Purpose & Profit by Dan Koe
Conditioning, identity, and perception -- the problems that begins the problem-solving journey
This was a great refresher on core principles when I needed them most during my early days at Insight. It’s been fascinating to see these same ideas echoed in Rockefeller’s letters to his son (review coming soon).
The book’s core insight is that meaningful work (with ‘work’ defined somewhat broadly) is the primary mechanism for human evolution, where life is viewed as a series of upgraded problems to solve. True fulfillment requires transitioning from a low-agency mindset that follows inherited goals to a high-agency “sovereign" state where you define your own vision. By aligning your skills with increasingly complex challenges, you enter a flow state that collapses the distinction between work, play, and personal development.
Thanks Danny for pointing me toward this one.
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Given the nature of the book, this will be more of a list of thoughts with quotes.
It arrived at the perfect time to remind me that ⅓ of life is spent at work. If that’s hollow, the rest follows.
“If you hate your work, and it drains your energy to enjoy the other third, and you are asleep the other third, there doesn’t seem to be a higher priority than to create, build, design, write, sell, invest, own, experiment, and discover a way to control what you do with your day.”
This prompted difficult questions. What am I really building with my days? A job? A career? Or something closer to a calling? 2025 taught me that while alignment isn’t strictly necessary for a great attitude, it certainly makes it easier to maintain.
To find that alignment, the book defines the spectrum between a job, a career, and a calling.
“A job is some unpleasant work you do for someone else for the sole purpose of making money. A job is a survival mechanism.”
By contrast, in a career:
“With each level of challenge, life becomes more complex and interesting. A career is extended schooling.”
Difficulty becomes development, which is beautiful. Finally, then there is a calling:
“Work you can’t pull yourself away from and others can’t help but pay you for.”
The boundaries start to blur. Money isn’t about survival, but creation.
“A job is not a career or a calling, but a career and calling are both jobs. A career is not a calling, but a calling is a career.”
There is a natural progression through these steps, and it is rare to skip any of them. Each layer informs your vision and your anti-vision.
“Your anti-vision is the future that you do not want to live.”
Sometimes it’s easier to name what you refuse than what you desire. For me, anti-vision is work that narrows instead of expands, environments where curiosity fades into routine, and conversations that circle around escape rather than creation.
Vision is the opposite. It is where work compounds, deep dives sharpen perspective, and projects serve as training grounds for a broader life. I imagine late-night projects and serendipitous friendships built on shared purpose. Looking back at my deep-dive experiences in 2025, this rings true. (Shoutout Ditty, Lonne, Adam, Zoey, Intel, and Vishnu—it takes stamina to do these, but I cherish that time spent working together.)
Sometime in 2025, I oriented toward robotics. Robotics has been a fascination since childhood — any sci-fi reader knows the dream of machines with intelligence working side by side in the physical world.
The opening chapter of my career began in a mature ecosystem. Inside Insight and across the SaaS landscape, competition is cut-throat. Robotics feels like what software may have been 30 years ago: destined to reshape everything, but currently "hardly working," slow to deploy, and demanding a rare mix of daring builders and patient backers.
While I may have previously felt gated by a lack of academic background, today I have a PhD in my pocket via ChatGPT and Gemini. I have the tools to access the brightest minds and the funding to aggressively chase curiosities. The wall between “employee” and “entrepreneur” has collapsed.
“The difference between an employee and entrepreneur is the difference between low agency and high agency.”
High-agency people set their own goals. Low-agency people inherit them.
“True agency can only be developed when you blame yourself for every problem, even when you’re not at fault.”
It can initially sound harsh, but it’s actually freeing. Life is nothing without problems to solve.
“Without problems, there is no creativity. Without creativity, there is no life.”
The real question isn’t how to avoid problems, but which ones to choose. At Insight, I’ve seen the saturation of AI and software. While it felt tough to imagine a career in a consolidating market, I now see my current training as a way to learn timeless investing principles, deal fluency, and institution building.
When you create to solve problems at the right level, the work feels alive.
“The sources of psychic entropy are boredom and anxiety… If your skill is too high and the challenge too low, you get bored. If your skill is too low and the challenge too high, you get anxious.”
I know the state of restlessness on one side and self-doubt on the other. But in between lies flow, the rare balance where skill and challenge meet.
“Challenge is the source of enjoyment. Enjoyment comes from solving problems….Projects are how you turn problems into solutions. Projects create a frame for your mind to expand into.”
I’ve started to see my work as a series of these "containers" for flow. Some are professional, while others are personal (meditation, creative writing, or training for a sport or competition).
