Best-selling author Dan Goleman examines what happens when high-powered leaders lose their reason for working.
Vinay Hiremath, co-founder of the tech company Loom, is 32 years old and never has to work again. After selling Loom for $975 million, Hiremath wrote a blog post that begins, “I am rich and have no idea what to do with my life.” In it, he describes his journey with Loom, his choice to walk away from a $60-million paycheck with Atlassian, and the unsureness he has about who he is and what he wants.
“After selling my company, I find myself in the totally unrelatable position of never having to work again,” he writes. “Everything feels like a side quest, but not in an inspiring way. I don’t have the same base desires driving me to make money or gain status. I have infinite freedom, yet I don’t know what to do with it, and, honestly, I’m not the most optimistic about life.”
After it was shared on social media, the post was viewed more than 500,000 times. While the piece received all sorts of responses, it’s an honest first-person look into an underdiscussed phenomenon: the purposelessness many founders feel once their company is sold. Experts in personal finance say that this experience—of letting go of an organization and achieving financial freedom—commonly leads to a deeper search for what matters.
“When we have more money than we could ever spend, most people quit their job — but the job provides many of us with structure, a sense of purpose, and a great deal of our social interaction,” explains financial advisor Robert Pagliarini, the author of a book on sudden wealth. “Remove this, and it leaves a big void.”
Hiremath’s blog post doesn’t just unpack his loss of a sense of structure or his achieving of a goal; it speaks to the deeper ways in which Loom became his identity. He isn’t just asking himself “What do I do now?” He is asking himself, “Who am I, if I am not invested in making Loom succeed?”
Dr. Laurie Santos, one of the top academic researchers of happiness, has said it again and again. Feeling joy over the long term doesn’t depend on our bank account, physical appearance, or material possessions. How we feel about our lives and our place within them is a result of strong relationships, a sense of purpose, and activities that challenge us and motivate us to grow.
On one level, having a sense of purpose is about engaging meaningfully with the outside world—the people, causes, and missions that motivate us beyond our personal gain. But on another level, it’s hard to do this without knowing what we fundamentally care about—the things that inspire us and map to our deepest core values
To find these things—the issues, efforts, and causes that inspire us to connect to something bigger—people need to take what Charlotte Burgess-Auburn calls an “inner road trip.” In this road trip, goals are the destination; values are the car; ethics are the steering wheel; and biases are the ruts in the road. Burgess-Auburn talks about this road trip in her work on developing a “personal manifesto,” a statement of purpose combined with a script for action. She focuses less on the idea of rallying others around a cause than on rallying ourselves around our own inner compass.
“We are currently in the middle of a maelstrom of being recruited by everyone at every moment,” she said in a 2023 interview. “Anybody with a telephone in their pocket is constantly being recruited… And I think we need to spend some time recruiting ourselves to our own cause.”
Hiremath illustrates this beautifully when he shares the ways in which he tried to give his attention to agendas and purposes that were not actually his own.
“The immediate two weeks after leaving an intense 10-year journey, I did what any healthy person does and met with over seventy investors and founders in robotics… I wanted to throw myself into giving computers arms and legs,” he writes. “At the end of the two weeks, I left feeling deflated and foolish. I didn’t want to start a robotics company. The only thing that seemed interesting to me was humanoids.”
Charlotte Burgess-Auburn captures Hiremath’s experience in one simple statement—one almost every leader and founder should reflect on: “If you’re not living life according to your own values, you’re most likely living them according to someone else’s.”
Co-written by Elizabeth Solomon
Daniel Goleman is author of the international best-seller Emotional Intelligence and Optimal: How to Sustain Personal and Organizational Excellence Every Day. He is a regular contributor to Korn Ferry.Â
Click here to learn more about Daniel Goleman’s Building Blocks of Emotional Intelligence. Â
This article appeared on Korn Ferry.
