Your Business Needs a Soul (And How To Give It One)

The difference between an ego-driven mission and a calling from the soul.

We are living in a crisis.

I’m not talking about the economy or whatever war is on the news. Those are just symptoms. The real problem runs much deeper.

If you look closely, you can see it everywhere. It is a crisis of the soul.

And it's haunting the creator economy. I bet you've felt it.

It's in the sense of dissatisfaction in a job well done but not well-loved. It's in the endless scroll for connection that leaves you feeling more isolated than before.

We have more tools, platforms, and freedom to create than any generation in history. Yet for many, the creative life is defined by a quiet desperation.

You've written down your purpose statement, you've clarified your vision, you're "doing the work"... but something is still missing.

You’re caught in a frustrating loop: you understand the idea of a purpose-driven business, but you can’t seem to feel it in your bones. The result is burnout, self-doubt, and the nagging sense that you’re just running a very sophisticated ego-project.

It is a problem that persists even after the bills are paid and the audience is built. This is the spiritual crisis of our age. It is a collective loss of meaning.

This isn't a personal failure. It’s a systemic one.

The Existential Vacuum in the Creator Economy

For most of human history, we lived inside collective frameworks that gave life meaning. Religion, cultural traditions, and shared myths offered a sense of significance and belonging. They gave us answers to the big questions: Why am I here? What am I meant to do?

But for the conscious, modern mind they have lost their authority. Many of us have outgrown the dogmas we inherited. We can’t return to blind faith in institutions we no longer believe in.

At the same time, the purely scientific and rationalistic worldview that replaced them is insufficient. By explaining the psyche as a mere byproduct of brain chemistry or reducing human motivation to biological drives, it leaves no room for the soul. It denies the autonomous, spiritual part of ourselves that craves a deeper purpose.

The "gurus" and productivity hackers of our time have adopted this mechanical view, treating you like a system to be optimized, not a human to be actualized. Your creative drive is a series of inputs and outputs. There is no mystery or a meaningful calling.

We’re caught between a faith we can no longer believe and a reason that leaves us empty and alone.

It would be foolish to think we don't need a some sort of spirituality. For thousands of years, religion was the core of civilization. That need for a connection to something larger than ourselves, has not suddenly vanished. It's deeply ingrained in us.

So we’ve replaced the old gods with new, pseudo-religions: capitalism, political ideologies, sports fandom, environmentalism… Even the creator economy itself can be seen as an ersatz religion.

We worship at the altar of growth metrics, perform rituals of posting every day, and seek salvation in the form of a personal brand.

The problem is that none of these can fill the void. They are insufficient. The result is a collective lack of meaning or what Viktor Frankl called the "existential vacuum."

And if you haven't figured it out yet, that shit is causing some serious problems.

The Missing Dimension

This all might not sound like big news to you. In recent years, purpose and meaning have gotten a lot of attention, and I see many people on Substack talking about it. That’s a great movement.

In my last article, I introduced a model to help you build a purpose-driven business that brings more meaning to your life. It’s built on the integration of three dimensions, each represented by a core archetype:

• The Philosopher (WHY): Seeker of truth, meaning, and purpose.

• The Entrepreneur (HOW): Builder of systems, master of strategy and competence.

• The Artist (WHAT): Master of craft, skill, and authentic expression.

The integration of these three results in what I call the Sovereign Creator.

And yet, even with this powerful model, you can have a personal philosophy, a clear purpose, and a brilliant business strategy... and still feel like something is missing.

That missing piece is what we’re talking about today. There is actually a fourth, invisible dimension. It’s the difference between an impressive business and a meaningful life.

And it’s a word that makes a lot of people uncomfortable: faith.

The Limits of a Rationality

Now, before you think I have turned into an esoteric guru, let’s define what I mean by faith. It is not about going to Church every Sunday or sending prayers to a distant god. The word faith has been terribly misused and our conception of it is a mixed bag.

On one side we have the rationalists who reject anything not scientifically verifiable, and on the other side there are the believers who blindly follow the "word of god" or “trust the universe.”

The faith I speak of is neither of those.

It is not a belief in a prescribed dogma or an intellectual assent to a set of propositions. That is the fragile faith of the collective, a secondhand certainty that shatters upon contact with real life.

Instead, the faith I speak of is a lived, empirical, and unwavering trust in the autonomous and purposeful activity of your own unconscious. It is the direct experience of a guiding intelligence within your psyche that is not your ego.

In other words, faith is the ego’s courage to step down from running the show and take its rightful place serving the soul.

The Ego Trap

Let’s take a step back to unpretzel what I have just said.

To understand this type of faith, we must first understand the landscape of our own psyche. Most people associate something negative with the ego. You hear the ego is the enemy, something to be overcome. This is a convenient oversimplification.

The ego is the conscious center of our personality. It is the part of us that perceives reality, thinks, and acts. We need it. The problem is that the ego mistakes its limited view for the whole of reality. Because it is the seat of your conscious awareness, it assumes it is in control of everything.

The ego hates the fact that it is not the ultimate master of your life. It wants certainty, predictability, and a perfect story about who you are and why you matter.

That hubris creates the shadow side of the ego. It’s the part most people picture when they think of the word ego. It’s the collection of what we like to hide or deny: mistakes, petty motives, fear, envy, the gaps between our stated values and our actual moves.

Denying these aspects, is denying our humanness. They are part of us. Faced with this discomfort, the ego tends to overcompensate. It fixates on our strengths, inflates our sense of importance, and tries to elevate itself to god-like status. At the core is a universal human need: to feel significant, to believe our life matters. The real question is whether we fulfill that need in a healthy way or an unhealthy one.

This where the trap sets in.