The highest stage the book describes is contribution.
“You don’t see work as clock in, clock out. You don’t see rest as a treat. You don’t see play as a hobby if you have the time. You see all of them as necessary counterbalances.”
This necessarily reframes success. It isn’t title or number of deals, but whether the problems you wrestle with naturally lead to service (giving!).
“You don’t only consume and take, but you create, share, and give back.”
To contribute in ways both small and then hopefully large (as an investor, a builder, or a student) feels less like chasing a career and more like building a life’s work.
Selections:
Read through once for consumption and a second time for digestion.
If you hate your work, and it comprises one third of your life, and it drains your energy to enjoy the other third, and you are asleep the other third, there doesn’t seem to be a higher priority than to create, build, design, write, sell, invest, own, experiment, and discover a way to control what you do with your day.
A job is some unpleasant work you do for someone else for the sole purpose of making money. A job is a survival mechanism. A job is one milestone on the path to living up to those who shaped your mind.
A job is similar to schools from the perspective that good marketing can make up for a bad product.
A career is a commitment to development in your work.
With each level of challenge, life becomes more complex and interesting. New paths for knowledge and skill acquisition become apparent. A career is extended schooling.
A calling is work you can’t pull yourself away from and others can’t help but pay you for.
A job is not a career or calling, but a career and calling are both jobs. A career is not a calling, but a calling is a career.
create work that doesn’t feel like work no matter the difficulty of that grand task.
Like lifting weights, you start for the vanity, stay for the therapy, and cultivate a philosophical sense of mastery behind the pursuit.
Your journey from job to career to calling will not be one without mistakes and ego, and that’s okay. It isn’t supposed to be any other way, and you will experience significant emotional backlash if you try to skip steps. At the start, you create to make money. In the end, you make money to create.
All pursuits are materialistic until a philosophical sense of mastery is formed, even the most “spiritual” pursuits. Then, it becomes your vehicle into the unknown. A vessel to expand and evolve. Like a relationship, you are attracted by their looks and are only then introduced to the depth of their being. Looks, in all domains of life, are as important as depth. But most people fear what lies beneath, so they bounce around on the surface, distracted by anything that allows them to forget their pain.
The future of work will consist mostly of entrepreneurs, specificallcyreators, and if not entrepreneurs, elite employees who have the traits of entrepreneurs in increasingly rare positions.
The difference between an employee and entrepreneur is the difference between low agency and high agency.
High-agency individuals are those who create their own goals and actively pursue them without permission from another. Low-agency individuals are those who are assigned goals and pursue them because they don’t have a mind that allows them to see any other option.
True agency can only be developed when you blame yourself for every problem, even when you’re not at fault.
People inherently know that challenges make life interesting, so they pursue more, but once they reach their limits, they begin justifying their newfound comfort with statements like, “I just like the stability of a job.” Then and there, your calling disappears. You eliminate the possibility of further novel challenge. That is dangerous.
Other domains of your life can only advance as high as your ability to contribute to others through your work.
If you are wondering where your child-like zest for life went after the progression of your schooling ended, now you know. Being an entrepreneur is hard, but being an eternal employee is harder. Not because of the work, but because of the mind. Self-development is a gateway drug into entrepreneurship because it teaches you that improving others is the next level of improving yourself.
“Employee” and “entrepreneur” are not titles, they are states of mind. They aren’t a role you play, but who you are.
Employees are not always entrepreneurs, but entrepreneurs can be employees. Since entrepreneurship is a state of mind, you can have a job and still cultivate a sense of agency.
The evolution of your work is a direct reflection of building your vision. Sometimes that entails working at a job you hate, at a startup you love, or on a little creative side project, as long as they fuel your vision.
If you don’t want to work long hours, solve the problem of prioritization. If you like the “stability” of a job, solve the problem of self-management.
Entrepreneurs who lack fulfillment aren’t entrepreneurs. They may seem like it in their work, but they have the mind of an employee. They are employees to an invisible employerresidue from their programming—that secretly planted a new goal in their head that shapes their ability to identify and solve the right problems.
Your psyche is wired to hunt, but physical threats aren’t an issue anymore. The real threats of today’s world are psychological and spiritual. A mental game. We are built for survival, but the question is no longer how to survive; the question is how we evolve beyond and integrate our survival to make life meaningful.
Money is a great tool to continue a life of novelty and challenge. You know, the thing that disappears after you graduate school and get acquainted with your job.
because it buys the resources to solve more challenging problems since time and labor only go so far.
