Finding Purpose Beyond Wealth: Key Insights from Dr. Jordan Grumet

Dr. Jordan Grumet is the author of “The Purpose Code” and brings a unique perspective to the discussion of purpose and wealth. After losing his father unexpectedly, Jordan found his path to medicine, which eventually led to his work as a hospice doctor. This personal and professional experience has shaped his views on what truly matters in life. In “The Purpose Code,” Dr. Grumet challenges us to rethink how we approach purpose—not as a measurable goal to achieve, but as something we create intentionally, even when the payoff isn’t immediate or obvious.

Q&A with Dr. Jordan Grumet

QUESTION: Your book highlights the idea that purpose isn’t something we find, but something we create. Julia Child’s story in your book is a perfect example of someone who took a leap of faith with no guarantee of success. How can we as financial professionals help clients embrace a similar risk of pursuing their passion when the immediate ROI isn’t clear, but the potential for a meaningful life is really huge? In other words, how can we balance encouraging clients and ourselves to follow our passions with the reality we live in of financial security?

JORDAN: We have to lower the stakes. The problem is we all think it’s this all or nothing proposition and your purpose has to be this really big, audacious thing that’s not only going to provide for your family and bring you all sorts of wealth, but also make you bubbling over with happiness. I don’t think that’s the way it is.

A lot of us can have jobs that don’t fill us up, and start first by bringing in just some purposeful activities on nights, weekends, lunch breaks. The idea that purpose can be something small, something you enjoy, that lights you up, is kind of the beginning place, and then we can see what happens.

Many people feel it has to be this big, audacious thing, so they don’t even try in the first place. But when we define it as something much smaller that you enjoy the process of doing, it’s really easy to spend 30 minutes reading a blog about something that lights you up, or take a nice long walk during your lunch break, or do something at home at night, maybe you like knitting or crocheting. All these little things are where you start with purpose.

Now here’s what’s really cool about that: when you start building a life of purpose, even around these small things, sometimes you do find that you can start integrating them into the rest of your life.

A perfect example is I had a friend who worked in corporate America, and she didn’t love her job, but she did love studying this idea of women’s place in corporate America. It was very important to her. In fact, she started researching it and blogging about it because it was something that lit her up and it was just a little thing. She started a little bit of purpose in her life, but she got really good at it and got a lot of traction. Eventually, she started doing programs for her work. She did it for free. It was just something she was interested in. But these were so successful that eventually her company decided to make her part time at her current job, which she didn’t love very much, and had her work the other 50% of her time building these programs, something she did love.

QUESTION: I think that’s the piece that I sort of want to highlight. We can be gracious oftentimes towards examples where a person invests their time in their passion or in their pursuit, thinking that it doesn’t take anything from them. But as soon as there’s a decision to invest money into a purpose or a passion, there’s a question about, “Well, what do you get in return?” And there needs to be this financial transaction to the purpose. Could you speak to that?

JORDAN: Isn’t that really funny? When we look at life, time is our most valuable resource and we have no control over it. You can’t buy it, you can’t sell it, you can’t change it. In fact, the whole point of building wealth is so you can control what activities you do as time passes.

So what you were just saying is the exact opposite. People say, “Oh, I’ll spend time doing something I don’t like doing if there’s an ROI, but I don’t want to spend money.” It should be the exact opposite. We should be using our money to help us better utilize our time.

I always ask people, “What does winning the game look like to you?” To me, it looks like spending as much time as I can doing things that feel purposeful, that light me up, and getting rid of as many things I loathe as possible. Money is a great tool to help you do that. If you have money, you can use that money to hire someone to clean your house so your weekends aren’t spent cleaning your house, and you have that time to do something more purposeful, or you can take that money and take a vacation, because that’s purposeful and meaningful to you.

