Purpose

There's a particular kind of founder I meet a lot. Sharp, driven, has built something real. And when I ask them why they do it — not the polished investor version, the real one — they go quiet. Or they reach for something they read in a book. An affirmation. A mission statement that three people in a meeting room argued over until it meant nothing.

That always tells me the same thing. They've been trying to choose a purpose. And purpose can't be chosen. It can only be remembered.

This is the second section of The Success Framework, and it sits exactly where it does for a reason. First we did Values — the foundation, the genuine filter, the non-negotiables of who you are. Now we build on that with Purpose: the why. If Values is who you are, Purpose is what you're here to do. And you can't do this work honestly until your values have surfaced first. Try to name your purpose before you know your values, and you'll write something aspirational with nothing underneath it. Beautiful sentence. No evidence.

So let me show you how I actually do this — and I'll warn you now, it doesn't start where you'd expect.

Purpose is found in stories, not in introspection

Most people, when they want to find their purpose, sit down and think hard about it. They stare at the ceiling. They journal. They ask themselves big abstract questions and wait for a big abstract answer.

It doesn't work. Or rather, it produces words that sound good and that you don't actually recognise as yours.

Here's my belief, and I've watched it hold true running this process with founders and leaders over and over: your purpose is already present in all of your history. It's the through-line running underneath the stories you already tell about your own life. You don't need to invent it. You need to go and collect the evidence, lay it out, and notice what keeps showing up.

So the route in isn't think about your purpose. The route in is: write your stories, find the themes, and let your purpose surface from underneath them.

And these stories are pure gold for more than just this exercise. This is the part that was honestly lost on me until I'd filmed a lot more of the framework — the stories you collect here are infinitely reusable. They become your marketing. Your brand. The way you connect with staff and the people you'll one day hire. The content you'll want to make. You're not just doing a worksheet here. You're building a reservoir you'll draw from for years.

The four kinds of story — and why you can't skip the dark ones

We collect stories across two lives — your personal life and your career — and within each, we go after four kinds:

- Wins. Yours. Other people's that you were part of. Wins for your community. The successes you're genuinely proud of. - Losses. Things you regret. Things that were done to you. And — this is the one people flinch at — things you did to others. - Change. Change that was forced on you. Change you chose. Change you instigated. - Tension. A clash of values. Friction with friends, family, colleagues, customers. Tension in your environment, where you live, how you work.

Both lives. All four kinds. No skipping.

And I'll be straight with you about why. The natural instinct is to write the wins and quietly leave out the losses and the tension. To sanitise it. But the moment you do that, you hide the very themes you're hunting for. I've stuffed up in my career. I've created losses for other people. I've been a great person, and I've been a genuinely rubbish one at times. The themes that actually define me — they're in those stories too. Maybe especially in those.

So candid honesty is your friend here. Nobody else needs to read this. It's just you. And I promise you — an honest, authentic person builds a better business, for their customers, their staff, and themselves. The more truth and the more courage you bring to this, the better what comes out the other side.

A worked example: the book fair and the tumour

Let me give you two of my own, because abstract instructions only get you so far.

The first one's a career win, and it goes back to school. In Year 11 and 12 I never once sat in a business class. Instead I had a teacher who actually got who I was — he knew that making me do paperwork about business would never get a result out of me. So he set up a scenario where I could just be an entrepreneur. And what I built was the Canberra Antique and Rare Book Fair. We did the flyers, the advertising, got on local ABC radio talking about rare books, had crowds turn up. We made money for the sellers, money on the door, money for the school — I even ended up with some rare books that had cash tucked in the back to pay for a thing that was never meant to make a cent.

What's the point of that story? Simple. I'm entrepreneurial at my core. It was clear and present that early. That's a thread I can use to understand my own identity — and to tell people what matters to me.

The second one is harder, and I nearly didn't share it. Very young, I found out I had a tumour. We caught it early — but then I flew to Vietnam for work for six weeks, and the whole time the specialist results hadn't come back. Every single day, every minute, there was this impending fear of cancer sitting over me. And the thing is: I kept going. I called my partner. I did the work. I exercised. I got the job done with that fear boring into me the entire time. Came home, found out it had been a tumour, they'd taken it out, I was fine.

What do you infer from that story? Resilience. The ability to do the work under pressure. The ability to keep going when there is genuinely no option to stop.

See what's happening? I'm not deciding I'm resilient and entrepreneurial. I'm reading it off the evidence of stories I already lived. That's the whole game.

Pulling the themes out

Once you've got your stories down — and you might have ten, twenty, more — you go back through them with three lenses:

- Threads — the things you most easily remember about your past. Sport, adventures, starting little businesses, writing, photography. Whatever yours are. - Experiences — the experiences that come straight to mind when you think about your life. - Influencers — the people who shaped who you are. For me that's Bernard, an early teacher who taught me it was alright to write poetry. My dad, who didn't care what you called him as long as the job got done. Robert Greene through his books.

Then you do the synthesis. You go through everything you've written and you circle the themes that keep repeating — the ones that show up across both lives and through all three lenses. Those are the load-bearing ones. You re-list them fresh.

And here's a step people miss: some of those themes are actually values — ones that didn't make your top ten. In my stories there was stuff about standing up to bullies, about being principled — that's Justice. Entrepreneurial, hungry to learn — that's Wisdom. Easy to get on with, patient — Temperance. Feed those back into your Values list. Purpose and Values aren't sequential-and-done. They're paired. Purpose surfaces the values you missed.

Writing the statement — and the equation underneath it all

Now you write the thing. And there's a fixed grammar to it, because the grammar forces honesty:

> "My purpose is to ______, so that ______."

or

> "My purpose is to ______, that allows/enables others to ______."

That second half is non-negotiable. A purpose without a beneficiary is just a hobby. (Simon Sinek's Finding Your Why is excellent on this.)

Here's mine, the one I'm living right now as I write this: my purpose is to help businesses, entrepreneurs and driven individuals find out who they are, what they're here to do, and how to get there. And the test of a real purpose statement is this — once you've nailed it, you should be able to see it present in your day-to-day work, whether the day's been brilliant or rubbish. It's always there.

Don't expect perfection on the first pass. Mine took many goes. Progress, not perfection — get words on paper, then iterate.

And remember the structure underneath all of this. Values plus Purpose feeds Vision. V + P = V. Without doing this work honestly, your Vision in the next section isn't a vision at all — it's just a fantasy, with nothing real holding it up. This is the foundation. Everything else gets built from here.

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If you've read this far, you already know the difference between a purpose someone handed you and one you dug out of your own history. The second kind is the only kind worth having — and it's quietly sitting in stories you've never bothered to write down.

If you want to go deeper — the full elicitations, the worksheets, and the rest of the framework that turns this into a real direction for your business — that's what I'm building here. Join the list, and I'll walk you through it, section by section. No hard sell. Just the work, in the right order.

See you in Vision.