True education is what allows the individual to solve their own problems (rather than assigning general temporary relief)
The education system is focused on training people to be useful workers for their own benefit (because you aren’t the one paying for that education system
It does not make sense to pay someone based on the amount of work they do, especially in a future where that work will be more efficient, worth less, and require fewer resources to complete. However, it does make sense to pay someone based on the level of problems they solve, as problems constantly evolve as work does.
If enjoyment comes from the feeling of progress being made, connection to something greater than yourself, and receiving meaningful feedback from both, then conscious entrepreneurship is how you sustain and control the enjoyment in your life. And by filling your own cup, you begin to overflow, and your natural desire shifts to helping other people.
If you only learn as much as your top-of mind goal allows, and that goal is to get a high-paying degree for the sake of status and security, then by the time you exit this system you are no different from a lion in the Savannah or polar bear in Alaska. If you were to swap the two, both would fail to survive because they are niche specialists.
A good metric for determining if you are on the right path is if your work changes at a minimum of every year. You evolve. Your interests evolve. You identify new problems once previous ones are solved.
Humans find fulfillment in caring for others, like how you may be better at taking care of your dog than you are at taking care of yourself. The more you can care for others—through the progressive overload of responsibility or training with emotional weights—the more fulfillment you receive. In this sense, money isn’t the only form of profit. One could consider it their life’s work to evolve through these stages to contribute to humanity at their highest potential. Note that you do not break free from lower levels. You do not break free from the care of your family for the care of an animal. You integrate the former into the latter.
Aristotle believed that the final cause of a thing is its function, and that a full explanation of anything must consider its final cause.
Teleology (telos meaning goal, logos meaning reason) is the idea of explaining something by referring to its purpose, end, or goal. Cybernetics studies how systems self-regulate and selforganize toward the end goal of a system.
Distinguish vertical development from horizontal development
You can only solve a problem once you expand your mind beyond the problem. You need to stop, zoom out, and open your mind to view your problems from a higher perspective. From there, you can create a goal that opposes the problem, collect ideas that form a theory, and experiment with potential solutions until the problem is solved. Once it’s solved, you solidify a new level of purpose.
Immerse yourself in environments and education that begins to change the goals your mind operates on. Block out time to work on improving the value you have to offer. Acquire complementary skills to the ones you use in your job or career. Experiment with side projects. Expose yourself to massive experience until you are able to make enough money to see beyond your survival.
The mentors of the past and present that you look up to, like Gautama Buddha, Jesus Christ, Plato, Krishna, or any other influential individual you hold in high regard have a high degree of status and power. Otherwise, their message would not have captured your attention, persuaded you to change your mind and behavior, and persisted for thousands of years. But that’s the thing, they didn’t have a marketing budget, they had a message. A life’s work to spread. That was the source of their power.
To solve bigger, more meaningful problems that increase the baseline level of purpose of humanity. But you can only do that once you’ve attained some form power and influence. Once you’ve created the art, products, or services that improve the lives of the recipients. Once you’ve built the body that reflects the character by which you interact with the world. Once you’ve built the mind that harnesses power with persuasion, not force or deception.
You find spirituality in experience. You find it in the story of creating your own way. You find it in the highs and lows of pursuing goals and solving problems. You find it in correcting the mistakes you made and learning how to move in a better direction. Spirituality comes from the journey, but that journey is only possible with a conscious destination. If you can’t find meaning in life, it’s because you haven’t started pursuing the goals you’ve been suppressing because you’ve been tricked into thinking they’re bad.
In the status stage, much of what you learn and do will be from what others teach you. In the creativity stage, you take your expanded knowledge and begin to create your own way of doing things. You’ve tried different training regimens, business models, and coping strategies to the point of realizing the patterns and principles between them all. You’ve unlocked a perspective that allows you to navigate intersecting domains with grace.
The contribution stage is where the separate domains of your life collapse into one. You don’t see work as somewhere that you clock in and clock out. You don’t see rest as a treat that you can only indulge in once work is done. You don’t see play as a hobby that lasts thirty minutes at night if you have the time to do it. You see all of them as necessary counterbalances to one another. Work, rest, and play become difficult to distinguish. Rest becomes a way to regenerate your creative ability for your work. Play becomes what you do for work. Work is so deeply integrated with your life that anything you do can pay back tenfold in more ways than cash. Your footsteps leave pits of value in their path.
Your entire life begins to revolve around how you can best contribute to the world. You become a perspective vessel for reality. The true value lies in the mind you’ve developed, and you are able to adopt the perspective of a strategist or visionary. You hunt for and gather information, synthesize it with your experience, and distribute it to those who want to benefit from it. You become less of a leech. You don’t only consume and take from reality for your selfish personal gain, but you create, share, and contribute back to the world.