In its desire for control and significance, the ego creates what I call an intellectualized purpose. It builds a noble mission statement to justify its own primal needs for status, power, freedom, or mastery.

This is the creator who is obsessed with becoming rich so they can "change the world."

They dismiss the search for meaning as "pathetic." They declare that their own lofty money goals are driven by a "deeper spiritual calling," yet this calling is so deep and many-layered it can never be articulated. It serves as a shield. Anyone who questions their ambition is simply too unenlightened to comprehend their grand design.

The ego can grant itself a moral permission slip. I know, this might be an extreme example, but I have seen this many times. The point is so many people seemingly have a purpose but still feel empty.

Here is the paradox that stops most purpose-driven creators in their tracks:

You don’t choose your purpose.
Your purpose chooses you.

This is why we need faith. Your true purpose does not come from your conscious ego. It is not something you find in a Venn diagram or brainstorm on a whiteboard. It emerges from what Carl Jung called the Self.

The Self is the ordering principle of the total psyche, the greater, transpersonal center that includes both the conscious (ego) and unconscious. Faith acts as the bridge. It is the living connection between our conscious ego and this deeper, spiritual Self.

Simplified illustration of the Self

Think of the three archetypes as planets in your inner solar system. The ego is the force that wants to arrange them in a neat, predictable line. Faith is the gravitational center, the sun, that pulls them into a holistic orbit. It is the force that holds the entire system together, ensuring your work remains connected to your soul.

Without this faith, the Sovereign Creator is a brilliant but lonely monarch. A master of his own small, finite kingdom. With it, he becomes a conscious participant in a mystery far greater than himself. His work ceases to be a monument to his ego and becomes a channel for the soul. This is the difference between a life of impressive achievement and a life of profound meaning.

Where Breakdown Becomes a Breakthrough

This faith is not a gentle feeling. It is not a comforting belief you can adopt like a new mindset. It does not arrive in a single, cinematic flash of enlightenment. That is an illusion. It’s the ego’s fantasy of a "perfect" life free from problems. We desperately wan to believe that. It relieves us of the responsibility of our own transformation.

The truth is that even the most realized individuals still feel pain, have bad days, and face problems. What changes is not the presence of struggle, but their inner attitude toward it. How they perceive and react to it.

You do not find this faith when things are going well, when you’re living the “happy life” and the metrics are climbing. You can’t think your way into it either. It is born in the breakdown. When the carefully constructed machine of your sovereign business breaks down. When a launch fails, when you feel like an impostor…

These trials are initiations.

You’re forced to confront the gap between the person you claim to be and the person you are. The constructed world of the ego gets shattered. Its illusion of control is exposed. This is a terrifying experience. But it is also a sacred opportunity.

When the ego surrenders, something else can finally be heard.

The practical act of faith is simple and difficult at the same time: listening. Listening means more than silence. It requires courage. The ego prefers certainty and control. Listening invites ambiguity and the risk. You have to be willing to be wrong about who you thought you were.

In those moments the ego learns to stop talking and starts listening. It stops trying to impose its will and starts trying to understand the will of the Self.

You have to trust your unconscious to provide the path forward, even when that path is uncertain and leads through shame and fear.

Your task is not to invent the path, but to learn to see it.

At this point I can hear you saying, “Okay, this all sounds interesting, but how do I actually develop this kind of faith in practice?”

I wish I could give you an easy answer. The truth is, cultivating this kind of faith requires depth and patience. Since this article has already grown into a beast (and we’re not even done), I’m going to save that for a future piece. There I will share with you a set of practices for self-education that help you listening to your own psyche and understanding the function of your own inner world.

Make sure you’re subscribed, so you don’t miss them.

From Business to a Calling

A business is a construct of the ego. It is a brilliant system for survival, impact, and adaptation in the outer world. Its primary orientation is outward.

A calling, however, does not come from the ego. It is the expression of the soul's deepest purpose. Its primary orientation is inward, toward the source of meaning itself.

When faith creates the living connection between the two, the business ceases to be the primary object. It becomes the vessel. It is the alchemical container in which the base metals of your personal story, your skills, and the market's needs are transmuted into the gold of a meaningful life.

This is when your business becomes an expression of who you are in the deepest sense. You are no longer just "building a business." You are playing out a core archetypal pattern. Your work feels less like work and more like an inevitable extension of your being.

The Antidote to an Age of Meaninglessness

The emptiness so many creators feel is the neurosis of a soul disconnected from its own depths. We have tried to fill this void with metrics, with productivity hacks, with the pursuit of perfection. But the soul cannot be fed by the things of the ego.

The ultimate goal is not merely to have a "purpose-driven business." That is still too small a story. The true aim is to achieve a more whole and complete personality, and to let your business become the natural, useful byproduct of that integration. Your work becomes a vessel for your own self-actualization.

This path leads to the discovery of a meaning that is uniquely yours, grounded in direct experience rather than borrowed from a guru. It is about fulfilling your own potential. In a world of “pseudo authenticity” and AI, that is the only sustainable competitive advantage.

Being a creator in this age means being a curator of something subtle and slow. It means learning enough humility to let the deepest work do itself through you, while retaining the competence to ship, test, and iterate in the marketplace. It’s both craft and devotion.

In the end, this is what the creator economy needs: not more tactics, not more positioning, but more people willing to build vessels. When enough creators do that, the industry stops being a stage for empty performances and starts to be a place where people do their deepest work.

This is the difference between building a successful brand and leaving a lasting legacy. A personal brand is a story the ego tells the world. A legacy is the trail left by a soul that has answered its calling.

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Aligning your work with your soul's purpose begins with understanding your inner landscape. My Archetype Navigator is a free guide that walks you through the first crucial steps of identifying the core patterns that drive you, so you can begin to build a business that is a true expression of yourself.