So money does serve you. But the mistake many people make is that either money is the goal—and it isn’t, it’s just a tool—or thinking it’s the only tool. We have all sorts of other tools besides money. You can use things like your youth, your energy, your community, your passions and skills. Those are also tools that we can use to live a purposeful life, even in the absence of money.

QUESTION: I think about our Michigan house, for example, which I’ve shared a little bit about on this podcast. We live in Phoenix, Arizona for most of the year, but we bought a house in Michigan a number of years ago on a lake. We go there and spend the summers. We get out of the heat of Phoenix, and we go there as a family. One question I get all the time from other financial professionals is whether I’m renting it out, or how I am making money from that decision or from that asset. We truly made that very big life decision for gains such as quality time as a family, building memories, the idea of play and adventure, because we go out on the lake and on the boat, and we act silly, and we go tubing and ride our bikes. And really, just slowing down our pace of life, enjoying the simple things, building community, building connection there, and not at all for financial gain. It actually felt like fulfilling a purpose that we have of fostering family relationships and values as a family. It’s amazing to me how often financial professionals see it as such a cost, though, and I think these benefits are often immeasurable. Pursuing our purpose has such immeasurable gains, it feels priceless in a lot of ways.

JORDAN: It’s funny, because we’re comfortable with money, because you can measure it. So I would say this: let’s start measuring your purpose. Flip open your calendar app and start looking at how you’re spending your time most of your day, and look at everything that’s on your calendar, and start tallying up. Is that something that’s purposeful, that lights me up, or is that something I have to do or something I loathe? You can literally measure how much purpose you’re living by just looking at your calendar every week. It’s actually very measurable.

I think people have difficulty defining what purpose is, and because of that, they don’t know how to measure it, whereas I think it’s very simple. Purpose is doing those activities in the present and future that light us up. So you can look at your calendar for next week and say, “How many of these things light me up, are interesting or exciting to me, and how many aren’t?” You could do that every year and start saying, “Am I getting better? Am I improving? Is my calendar in my 40s better than my calendar was in my 30s?” I think it’s a lot more measurable than people think.

QUESTION: I do agree with that, and I think that’s why I wanted to talk about it. Money is so measurable that as financial professionals, I think we rely on it so heavily, and it is something that we can easily quantify and hold on to. I really want this conversation to be where we are encouraging financial professionals—I’m not saying throw caution to the wind here—but I do think that there is this idea that “smart” decisions are financially smart, oftentimes. I think having this exploration of different ways that we can pursue our purpose, how can we quantify that? How can we encourage our clients to do that? You just gave a great example of having our clients look at their calendar. Maybe we don’t have a lot of extra money for any number of reasons, but we can still help them improve their quality of life, feel fulfillment and satisfaction just from everyday things that cost no money and quantify it for them, by looking at their calendar or thinking about what they’re grateful for before bed. It’s not one or the other. It’s not financial gain while we sacrifice all of these other things.

JORDAN: I’m a hospice doctor. I sit with people at the end of life, and not a single one of them says on their deathbed, “You know, I really wanted to get to a net worth of $1.5 million and I only got to 1 million, and I’m so upset.” Not a single one says, “I wish I worked more nights or weekends.” Not a single one says, “I really wasn’t aware enough of opportunity cost.”

They all say the same things. If they have regret, they say, “I really regret that I never had the energy, courage or time to…” and then they talk about an experience, a hobby, some type of thing that was deeply important to them. They never talk about money.

So if we make this a conversation about money and only about money, we’re really missing the point. Money is a great tool to live the life you want to live. We need financial coaches. We need to help people live these great lives. But money is a conduit, and once we start making it a goal as opposed to just a conduit, I think we start losing sight of what’s important.

QUESTION: I completely agree with you. It’s one of the reasons I talk all the time about coaching the whole person. Money is one element of that, but it’s just one small piece of it. So many other important factors about a decision need to be weighed when they’re making a financial decision. A decision might cost them more money, but they gain in so many other ways that are much more worthwhile for them.

