Weekly Coaching: in search of meaning
Week 3: Day 16 of a countdown of 365 to leave the corporate life
Am I Losing Myself?
Lately, I’ve been asking myself if I’m losing my way. If, in focusing so much on the end goal—leaving corporate life behind—I’ve started to forget why I care about leaving in the first place. Am I actually moving toward something meaningful? Or am I just setting myself up to repeat the same mistakes, trapping myself in a different kind of rat race?
So I’ve been thinking about meaning. Two people have deeply shaped my perspective on purpose:
1️⃣ Viktor Frankl—psychiatrist, Holocaust survivor, and author of Man’s Search for Meaning.
2️⃣ My father, whose story I’ll share another day.
Frankl believed that humans can endure almost anything if they have a strong enough “why” to live for. He knew this better than anyone. In the concentration camps, he had no control over his suffering—but he could choose how to make sense of it. That was his freedom, and that’s what allowed him to survive.
But how do we find meaning? Frankl argued that meaning isn’t something we passively discover—it’s something we create through our actions, attitudes, and choices.
Three Paths to Meaning
🔹 Work (Creativity & Accomplishment)
Meaning comes from creating, building, and contributing to something larger than yourself. It’s not about having a job—it’s about doing work that aligns with what you care about.
🔹 Love & Relationships
Deep connections make life meaningful. Frankl survived the camps by imagining conversations with his wife, holding onto love even when he didn’t know if she was alive.
🔹 Suffering with Purpose
If suffering is unavoidable, we can give it meaning by learning, growing, and enduring with dignity. Instead of asking “Why me?”, ask “How can I use this?”
I hope I’m not turning this newsletter into a self-help book or, worse, butchering Frankl’s work. But I do believe he’s right: to live at peace with ourselves, we need to live with purpose. And that kind of clarity doesn’t just arrive one day—it’s something we discover by taking action, day after day.
So, knowing this, I did what any rational person would do next: I asked my career coach—dear ChatGPT—to channel Frankl for a minute and coach me.
My Frankl Truth
1️⃣ You have everything you need to leave corporate life, but you hesitate, waiting for a risk-free exit that will never come. “Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response.”
2️⃣ You keep searching for meaning inside work, but meaning is something you bring to work, not something work gives you. “What is to give light must endure burning.”
3️⃣ Your fear of losing security is keeping you small, but security is an illusion—resilience is real. “Those who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear almost any ‘how.’”
This hit hard. Hard enough that I had to sit with it for a bit before writing this, which is why I’m sending this a day later than planned (and, well, I did promise myself I’d take things slower, didn’t I?).
We closed the conversation with one last question:
👉 What is the best next action I can take?
The answer: Commit to a date to leave corporate life, stop waiting for validation before acting, and measure success by meaning, not safety.
And then came this quote, which hit even harder—especially because this newsletter started as my first step toward change after a health scare that made me feel like I’m living on borrowed time:
“Live as if you were living a second time, and as though you had acted wrongly the first time.”
Progress Update
This conversation made me rethink everything—including the goals I set for this month. Do they truly help me move toward meaning? I don’t know. But I do know that taking action is the only way to find out. So I’ll stick with the plan.
📌 Goal 1: Get to 50 Substack subscribers → 19 of you are here with me on this journey. Thank you!
📌 Goal 2: Do 3 financial freedom coaching sessions → No progress yet (might have been slightly distracted by the idea of celebrating a slower way of life).
📌 New Goal: Countdown to leaving corporate life: 349 days to go.
And about my father—I’ll save his story for another day. What I can say is that before this whole millennial crisis of meaning at work even existed, my father was already living his purpose. He has always been mission-driven, always true to his values, and when life required it, he changed everything to stay aligned with them.
Watching him build an extraordinary career in service to others has shaped my own view of what a meaningful life looks like.
And just like Frankl said, my father showed me that “Those who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear almost any ‘how.’”
Final Thoughts
This is not about leaving corporate life for the sake of leaving. It’s about building a life I won’t regret living twice. I think I’m on track :)
🚀 349 days to go.