglessness.

As a result, human beings have become orphaned.

We went from being purposeful beings in a purposeful cosmos to being the only islands of purpose in an ocean of meaninglessness.

The core problem

There's been a consistent rise in anxiety, depression, and suicide in North America and Europe, all pointing to widespread loss of purpose.

The fundamental mismatch is that our minds are meaning-making machines that desperately seek purpose, narrative, and significance, yet science reveals that we inhabit a purposeless universe that's cold, indifferent, and mechanical.

This brings about a form of existential homelessness where we're unable to reconcile spiritual aspirations about meaning with our scientific lens and worldview.

The inevitable byproduct is the attempt to meet our existential needs through material acquisition.

When the universe has no purpose, our individual purpose feels arbitrary and lacks the substance that can anchor us and assist us in weathering the storms of life.

Business as a meaning-making vehicle

The way out of this meaning crisis and the rediscovery of your purpose is through personal responsibility.

It's about cultivating the personal authority needed to take meaning and purpose into your own hands.

This is where wisdom practices come in.

Mindfulness isn't just a way to alleviate your stress from work.

It's actually one of the antidotes to the meaning crisis itself.

Beyond mindfulness, contemplative traditions that induce higher states of consciousness, and the reconnection with community and ritual that provide wisdom and guidance (rather than information) are key aspects of escaping the meaning crisis.

This is why the quality of your attention is so important.

Your attention is being hijacked, and its theft is sending you straight into the abyss of nihilism and meaninglessness unless you do something about it.

You must take back your mind and seek depth and wisdom over distraction and cheap dopamine. Part of reclaiming personal authority is declaring what you will attend to.

Meaning isn't found in propositions about the universe - it's cultivated through transforming how we participate in reality.

The solution is to systematically cultivate the practices that generate wisdom, self-transcendence, and deepen our contact with reality

Practical first steps

This is why starting a business is the path to your purpose and to having a meaningful life.

A business forces you to place your attention on what matters to you rather than leaving it in the hands of others.

Starting a business is 80% psychological and 20% strategic

You must confront your self-imposed limiting beliefs, stories, unconscious patterns, and transcend your egoic self in order to create value for others.

Uncover limiting beliefs and learn to dissolve them.

Cultivate high-quality attention so that you focus on what matters.

Seek and join others in community to work toward a purpose greater than your ego's self-absorbed proclivities.

When you start a business, you are, by necessity, discovering and imposing your value hierarchy on the world.

Rather than consenting to one that is imposed on you.

Those are really the only two options.

You're either told what to care about—which by definition arises from what you're attending to.

Or, you assert your values on the world and intentionally extract purpose from it.

This is really about living from the inside-out rather than from the outside-in.

As Carl Jung says "You either tell the world who you are, or the world will tell you."

Where to go from here

The first step to take is to figure out what your purpose is. No matter what stage of life you're in right now, this video will guide you in uncovering your purpose.

From there, figuring out the pieces of starting your business will start to fall into place.

Click here to watch Uncover Your Purpose: https://awakenwithap.kit.com/3544e671ba

​

Peace,

-Alex

​