Stop Chasing Success. Start Designing a Life Worth Having

Imagine leading a company where people genuinely love coming to work. Where financial performance is strong not despite the investment in people, but because of it. Where success is measured not just in revenue, but in the quality of lives being built including your own.

This is not a fantasy. It is what the research shows. It is what I have witnessed in my own work over the past decade. And it is the heart of the conversation I recently had with Meghan French Dunbar, author of This Isn’t Working, former CEO of Conscious Company Media, and someone who has spent years talking to hundreds of leaders quietly building exactly this kind of organization.

What Meghan found in her research was both simple and profound. The leaders who built financially thriving companies while also flourishing themselves all shared one thing in common. They had replaced the organizing idea of “performance” with the organizing idea of “flourishing.” Not as a tagline. As a genuine operating system for how they led, how they managed, and how they defined success.

And here is the part that matters most: flourishing is not a soft metric. Oxford research shows that flourishing cultures generate 2-3.5% alpha above market returns. Barry Wehmiller, a ~$3.5 billion company, has succeeded through 80 acquisitions in a world where 90% of acquisitions fail to create value. The leaders who center flourishing are not trading profit for purpose. They are discovering that purpose is the engine of profit.

Meghan’s framework for what flourishing actually requires comes down to three pillars. And the key insight, the one that changes everything, is that you need all three working together.

Pillar One: Purpose

Purpose is the foundation. It is the reason you get out of bed that goes beyond a paycheck or a title. And while it has become something of a mainstream conversation in leadership circles, Simon Sinek’s Start With Why brought it into the boardroom, Meghan’s research confirms what I see in my own work: most people still do not feel it at work.

That is a massive opportunity.

When people find genuine meaning in what they do, engagement rises, creativity opens up, and discretionary effort, the kind you cannot mandate, flows naturally. Purpose is not optional. It is the precondition for everything else.

But here is the truth I share with every leader I work with: purpose alone will eventually hollow you out. I have seen it in not-for-profits where 90% of employees find deep meaning in their mission, and yet burnout is rampant. Meaning is necessary, but it is not sufficient. It needs to be held alongside growth and quality of life, or it quietly consumes the very people who care most.

Actions you can take:

• Write down in one sentence why the work you do matters beyond the revenue it generates. If it takes you more than five minutes, that is useful information.
• In your next team meeting, ask each person: what part of our work gives you the most energy? Listen for where purpose is alive and where it has gone quiet.
• If you lead an organization, audit whether your company’s stated purpose shows up in the day-to-day decisions people make, or whether it lives only on the website.

Pillar Two: Expansion

The second pillar is what Meghan calls expansion and it is the one most organizations underinvest in. Expansion is about continual growth, mastery, and the freedom to follow curiosity over obligation.

The research on intrinsic motivation is clear. The things that bring us genuine, lasting satisfaction are not the external rewards, the awards, the titles, the bonuses. They are the internal ones: the sense of getting better at something, of being challenged in a way that stretches us, of doing work we are genuinely interested in. Meghan found that every flourishing leader she studied was deeply committed to this, for themselves and for the people around them.

This is also about autonomy. When people are stripped of their voice, their agency, their ability to shape how they work, something fundamental breaks. The most engaged employees are not necessarily the highest paid. They are the ones who feel trusted, heard, and given room to grow.

As a leader, your job is not just to deliver results. It is to expand the people in your care, to treat every person on your team as someone with leadership potential worth developing.

Actions you can take:

• Ask yourself: when did I last learn something that genuinely excited me? If you cannot remember, that is the first place to look.
• Have a conversation with each of your direct reports about where they want to grow — not just in their current role, but across the organization. What are they curious about? What would they try if they felt safe to explore?
• Create one concrete opportunity this quarter for someone on your team to step into a stretch assignment, a new skill, or a cross-functional project they chose rather than were assigned.

Pillar Three: Quality of Life

This is the pillar that leaders sacrifice first. And it is the one that, when neglected long enough, takes everything else down with it.

Quality of life, in Meghan’s framework, is built from four elements: health, joy, connection, and a deep sense of values alignment. These are not luxuries to pursue once the work is done. They are the conditions under which sustainable, excellent work becomes possible.

Meghan is candid about her own story here. She built Conscious Company Magazine from a crowdfunded experiment to a company she sold in 2017. She never saw her friends. She worked nights and weekends. She completely ignored her physical and mental health. She was achieving everything on the outside while depleting everything on the inside. The burnout that followed was not a surprise in retrospect, it was the inevitable outcome of treating quality of life as optional.

The leaders Meghan most admires made a different choice. They scheduled joy. They defined what “enough” looked like, for their finances, their time, their ambition, and they protected that threshold. They wrote ideal life statements and used them as a compass when the pull toward more became loud.

I think about this in my own life. I came to this work after nearly 30 years of chasing a version of success that was never really mine. What changed everything was learning that quality of life is not the reward at the end of the journey. It is how you travel.

Actions you can take:

• Make a list of what genuinely brings you joy, not what you think should bring you joy, but what actually lights you up. Then look at your calendar. How much of it is there?
• Define your “enough.” What does a thriving life actually require, financially, professionally, relationally? When you know the number, you can make decisions from clarity instead of anxiety.
• Write a one-page ideal life statement. Not a career plan. A life plan. Describe how you want to spend your time, who you want to be with, what you want to be learning and building. Pin it somewhere visible. Let it be the thing that pulls you forward.

Flourishing Is the Strategy

Flourishing is not a trade-off with performance. It is the precondition for it.

When people have purpose, they bring discretionary effort. When they have room to expand, they bring creativity and ownership. When they have quality of life, they show up sustainably, at their best, for the long game.

The companies proving this are not small experiments at the margins. They are ~$3.5 billion manufacturers, near-billion-dollar food and beverage companies, and global private equity firms making employee ownership a stated strategic goal. The movement is real and it is growing.

The question is not whether this is possible. It is whether you are willing to make flourishing, yours and your people’s, the organizing principle of how you lead.

Start with one pillar. Strengthen it. Then let the others follow. That is how a flourishing culture gets built, not in a single all-hands meeting, but in the daily choices of leaders who have decided that this is what success actually means.

If this article sparks something for you, I would like to hear what resonated. And if you want to explore what this could look like inside your organization, reach out. This work is possible.

You can hear our full conversation, including remarkable case studies of companies living these principles, on the Flourishing Edge podcast.

Learn more about Meghan French Dunbar on LinkedIn.

Listen to the podcast with Ashish and Meghan French Dunbar below, You can also listen on Apple Podcasts.

Access and subscribe to all of the episodes of the Flourishing Edge Podcast here.

Make Flourishing Your Competitive Edge.