A job is the “secure” and “safe” route touted by those who haven’t discovered the depth of life. It can quickly chain you to responsibilities that narrow your mind and drain your energy. You can’t effectively pursue your life’s work by neglecting your relationships and mental and physical health.
If you are passionate about your work, late nights and bad habits will impact your ability to create. If you aren’t serious about your work, these problems won’t register in your mind as problems. They will stick around and lead to entropy. When your work demands your best self, the path to developing your mind, body, and relationships becomes clear. You must uphold them or else your work suffers.
Your purpose is the source of your struggle, and nobody said that struggle can’t be fun. The fundamental problem, or problem of all problems, is that people rarely dive into the unknown and fail to recognize that as the problem that begins their problem-solving journey. This mostly comes down to conditioning, identity, and perception.
Without problems, there is no creativity. Without creativity, there is no life. A life without problems is a life without purpose. You have no reason to step into the unknown, discover ideas, create knowledge, deposit it as a contribution, and live fully. Problems, like ideas, are infin
If there is any point in your life where you are not wrestling with a meaningful problem (this includes mindfulness, meditation, and other forms of spirituality that make it seem as if you aren’t solving the problem of an entropic mind), it is safe to say that you are not in the process of producing value or creating the potential to contribute to something greater than yourself.
It’s wise to note that there is an enemy of progress. When you encounter a problem—or a conflict between where you are and where you want to be—entropy has the potential to increase. Entropy, in brief, is that all systems fall into chaos unless an effort is made to maintain order.
The sources of psychic entropy, or the mind falling into chaos, are boredom and anxiety. Both stem from a mismatch of your skill level and the challenge of a situation. If your skill is too high and the challenge is too low, you get bored. Boredom leads to self-centeredness. Your mind starts thinking of something better, and often more pleasurable, that it could be doing with its time. If your skill is too low and the challenge is too high, you get anxious. Anxiety leads to self-consciousness. Your mind starts thinking of how it’s not good enough.
You begin wondering why your life is getting worse while your days remain the same. Most people’s lives are determined by how they choose to cure their boredom.
The first leap into a new way of life will have a buffer period of high anxiety. This is nature’s way of testing how serious you are about seeing what you’re capable of.
When you’re living at the edge of your abilities. The flow state. Locked in. You feel invincible. Nothing else matters but the task in front of you. You become one with the problem. You move with purpose. People gravitate toward you because you have something they’ve lost. Your life’s work is to maximize your time in this optimal state of ordered consciousness
Start where you are but challenge yourself. This is how you acquire an interest-based education. You view your life as a story that unfolds in chapters, phases, and cycles. Each chapter has goals, problems, highs, and lows that reveal themselves as the pages turn. Each chapter is a macrocycle of life. Once you understand it, you can identify which part of the story you are in, become aware of its components, and ease your mind until you enter the next phase.
Your life’s work doesn’t happen at some imaginary future moment. It happens at every passing moment. One foot in the unknown. Not so deep that you get anxious, and not so shallow that you get bored. But right where the meaningful flow of information is maximized
You feel lost at one moment, but if you have faith, you soon become curious. That curiosity leads to a period of intensity, a season of rapid progress where there is nothing you’d rather be doing but pursuing your purpose. Post-intensity, you enter a period of consistency where you maintain a higher baseline than before. You reach a new level of purpose and continue your ascent from a similar point in the spiral. You may not feel like you are progressing, but if you look down the mountain, you will see how far you’ve come.
Instead of obsessing over discovering your life’s work, pay attention to the opposite: where your life will end up if you keep performing the same actions. If you understand entropythat all things tend toward disorder—you understand that by doing nothing with your life you choose to slowly drown in chaos. You don’t stay the same. You dig yourself deeper into a hole without trying.
When people say, “I don’t know what I want,” what they’re really saying is, “I don’t want to do the work it takes to get what I want.” It’s not that you don’t know what you want. It’s that you know what you don’t want—meaning you know what you want—and are hiding from the pain of reinventing yourself. You are hiding from the slow structural redesign of your identity.
I’ve always known what I wanted because it’s extremely simple to observe society and know what I don’t want: A job I hate. Work I don’t care about. A body that lacks energy and aesthetics. A partner I can’t stop arguing with. A mind that I can’t come to grips with. These are the main problems that lie in the conditioned human experience.
When you learn how to create a story worth telling by forging your own path, how you attract others becomes trivial.
