Passion Without Purpose. Purpose Without Principles. Pick Your Flavour of Stuck

On Principles, Passion, and Purpose — the parts we left out of Dreams & Deadlines. Intentionally. Sort of.

Quick housekeeping: this article covers content that didn’t make it into the book. Not because it’s essential — the method works fine without it — but because it’s interesting, and we didn’t have the space to do it justice. If you’ve read Dreams & Deadlines, you’ll find nothing here that contradicts it. Think of this as a side room off the main corridor: worth exploring, entirely optional.

Let us introduce you to three people. You may recognise them. You may, in fact, be like one of them.

Marcus has his life remarkably together. He has a personal mission statement — a good one, not the kind that sounds like a LinkedIn bio written by a philosophy student at 2am. He runs his quarters using Personal OKRs. He reviews his progress every Sunday evening with a coffee and a spreadsheet that would make a management consultant weep with joy. He is disciplined. He is consistent. He is, by every measurable standard, executing brilliantly.

He is also deeply, quietly miserable. His Key Results get hit. His sense of excitement has gone completely missing, and he has no idea where it went.

Eva is the opposite problem. She is magnetic, energised, the kind of person who starts a conversation about her work and suddenly forty minutes have passed and you’ve forgotten you had somewhere to be. She has found her passion — genuinely, not in the Instagram-caption sense. She’s building something, pursuing something, feeling something. She’s got more enthusiasm than she knows what to do with.

She’s also been building in roughly the same direction for three years with nothing lasting to show for it, and she’s starting to wonder, in her quieter moments, whether enthusiasm might not be quite enough.

Derek wants to change the world. No, really. Not performatively — he actually does. He has a clear sense of what’s broken, what matters, and where his contribution could go. He has purpose in the way that most people only read about in books about Okinawan centenarians. He would describe his work as a calling, and he would be right.

He is also burning out. Quietly but steadily, like a candle that’s been left on too long. He keeps pushing through because the cause demands it. He’s not sure he’s allowed to stop.

Three different people. Three different flavours of the same fundamental problem.

What Marcus is missing is passion.

What Eva is missing is purpose.

What Derek is missing is principles.

And here’s the thing we didn’t have much space to say in the book: all three of them have done everything the self-help literature told them to do. Marcus has his mission statement. Eva has her fire. Derek has his why. Each of them is running on one or two cylinders of an engine that, in our experience, tends to run a good deal smoother on three.

What sits beneath all of them is the part we had to compress into a single paragraph. It looks like this:

See those three dark blocks at the bottom of the funnel? That’s what this article is about. The figure shows them as a possible underpinning to the direction-setting concepts above — and that word “possible” is doing real work. The POKR Method doesn’t require you to have your Principles, Passion, and Purpose mapped out. We say that clearly in the book, and we mean it. You can run a perfectly good OKR cycle without ever using these three words.

But. If you’re doing most things right and something still feels persistently off — not a planning problem, not a motivation problem, not a time management problem, but something harder to name — this is often a useful place to look.

Here’s how we’d put it, and we want to be precise about this because precision matters:

Principles serve as our internal compass, providing consistency and integrity to our decisions. As Ray Dalio emphasises in Principles, sustainable success often requires clear principles that provide an unshakable foundation for our actions. When we’re grounded in strong principles, our decisions align with deeply held beliefs, offering a stable base for life’s twists and turns. However, principles alone can create rigid, duty-bound objectives that lack emotional resonance or sustainable motivation.

That’s Marcus. All compass, no fuel.

Passion provides the emotional fuel and intrinsic motivation necessary for long-term commitment. Research by Duckworth and colleagues on “grit” demonstrates that sustained passion combined with perseverance predicts achievement beyond what talent alone can account for — not that it beats talent outright, but that it adds something talent cannot buy. Yet passion without principles can lead to unfulfilling or ethically questionable pursuits, while passion without purpose risks becoming self-indulgent.

That’s Eva. All fuel, no compass.

Purpose connects our efforts to something larger than ourselves, creating what the Japanese call ikigai — a reason for being. Studies show that purpose-driven goals correlate with both higher achievement rates and greater life satisfaction. However, purpose without passion can become overwhelming or burn us out, while purpose without principles may lead to misaligned means and ends.

That’s Derek. All payload, no fuel tank.