Now, you write in the book about the anxiety that can come from chasing your purpose. As financial coaches, we often are goal oriented. We talk with our clients about what they want to do next, which is why I want to highlight this, because I do think there’s a delicate dance here that we need to take with our clients and also with ourselves. How do you think this ties into the fear of pursuing our purpose in a way that maybe we are looking for guarantees, or looking for tangible outcomes when we can’t see all of those intangible benefits that come from pursuing our purpose?

JORDAN: I think we live in a very goal-oriented society. I break down purpose into “big P” purpose and “little P” purpose. Big P purpose is often associated with anxiety. In fact, studies show that 91% of people at some point in life get what’s called purpose anxiety, this idea that trying to find their purpose causes them to be stressed out and frustrated and even depressed. I think it’s very much related to what I call big P purpose.

Big P purpose is very goal oriented. Because we live in America especially, we tend to have big, audacious goals. So it’s “if you can dream it, you can build it.” People have these big goals like a really high net worth or a seven-figure business or travel around the world, or wearing the nicest clothes, or six-pack abs, whatever it is. Usually they’re these big, outsized dreams.

The problem with that kind of purpose is it’s very hard to achieve. Not everyone can be a billionaire, not everyone can become president, not everyone can cure cancer. If that’s your version of purpose, it tends to be an all-or-nothing proposition, and most people fail. So it’s very scarcity-mindset oriented.

What I talk about is little P purpose, which is not goal oriented, it’s process oriented. It’s more about doing the things that light you up, that you’re excited about doing. So when we have that conversation about return on investment, it’s not really a conversation when it comes to little P purpose, because really the only return on investment is you enjoy what you’re doing at the moment. Most of the time that doesn’t take a lot of money. Even if it does take money, you realize fairly quickly whether this is lighting you up and this is fun, or it isn’t, and then you stop investing in that thing.

The worry about tangible gains or benefits really crystallizes down into: am I doing things that light me up or not? And it’s pretty apparent.

QUESTION: This is a nuanced conversation. When we’re meeting with clients, especially newer coaches and financial professionals, they don’t always realize that so much of where their value can come from is if their client just felt better, or they helped their client discover a new process that they can enjoy in their day, or a step that they feel grateful for, or an element of their life that they truly feel enthusiasm for. It’s not from “here’s how you save $5 on this bill.”

I remember when I was reading this portion of your book, I felt like it truly described, even though I couldn’t have articulated it at the time, why we decided to spend the summers in Michigan years ago. I go away for the summers and I have no goal. Every day I want to spend time in nature. It’s really about being very present in the moment. I remember the first summer that I did it, it felt like I was doing it because I wanted to see if I really could do it. I had gotten into that mindset of pursuing big P purpose and wondering, can I live a slow life? Would I wake up feeling motivated?

Would I feel enjoyment for my life? I actually found greater pleasure from my life by pursuing small p purpose. As I was reading that part of your book, I thought it completely resonated for me personally.

JORDAN: When talking about big P purpose, especially when coaches are talking to their clients about their monetary needs and big P purpose, it’s a really good time to ask two questions: “why” and “what.” Why? When people ask about big P purpose: “Why? I want to have a million dollars.” “Why?” “So I don’t have to work anymore.” “And why don’t you want to work anymore?” “Because I want to x.” When you really get down to the why, you can start asking the what question, which is, “What can we do to help you do that now, even as we’re building a stable financial framework?”

A lot of people don’t realize that that big goal often speaks more to something that they could start integrating into their life now, if they were willing to think about it that way. When you start realizing, “Hey, I can build a stable financial framework, but my version of purpose doesn’t have to rely on it,” life becomes a lot easier. Instead of saying, “I’m going to work for the next 10 or 15 years, and then I’ll start pursuing purpose,” you start thinking, “How can I integrate that into my life now?”

