When Success Stops Mattering
Reconnecting Your Work to What Matters (Part 1 of 2)
So I’m sitting in my office on a gray December afternoon, staring at a stack of final exams, when an email from a former student lands in my inbox.
“Professor . . . thank you for a great semester. I thoroughly enjoyed your class and feel that I learned many things that will inform my practice of law and perspective on life moving forward . . . I look forward to hopefully having you as a professor in future classes”
As I read the email, I felt something I hadn’t experienced in months: a deep sense of connection between my daily work and my larger purpose in the world.
It had been a difficult semester.
During the last few months of 2025, I was juggling multiple writing projects, a heavy teaching load, and service commitments. Although my academic portfolio felt balanced, my writing pipeline was functioning smoothly, and my thought leadership was gaining traction, I was tired.
Plus, life outside of work did not make things easier. I was balancing work with co-parenting three small children while investing quality time into my marriage, friendships, and family. But somewhere in all that strategic execution, I’d lost touch with why any of it mattered.
That email reminded me of something very important: sustainable academic careers isn’t just about managing multiple projects or building social influence.
It’s about maintaining a clear connection between your daily scholarly work and your deeper sense of purpose.
What is the reason you entered academia in the first place?
The Purpose Gap
Here’s the paradox that many successful academics face: the busier their career becomes, the more disconnected they feel from their original motivations.
You entered graduate school because you were passionate about ideas, driven by curiosity, and motivated by the desire to contribute something meaningful to the world. But the realities of academic life—publication pressures, grant deadlines, committee service—gradually erode that sense of purpose.
Before you know it, you’re optimizing systems and climbing ladders without remembering why you wanted to climb them in the first place.
Research consistently shows that people who maintain strong connections to their deeper purpose are more creative, more resilient, more productive, and more satisfied with their work.
They’re also more likely to make innovative contributions to their fields because they’re motivated by intrinsic rather than purely extrinsic rewards.
Connecting your academic work to your deeper purpose isn’t just good for your soul, it’s good for your scholarship too.
Finding Your Way Back
When I work with academics struggling with this disconnect, I recommend the “Origin Story Exercise.” It helps you reconnect with your foundational motivations, then bridge them to your current work.
Think back to the moment you decided to pursue graduate study in your field. Not the practical considerations—career prospects, family expectations—but the deeper pull you felt toward the work itself.
Maybe you were an undergraduate reading a particular theorist who helped you understand something about the world that had always puzzled you.
Maybe you witnessed an injustice that you knew you wanted to spend your career addressing.
Maybe you discovered a research question so compelling that you couldn’t imagine pursuing any other path.
That moment contains the seed of your academic purpose.
For me, that moment came while I was studying abroad in Brazil, South Africa, and France in college. Living in different communities—especially ones dealing with inequality and environmental harm—shifted how I understood justice. I saw people organizing to protect their neighborhoods, their land, and each other.
And that’s when it clicked: I wanted my work to focus on community development and environmental justice, rooted in real lives, not just theory.
Whatever it is for you, remember, your purpose isn’t static.
It evolves as you do.
The Three Dimensions of Purpose
There are three dimensions of purpose that I believe sustains long-term scholarly engagement.
Dimension 1: Intellectual Purpose
This is your relationship to ideas themselves.
What questions drive your curiosity?
What problems keep you awake at night?
What would you study even if no one paid you to do it?
Your intellectual purpose is often connected to a particular way of seeing the world or understanding how things work.
Economists might be driven by understanding how incentives shape behavior. Literary scholars might be fascinated by how stories create meaning. Political scientists might be compelled by questions of power and governance.
The key is identifying not just what you study, but why you’re drawn to study it.
What is it about your particular corner of human knowledge that captures your imagination?
Dimension 2: Social Purpose
This dimension connects your work to its impact on others.
How does your scholarship serve your students, your community, your field, or society more broadly?
Who benefits from the knowledge you create?
Some academics are motivated primarily by advancing human understanding—adding to the collective knowledge base that others will build upon.
Others are driven by more direct applications—research that informs policy, teaching that transforms lives, scholarship that gives voice to marginalized communities.
Neither approach is superior, but understanding your own orientation helps you make decisions about where to focus your energy and how to frame your contributions.
Dimension 3: Personal Purpose
This is about how your academic work connects to your values, your identity, and your vision for the kind of life you want to live.
What aspects of being an academic align with who you are as a person?
Maybe you value autonomy and intellectual freedom, and academia provides a structure for pursuing ideas wherever they lead.
Maybe you’re committed to lifelong learning, and academic life offers continuous opportunities for growth.
Maybe you want to model for your children what it looks like to follow your passions professionally.
Your personal purpose helps explain not just what you do, but why academic life is the right vehicle for expressing your deeper values.
This Week’s Homework
Set aside at least two hours in a quiet space where you won’t be interrupted.
Phase 1: Origin Story Recovery
Write for 20 minutes without stopping about why you initially chose your academic field. Don’t edit or analyze, just capture whatever comes up.
What were you hoping to understand or contribute?
What problems did you want to solve?
What vision of the future motivated you?
Phase 2: Values Inventory
List your core values: the principles that guide how you want to live regardless of your profession.
Then identify which of these values are currently being expressed through your academic work and which feel neglected or suppressed.
Phase 3: The Three Dimensions
For each dimension above (intellectual, social, personal), write a paragraph describing what drives you. Be specific.
Don’t write what you think should motivate you. Write what actually does.
Questions to sit with:
When you think about your academic work as a calling rather than just a career, what shifts?
What would you pursue if you knew you couldn’t fail and didn’t need external validation?
If you continue on your current trajectory, what will your body of work represent? What story will it tell about what you believed mattered?
Next week, we’ll talk about how to actually align your daily academic practice with this deeper purpose, because identifying what matters is only the first step.
The real challenge is making sure your scholarship serves it.
Becoming Full,
P.S. As always, thank you for reading this week’s issue of The Tenure Track. If you found this article helpful, share it with a friend. If it moved you, consider supporting with a paid subscription or buying me a coffee. Together, let’s continue to build a supportive and creative academic community.
Your support helps me create content that serves fellow scholars on the path.
I’m so happy to see you writing about this. I have been preaching this message for 30 years but sometimes it felt like howling to the wilderness. Now more than ever it’s important to stay aligned with our values.