Research in positive psychology and goal-setting theory reveals an interesting interplay between these three elements: principles (our core values and beliefs), passion (what energises and excites us), and purpose (our reason for being and contribution to the world). While each element can exist independently, the most effective personal direction-setting occurs at their intersection.

That last sentence is doing a lot of quiet heavy lifting. At their intersection.The research points toward that overlap as a particularly rich operating zone — not a mandatory destination, but a useful one to know about. The psychological literature on flourishing — Seligman’s PERMA model, Csikszentmihalyi’s flow research, and prospective cohort data on ikigai from Japan — converges on this with some consistency (Seligman, 2011; Csikszentmihalyi, 1990; Sone et al., 2008). When more of these elements are in play simultaneously, something tends to shift. Goals become more self-reinforcing. Effort starts to feel less like effort. The Sunday evening spreadsheet starts feeling less like a quarterly reckoning and more like a progress report you’re actually looking forward to writing.

Now. Back to Marcus, Eva, and Derek. Because the good news is that each of their problems has a diagnosis and a relatively straightforward fix.

Marcus needs to go find what he loves. Not in a “quit your job and backpack through Southeast Asia” way — though if that’s what it takes, we’re not going to stop him. In a more mundane, more useful way: Marcus needs to notice what he reaches for when no one is watching. What he finds himself reading about at 11pm when he was supposed to be asleep. Passion, it turns out, is rarely a dramatic revelation. It’s more often a quiet, persistent pattern you’ve been ignoring in favour of what seemed more rational (Duckworth, 2016). Marcus has built a magnificent machine. He just needs to remember why he wanted to build it in the first place.

Eva needs to zoom out. Her passion is real and it is hers, but it currently serves mostly herself. The pivot from passion to purpose is less about finding a new thing and more about asking a harder question about the thing you already have: who else does this serve? Research on intrinsic motivation supports the idea that contribution — doing something that extends beyond personal gain — can deepen engagement and well-being (Ryan & Deci, 2000). Eva doesn’t need less enthusiasm. She needs to direct it at something larger than her own trajectory.

Derek needs to stop and read the instruction manual. His purpose is not in question. What’s missing are the guardrails — the personal principles that would tell him, clearly and non-negotiably, that sustainable contribution requires sustainable contributors. Values like rest, reciprocity, self-preservation. Principles that are allowed to set limits on purpose, rather than being endlessly overridden by it. Burnout research consistently shows that high demands combined with depleted resources produce exhaustion — and professions defined by strong purpose and mission (healthcare, social work, teaching) feature prominently in that literature (Maslach & Leiter, 2016). Derek needs his principles to protect him from his own purpose.

So. Which one are you?

And more importantly — what’s missing?

You don’t have to answer perfectly. The entire premise of the POKR Method is that you don’t need to have everything figured out before you start. But if something has been nagging at you — a low-grade sense that the goal-setting is working but the goals themselves feel slightly wrong — it might be worth spending twenty minutes with these three questions before writing next quarter’s Objectives.

Marcus can hit every Key Result and still feel hollow. Eva can be magnificently enthusiastic about a direction that ultimately leads nowhere. Derek can change the world right up until the point he can’t get out of bed.

You deserve better than any of those outcomes. And — this is the part we believe most strongly — the fix is usually less dramatic than you think. You already have more of the raw material than you know. You just need a framework that helps you see what’s there, and a system for building toward something that feels genuinely yours.

References

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Harper & Row.

Dalio, R. (2017). Principles: Life and Work. Simon & Schuster.

Duckworth, A. (2016). Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. Scribner.

Duckworth, A. L., Peterson, C., Matthews, M. D., & Kelly, D. R. (2007). Grit: Perseverance and passion for long-term goals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92(6), 1087–1101.

Maslach, C., & Leiter, M. P. (2016). Understanding the burnout experience: Recent research and its implications for psychiatry. World Psychiatry, 15(2), 103–111.

Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68–78.

Seligman, M. E. P. (2011). Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being. Free Press.

Sone, T., Nakaya, N., Ohmori, K., Shimazu, T., Higashiguchi, M., Kakizaki, M., Kikuchi, N., Kuriyama, S., & Tsuji, I. (2008). Sense of life worth living (ikigai) and mortality in Japan: Ohsaki study. Psychosomatic Medicine, 70(6), 709–715.