Trust me, my dad died when he was 40. A lot of people don’t even get the extra time they think they’re going to have. So if you’re thinking, “I’m gonna wait for 10 years to live my life,” you may find that you don’t have that long. I know that’s a morbid way to look at it, but we want to enjoy life today as well as tomorrow. That’s why we want to start thinking about these purposeful activities and figure out the what and the why. Why do I want all this money, or why do I have this big, audacious goal, and how can I get there without necessarily having to accomplish all those very difficult things?

QUESTION: When a new client comes to us, we have them fill out a survey or questionnaire, and we ask them what’s a financial goal they have. It’s usually something like become debt free, or pay off my house, or max out my 401K—their big P purpose for this situation. Then we ask them why they want that, or what would be different about their life, or how would they feel if they did that. They describe a whole slew of things, which after reading your book, I see as their little P purpose.

The cool thing is that we have always done this really well. I always say, “How can we achieve these smaller things that they describe right now?” We don’t always have to wait. A lot of times clients come to us and they think that they need to follow a sequence: A then B. We’re always thinking about how can it be B then A, or how can A and B come together and be happening in tandem?

JORDAN: A lot of these things don’t actually have to do with money. Some people say, “So I can travel,” and you ask, “Why do you want to travel?” They say, “Because I like to see new places, and I like to meet new people.” But you can do that where you live now.

Don’t get me wrong, as the finances get better, you’re also going to want to travel, etc., but you can explore different areas in your city. You can meet different people in different cultures in all sorts of ways. What you’re really trying to say is, “I want to be the kind of person who does these things,” but a lot of times you can start doing these things and be that person even before you have the money. So the money can support some of those things. But really the transition is you want to become the person, not buy the thing. It’s becoming the person. And I try to convince people you can become the person even before you have the money to spend on it.

QUESTION: I think you’re right when you describe the achievement treadmill. It’s a perfect example of, if we allow the client to buy into this idea that they need to achieve that before all of these other things can happen, it doesn’t happen that way oftentimes. Then they think of the next achievement they need to have in order to get the small p benefits. As coaches, it’s incredibly important for us to be aware of these patterns that people can find themselves in that don’t always serve them. It’s not about one way or the other. It’s about different times of our life, doing it in different ways to help us feel satisfied and fulfilled today while we’re pursuing our goals.

JORDAN: One thing about the achievement treadmill, which I think we probably see a lot as financial coaches, is there are a lot of people who have these big audacious goals for no other reason than it’s a big audacious goal. “I want this much money, or I want this much passive income, or I want this many rental properties.” When you get down to it and ask, “What will that do for you? How will that make your life better?” they’ll say, “Then I’ll be happy because I have these things.” And I ask, “But what will that do for you?”

A lot of times, people don’t have the answers, and the reason is they’re trying to prove their sense of worthiness or enoughness through these accomplishments. But the problem is, if you don’t feel worthy enough on the inside, having all these extra things will make you happy for a few minutes, and then you double down and think, “I still don’t feel worthy. I still don’t feel enough. I thought these things would make me feel enough, but now that I have them, it’s wearing off very quickly.” So then they double down, but they find themselves grinding away doing things they don’t like to achieve these goals that don’t make them happy for very long.

That’s a deeper issue. That’s more an issue of what makes you feel enough in this world and why don’t you feel enough, because monetary gains aren’t going to fix that problem.

QUESTION: This is where pressuring our clients to have a goal that they don’t have can be so dangerous and damaging. I think about the big, hairy audacious goal that I have right now, which is actually a goal that people have told me I should have for years. I kept saying no, I don’t want that. I truly was not interested for years and years. Then I’ve had a couple of years where I really didn’t have a big, audacious goal for myself, and I loved it. It was totally fine. Then just through some reflection over the past six months, and really giving myself time and space and thinking about what is next for us, my goal now is something that I feel excited for and it also doesn’t feel necessary—if I don’t achieve it, my life is still wonderful and amazing exactly as it is.

