For most of my life, I thought of myself as a kind person.
I wanted a profession that helps people, so that desire led me to study psychology. I imagined myself supporting people through their inner struggles, helping them untangle trauma and move forward. Life, as it often does, led me down a different path: corporate roles, leadership positions, people-focused functions, and eventually coaching.
The pattern of my motivation, however, stayed the same.
At every step, I was helping someone – my colleagues, managers, teams, and clients. Even when I worked in core business operations, I translated everything into human terms. To me, business was never abstract. It was people building something for other people. Products were tools in human hands. Numbers were not the point – they were signals that I am doing meaningful work that creates value.
Signals answering very simple questions:
- Are we creating something meaningful?
- Does it genuinely help someone?
- Do people choose it, pay for it, and come back?
Everything else – ROI, P&L, LTV, NPS, EBITDA, churn – felt like a different language describing the same reality. Language that is necessary in business, but secondary in terms of real human-to-human meaning.
So what’s my point?
Lately, I find myself wanting to go one layer deeper. Past the language of purpose. Past the comforting narratives we tell ourselves about “making the world a better place.”
Why do we really do what we do?
Even when we say it’s for a higher purpose – creating value, improving lives, contributing to something good – how much of that is truly about others? And how much of it is about ourselves? About the need to feel meaningful, needed, and being seen as good. If helping others makes us feel whole, validated, or worthy, is that still purpose? Or is it a refined, socially acceptable form of egoism?
So here is my answer. Yes – there might be egoism at the root of my motivation. Helping others makes me feel fulfilled. Seeing my clients shift, grow, and step into something more aligned with who they are and their goals gives me a deep sense of satisfaction. I want more of that, and I don’t pretend otherwise. But this doesn’t make purpose meaningless. What matters is not whether our work satisfies us, but whether that satisfaction is a byproduct of real contribution rather than a substitute for it. For me, egoism becomes a problem only when we stop checking for our impact on others.
And even when I think of happiness as something we all long for, for me, it is not a simple pleasure or external validation. It is the quiet feeling of being in the right place, at the right time, doing work that genuinely makes me feel good. If that is egoistic, then I consciously choose this form of egoism.
