I Still Believe in Meaning | Day 1 of 100

100 Days to Make the Case for Meaning in the Workplace

"No one will ever hire you to talk about meaning, young man."

She delivers this with a mix of kindness and condescension.

I'm standing in front of about fifty people at a National Speakers Association meeting in February of 2020, attempting to describe ideas I'd been developing around helping people find more meaning. I can't even finish before the workshop facilitator interrupts me with a dismissive wave.

Embarrassment spreads through my body like ink in water. As I look around the room at all these professional speakers—with their polished presentations, clearly defined niches and carefully crafted personal brands designed to make them memorable and bookable—I have this terrible, sinking thought:

Does no one care about meaning?

I can see what we're all supposed to be focused on. The message is clear: focus on what keeps you booked. Be memorable enough that event planners call you when they need someone to fill a speaking slot.

But meaning? Meaning, according to this facilitator who has been in the business decades longer than I have, is off-limits. Meaning doesn't sell. Meaning doesn't solve the costly, urgent, painful problems that organizations are willing to pay speakers to address.

Maybe she's right. Maybe I'm chasing a topic that doesn't actually have a place in professional conversations.

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The Contradiction (and the hug)

But here's what I keep bumping into: everywhere I look, people seem to want exactly what she says they don't want.

A week after that NSA meeting, I co-hosted a full-day event with a hundred attendees where we talked explicitly about fear, growth, and meaning. Everyone was deeply invested and we did some important work. But…these were individuals who purchased tickets to attend on their own time—not a business who hired me to explore meaning.

So, maybe…businesses and event planners don’t buy meaning?

When COVID hit just a month later and I lost every live event contract, I had to stay afloat somehow. So I abandoned my convictions and did what I was told to do. I built several virtual workshops touching on costly, urgent, painful problems—leadership in crisis, remote team management, change navigation. But as I delivered these workshops, I noticed something. The questions people asked weren't really about the frameworks I was teaching. They'd ask things like: "But how do I know if this actually matters?" or "What's the point of optimizing a system that kills our connection to our clients?" or “If I’m going to keep my people engaged, I need to tap into something deeper than you’ll keep your job during a difficult time.”

They were talking about meaning.

They just didn’t say it directly.

Fast forward to this past fall. After delivering a keynote to several hundred folks, a gentleman approaches me with tears in his eyes.

The hug comes from nowhere—he holds me a bit longer than I’m comfortable with, but I can tell he needs it. What else makes one hug a stranger for a little too long? He then says, "In your talk, you were talking about more than work, weren't you?"

He steps back but keeps his hands on my shoulders, his eyes searching mine. "You're talking about how we're living. How we're waking up each day and moving through our lives...right?"

I nod, and he shakes me gently, almost desperately: "Right?" As if he needs to hear me say it out loud.

Right, I say with a smile.

He thanks me—not for the productivity framework my keynote was technically about, but for acknowledging what he went on to call, "what's happening inside us at a deeper level."

That man hugged me not because I taught him how to manage his time better, he hugged me because I also talked about how our work connects to the broader human experience, and how we each have an ability to find meaning in the midst of our regular jobs.

Here's the contradiction I can't reconcile:

Apparently “no one wants to buy a keynote on meaning,” but everyone seems to want meaning. (and they’re willing to hug strangers when they find it)

Apparently companies are squeamish about writing checks for speakers to talk about meaning, but they'll pay thousands, sometimes millions for professional development programs and consultants and culture building initiatives to help employees care more deeply about their work. They want their teams to see their daily tasks as part of something larger.

Yes, every organization I’ve ever worked with would give an arm and a leg to get their people care more, to help them come alive at work. But I’ve been told they won't buy a keynote called "How to Make Meaning in the Workplace" because meaning doesn't sound like a business problem.

So what's going on? Is the NSA facilitator right that meaning doesn't matter? Or is there another way to see this?

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The Realization

A few months ago, I sought help from Jay Acunzo on developing a new speaking premise on meaning, and he shared a perspective that changed how I think about this entire problem.

In one of our sessions, I went on a rant—not only about that facilitator who canned my ideas back in 2020, but about a recent conversation with a keynote speaker I'd admired for years. This guy commands forty thousand dollars per speech, appears on news programs, the whole deal.

"Oh buddy," this speaker told me when I mentioned my desire to build a keynote on meaning. "No, you don't want to do that. No one wants to buy a speech about meaning. They want solutions to costly, urgent, painful problems. That's what people pay for."

I was telling Jay how frustrated I was that even the most successful speakers seemed to think meaning was a dead end. Jay let me ruminate on that for a moment, then shared an insight that’s guiding this here writing series I’m kicking off today:

"You can't be defeated by dismissal if you haven't put in the work to first truly develop your ideas."

Jay shared his own journey as a writer and speaker—how he thought he was fighting "average content" in marketing, only to discover that was just a symptom of something deeper, and everything changed when he went a few levels below the surface and doubled down on building and honing his universe of ideas.

The real work is investigating whether your ideas are strong enough to stand up to dismissal. It's about building something so compelling that dismissal becomes less likely.

This was a revelation for me: What if the problem isn't that meaning doesn't matter?

What if the problem is that I haven't built a strong enough case for why it does?

What if the NSA facilitator and the big-time speaker were right—not because meaning isn’t urgent enough to talk about in a business setting, but because I haven't figured out how to make meaning clearly connect with what seems urgent to them?

What if the reason people won't buy a keynote on meaning is because I haven't done the work of showing them why they should?

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The 100 Day Investigation

I keep seeing this pattern: people hungry for something they can't quite name, settling for frameworks and processes because those feel safer to ask for. They want their teams to cultivate a sense of meaning, but they'll request "employee engagement" instead. They want purpose, but they'll buy "culture transformation." They want courage and conviction, but they'll say they need "leadership development."

It's not that they don't want meaning—it's that asking for meaning feels risky. It seems more complicated to deliver.

So here's what I'm going to do: For the next hundred days, I'm going to build the case for meaning. Not just explore it, but develop it. I'm going to examine meaning from every angle—philosophical, psychological, practical, business—and figure out how to talk about it in ways that don't sound like naive idealism but like the practical necessity I believe it is.

I'm going to test this as my hypothesis:

By building a comprehensive universe of ideas and deeper frameworks around meaning, I will be able to present it in ways that generate measurably higher business interest than my current approach—helping people recognize that, by learning to make meaning, people (and organizations) find what been looking for all along.

I suspect (I know) that people who feel their work has meaning show up differently—more engaged, more creative, more resilient. Not because they're fundamentally different people, but because they've connected their daily actions to something larger than themselves. Because they’ve learned to see differently.

If that's true, then helping people discover meaning isn't just personal development. It's the missing piece that solves problems organizations already know they have: engagement, retention, innovation, leadership, belonging, performance.

I believe (and have witnessed) when people on a team learn to tap into meaning they can solve costly, urgent, painful problems. So have you. So has everybody. The disconnect here is puzzling and frustrating.

So, starting tomorrow: one post, one exploration, one piece of the argument each day, in public, with the hope that this process might be useful to others who sense that there's something important in our midst beyond skills training but haven't been able to articulate why.

People don’t need more information. We can know and learn anything in an instant. More systems and more strategy is not going to help us feel more alive and make more purposeful contributions.

We must learn to see our lives, relationships and work differently. We must build and exercise what I believe to be the most important muscle a human can develop: the ability to make one’s own meaning.

I hope you'll join me as I build the case, and I welcome your thoughts, feedback and ideas along the way.