JORDAN: I have nothing wrong with goals. People think I’m anti-goal, but I have big audacious goals all the time. I’m not anti-goal. The problem with big P purpose is the goal becomes the “why” for doing things you don’t like doing.

I’ll give you a great example. I love podcasting because I love sitting behind a mic and interviewing people. But if I had the big, audacious goal of having a million downloads a month, that’s fine. But when it stops being fine is when I start getting anxious because I’m not getting there. So I start doing TikTok and Instagram videos, which I hate doing, and I start spending all my time on social media, which I hate being on, in order to achieve that goal. That’s when it becomes a problem.

But if I have a healthy version of this big, audacious goal—I want a million downloads a month—but I love what I’m doing in service of that goal, and I love the process, then that goal is fine. If I meet that goal, great. If I don’t meet that goal, I kind of still love what I’m doing in service of that process. So it’s time well spent.

So I’m fine having big audacious goals, but I tell people, we have to be a little bit more goal agnostic, not go phobic, not afraid of goals, but goal agnostic. Whether you reach it or not is not nearly as important as whether you enjoy the things you do in service of that goal.

QUESTION: I love that. Often our clients are pursuing a goal that could take years to achieve, so it’s about going about it in a way that is enjoyable, enjoying the journey, and appreciating your life in the process. One part of my business that I’m most proud of is that our clients are not miserable in pursuit of their financial goals. If they want to get out of debt, that’s fine, but they’re probably enjoying that journey.

I give this example because I think getting out of debt is often portrayed as “hunker down, sacrifice everything”—that’s how the messaging around that is so pervasive. And that is just not our approach at all. Does it take a little longer sometimes? Sure, but it’s just because our clients are multi-dimensional human beings, and they have other parts of their life that they are enjoying and pursuing at the exact same time that they’re pursuing a financial goal as well.

JORDAN: The downside is burnout. If you have a big audacious goal and you are grinding away doing things you don’t like long-term to get there, you’re gonna burn out. That’s what happened to me. I didn’t love doctoring. I thought I was going to save the world, and I was going to make up for the fact that my father cosmically died by taking on his version of purpose. Then I became a doctor and realized I can’t save the world. It’s just too hard, and I couldn’t cosmically make up for my father dying because he was still gone, even after I became a doctor—it didn’t fix the problem.

Burnout was very real because I was working at something that was really hard, that wasn’t really fulfilling my sense of purpose. It was more a big, audacious purpose, which wasn’t making me happy. So it was really hard to continue.

We want people to have career longevity. You and I both know the biggest engine to having wealth is actually being able to make money. If you have a client who loves what they do and they make money at it, you’re like, “Fine, we can invest it. We can do all these things.” You are the biggest engine of your wealth building because you love doing this activity—it’s going to make you money.

As coaches, we want to help people hit that sweet spot where they don’t burn out, where they have more career longevity, and where they feel a sense of agency and purpose within their career. If we can get them there, they don’t mind going to work because they’re doing this thing that’s cool and fun and they’re helping people. It’s all the reasons why you like to coach coaches, because you found that teaching coaches means they can then do something that lights them up.

But we don’t want to say, “Okay, be a coach. Get as many clients as you can, so you can make this much money, so you can quit.” No, you want to teach them to be coaches so they can do something that they love, that’s sustainable, that makes them a great economic engine for long term, because they’re not burning out—they want to keep doing this.

QUESTION: Thank you for mentioning the size of a goal. What feels easy, simple, no problem to me, will feel like a big, audacious goal to somebody else.