Your anti-vision is the future that you do not want to live.
The greatest decision you can make is to change your physical, mental, and spiritual environments for good. Immerse yourself in a pool of new people, new ideas, and new potentials that challenge you to create, expand, and transcend.
Big goals are for direction. Small goals are for clarity.
Be stubborn with vision and loose with details. Your goals will change, and that’s okay.
Projects. Projects are how you turn problems into solutions. Projects create a frame for your mind to expand into. Projects, after a period of invested mental energy, become a magnet for ideas and experience. Serendipity increases. Pattern recognition increases. Dopamine increases to signal information that helps you actualize the project.
The creative challenge appears when you attempt to achieve a goal without betraying your vision. You can become rich without sacrificing your family. You can become healthy without sacrificing your work. You can become valuable without sacrificing what makes life worth livin
When your skill is the perfect match for the challenge of a situation, the world goes quiet, and you become one with the problem to be solved.
Challenge is the source of enjoyment. Enjoyment is found on the tightrope between boredom and anxiety. Enjoyment comes from solving problems.
Avoid getting locked into paradigms and beliefs that narrow your mind on one idolized path. Your vision is like a battery. You must fuel it with experience, education, and misdirection.
If you have the agency and desire, you can find a path to acquiring the knowledge you need to build what you want.
Most people think their problem is that nobody finds their interests interesting, but the reality is that they don’t know how to make their interests interesting to other people.
When most people want something, they explain what they want without understanding the mind of the other person, so they rarely receive it. Learning to persuade allows you to strive for mutual benefit—a positive-sum game—because you are able to articulate their desires often better than they can.
the path forward for sovereign individuals is to build their own audience, rather than being at the whim of any given system that allows you to tap into their audience.
When you publish your work in public, with intention, persistence, and iteration, you increase the surface area of people who may care about your work. For those who think this sounds uncertain or difficult, I must remind you that the other option—what you’ve been doing—is more uncertain or difficult while hiding under a veil of comfort and ease.
You offer them value in exchange for another form of value. In the case of a product, it’s money. In the case of media, it’s attention. Both are valuable. Don’t waste people’s time.
Value is perception.
The levels of problem awareness are unaware, problem aware, solution aware, product aware, and most aware. Most people you come across will lie between unaware and solution-aware. Your job is to speak to them where they are. You aren’t going to speak to someone who isn’t aware they have a problem the same way you would speak to someone who’s already tested solutions. This requires creativity and dexterity. It can’t be taught through words. It can only be learned through persistent trial and error on a long enough time horizon, which is why so few people have this irreplaceable skill.
Pull from your vision and get specific. What are you helping them achieve? What is the transformation? The more specific you can get with this, the more desire it will generate in a reader, viewer, or listener who is already aware of the problem.
The greatest marketing strategy is clarity paired with pure honesty
If you were to take these ideas with you as you push into the unknown, you will notice these persuasion principles everywhere you go, and that will teach you more than the words on this page. That, by all measures, is the best way to learn. Perspective, persistence, and pattern recognition.
You are attempting to amplify the problem to show the reader that it is a higher priority than they think because the longer the problem goes unsolved, the more damage it can do.
A process, in this context, is a creative system that breeds knowledge, skill, and awareness to bridge the gap between problem and solution.
To improve your writing is to improve your thinking, leaning, and earning. Through that error correction, you inadvertently learn psychology, marketing, sales, persuasion, human nature, and the topic being written about. Writing is how you engage in an interestbased education.
Choosing a niche and a life of fulfillment mix like oil and water.
First, you don’t have experience with a niche you choose, and most entrepreneurs fail because they try to solve a problem they haven’t experienced. And since you will probably never experience that problem outside of theory, you are working by proxy. You are studying the map, not the territory. It can work, and plenty of people have found success with this method, but I am here to help guide you toward a life of deep purpose. Second, it prioritizes finding, not attracting or becoming. You learn a skill for someone else.
The biggest problem with choosing a niche is that it is static. You box yourself into a little bubble of thoughts. Similar to the pursuit of prestige that comes from focusing on one area of study like a college degree, this creates a stupefying conformity that has high potential for replacement. You can only learn so much within a box. The beauty of becoming the niche is that it evolves as you do. Your niche isn’t a static target—it’s a living, breathing extension of your personal development. As you solve new problems, discover new interests, and create new knowledge, your business naturally expands to encompass these areas. Choosing a niche is for specialists.
Practice self awareness, the greatest business, marketing, and sales skill.
A human must orchestrate the tools at their disposal toward an evolving vision for the future.