The Purpose Blueprint: Gamify Your Life, Choose Your Feeling, Lead with Power

I began writing about purpose a year ago, not because I had finished researching it, but because I realized I never would. Purpose is a subject with no bottom, no final answer — and at some point, you must step away from the bookshelf and decide what you believe.

What has surprised me most since is where insights about purpose have appeared: not in grand treatises or mission statements, but in unexpected corners.

Take Jane McGonigal’s Reality Is Broken, a book about video games, not philosophy. Drawing on James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games, McGonigal reframes life as a kind of play: finite games have clear endings; infinite ones are open-ended, sandbox worlds. Games, she argues, don’t just distract us — they reveal what’s missing from our real lives.

And what’s missing, often, is momentum.

Games give us next levels, immediate feedback, collaboration, and above all, a sense of progress. In contrast, my nonprofit world offers little of that. No victory screen when goals are met, no cheerful music when challenges are conquered. Just an endless horizon of more to do. So I began to gamify my own life: printing my annual and five-year goals on thermometers to track progress, celebrating wins in staff meetings, inserting moments of whimsy into the grind, fiercely guarding time for reflection at year’s end.

Here’s what I’ve learned: gamification gives us momentum, but momentum needs direction.

That’s where Gala Darling enters.

In her work, Gala flips the script: make feeling good your top priority, and let that shape everything else. She echoes Joseph Campbell’s “follow your bliss” but goes further: what if purpose isn’t just bliss? What if it’s power, or adventure, or joy, or even mischief? She suggests that we can design our purpose not by asking what we want to do but by asking what we want to feel.

This is where the real shift happened for me.

For years, I knew — though I rarely said it out loud — that what I craved most was to feel powerful. Not in the domineering sense, but in the truest sense: agency, authorship, influence. So I began to design for that. I run a business to shape my financial destiny. I write and speak to shape the conversation. I mentor because there is profound power in shaping the arc of someone else’s rise. Teaching was never quite it for me — the script was too fixed — but thought leadership lit me up.

Here’s the provocation I want to leave you with:

You are the designer of your own game. You are the architect of your own feelings.

So ask yourself:

• How can you gamify your life? Where can you track your progress, celebrate your wins, inject moments of joy or creativity?
• And even more daring: How do you want to feel? Not what do you want to achieve, but what do you want your life to taste like, sound like, move like?

Start small. One tweak this week. One change that tilts you toward the feeling you crave. Next week, another. Small rebellions compound.

Most of us walk through our days like characters in someone else’s plot. But here’s the truth: you have the power to rewrite the story, redesign the game, and reimagine the rules. Purpose isn’t something you find. It’s something you build.

Play brilliantly.