If you could leave financial professionals with one piece of advice, Jordan, when it comes to helping their clients move beyond a transactional mindset when it comes to pursuing their purpose—helping their clients pursue purpose in their everyday life. By transactional mindset, I mean this idea that spending money has to have a direct and immediate financial ROI, and that living as lean as possible is the goal for everybody, and that’s the smart financial move. But pursuing your purpose or living a purposeful life and having intention doesn’t have to involve money, but it’s okay if it does too. This is such a nuanced thing—we cannot have hard and fast rules. What would you say to the coach who has clients? How do they keep an eye on this for the benefit of their clients, so that they’re managing not just their financial life, but also their emotional life and their health and all the things that are important?

JORDAN: I’d like to quote Ken Honda. He wrote a book called “Happy Money.” What I love about Ken Honda is he talks about happy money comes in, and then it behooves you to put happy money back out there. What does that mean? That means become the person you want to be. Do things you love, live with intention, fill it up with little P purpose. Happy money will come to you, but then you have to take that happy money and spend it on people and things that are important to you and do things that light you up and serve other people and all those good things.

What I love about this is it gets rid of money as the goal or the idea, and really you’re the driver of it. Create a happy, purposeful life, and money will come to you and then use that money to not only maximize your happiness, but everyone else’s. I think that’s really the goal—to stop thinking about money as the driver and start thinking about living a good, intentional, purposeful life as the driver, and then finding ways to incorporate money into that.

We all need help learning how to incorporate money into that, because if we are not wise with our finances, we’re not going to be able to support our purposeful lives. It’s not one way or the other. It’s not like “I’m going to pursue my passion, drop everything else, and not be wise with money,” not at all. It means I’m going to get much more knowledgeable about what purpose feels like in my life, and then use all these fantastic skills to build wealth so I can incorporate that in my life and pass it on to other people.

QUESTION: I also want to acknowledge that self-awareness is such a critical part of this journey of living your purpose, because it can change over time. The way you live a purposeful life can be one way during one phase of your life, and that can start to shift. As coaches, or even just as friends, as partners, as colleagues, helping people to gain that self-awareness, just by asking questions, reflecting back to them what you’re seeing: “I know you used to enjoy this, but you don’t talk about it the same way as you used to, or does it seem to light you up in the same way?” There is incredible strength in coaches doing that for their clients and just being curious about it, and reflecting back to them what you might be seeing.

JORDAN: And to let people off the hook, they feel like you have to have this one big version of purpose that lasts your whole life. The truth is, we probably have tons of different versions of purpose. We might do two or three or four of them at one time. Some of them might last a week, some of them might last a lifetime, and all of that’s okay. My only rule is, you really want it to be process oriented and abundant and not dependent on a goal.

QUESTION: I’ll give you an example, and I hope this is a good example. One of my small p purposes is just being physically playful. Whether it’s roller skating or sand volleyball or right now, I’m taking an acro dance class, which is acrobatics and dance combined, and I am completely uncoordinated, but it’s fine. I’m having a ton of fun. When I look back over my life, it’s not about sometimes having a goal of getting a state record in power lifting or something. What I’ve noticed is my small p purpose is just being physically playful throughout my life, and seeing what my body can do and enjoying my body, appreciating my body for the strength and the movements and the flexibility. Seeing my body as a miracle—I think physical bodies are miracles. That, to me, is a good example of small p purpose in my life.

JORDAN: It is, and if little P purpose is done correctly, it connects you to other people. Ultimately, what really makes us happy—there are all sorts of studies that show having a sense of purpose makes you happier, healthier and live longer. But I think the reason it does it is it connects you to other people, because there are even better studies that show that interpersonal connections are probably what’s most associated with happiness.

So my bet is, through this playful movement, you meet people, connect with people, become part of communities, and that’s that connection piece. Little P purpose leads to interpersonal connections, and that’s where happiness really comes from.

QUESTION: Thank you so much for joining me today, Jordan. I love this conversation. I appreciate you taking the time to just explore the nuance of all of this with me. Thank you again, Jordan, for taking the time to be with me today and for the positive impact that you’re having on people’s lives every day with your message.

JORDAN: Thank you for your kind words and for this great conversation.