The Science of a Meaningful Life: Why Leaders Get it Wrong

I read an article recently on how science defines a meaningful life (New Scientist). It made me think about something I see again and again in founders and senior leaders. Something I've felt myself. We treat meaning as something that shows up later. After the pressure lifts. After the company stabilises. After the next milestone. The research says we've got it backwards.

Many people can feel that meaning is achieved at the big finale, the prize at the end of a long race. What the evidence shows is simpler and harder: meaning isn't something you reach. It's something that forms (or doesn't) through how you work and how you lead, day to day.

Contribution Over Position

One of the clearest findings in the research is that meaning is tightly linked to contribution. Not status.

At senior levels that's easy to forget. Your title grows. Your decisions carry more weight. The surface signals of "importance" multiply. It's tempting to confuse responsibility with meaning. But responsibility alone doesn't create it.

What does is the sense that your decisions make things better for someone else. Customers. Employees. Partners. Even a future version of the organisation. When that link breaks, when work becomes detached from real impact, even objectively successful roles can start to feel hollow. We have all heard about people in dream jobs who feel emptier than they did in messier, earlier phases.

That's not a paradox. In smaller, messier phases, contribution is clearer. The feedback loop is shorter. You can see the effect of what you do. Once you're several layers removed, it's easier to lose the thread. So the question isn't "How important is my role?" It's "Can I still see how my work lands?"

Progress Beats Milestones

Another pattern that shows up everywhere: it's progress that sustains people. Not big wins. Not defining moments. Forward movement.

Big milestones are rare. And they're surprisingly bad at keeping people going. You hit one, celebrate for a week, and then it normalises. Attention shifts to the next target. What actually carries people over time is the sense that things are moving in the right direction. That decisions, even imperfect ones, are pushing something forward.

In leadership, a lot of the work is ambiguous. Outcomes lag. Feedback is delayed or filtered. If you only measure yourself by headline results, you can feel stuck even when you're succeeding. The leaders who stay grounded tend to watch different signals: Are we clearer than last quarter? Are fewer things breaking? Are people more aligned? Those questions carry more meaning than any single win.

Relationships Are Not Secondary

We often treat relationships as the "soft" stuff. Culture. Communication. Trust. Nice to have when there's time. The evidence doesn't back that up. Connection is one of the strongest predictors of meaning, resilience, and long-term wellbeing, and it matters more, not less, when pressure goes up.

When things are hard, people remember how they were treated. When trade-offs are real, they notice what you protect and what you don't. When information is incomplete, they watch how you explain decisions. Strong relationships don't remove difficulty. They make it bearable. They give the work weight beyond the outcome.

For leaders, this isn't about being liked. It's about being fair, clear, and consistent. About creating an environment where people understand why decisions are made, even when they disagree. That understanding is a major source of meaning on both sides.

"Meaning isn't waiting at the end. It's built into how you operate now."

Reflection Is Part of the Job

Reflection gets framed as a personal habit. Something you do outside work, if you have time. In reality it's a leadership responsibility. Without it, people drift. They optimise locally. They keep doing what they've always done long after it stops making sense.

The question isn't whether you're busy. Most senior people are. The question is whether the work still lines up with what you value. Why are you building this? What are you willing to trade off, and what are you not? What kind of leader are you becoming under pressure?

Those questions are uncomfortable. They don't have clean answers. But avoiding them has a cost. A lot of people don't burn out because they work too hard. They burn out because the work loses coherence. The effort no longer connects to a clear sense of purpose. Reflection is what restores that connection. That is why you should regularly book reflection periods in your calendar, but make sure you have a clear structure for how to reflect, otherwise you can end up getting nowhere.

Who You Become While Leading

Here's the idea that ties it together: leadership shapes you as much as it shapes the organisation.

The job doesn't just produce outcomes. It produces habits. Reflexes. Ways of relating to people. How you behave when information is incomplete. Where you apply pressure and where you don't. What you choose to notice and what you choose to ignore.

Over time it determines whether the work feels meaningful or draining, regardless of success. That's why meaning can't be postponed. By the time the milestone arrives, the shape of your working life is already set. The habits are already there. The question is what kind.

A Useful Reframe

If you're leading a company or a team and you're questioning the cost (the hours, the trade-offs, the weight of it), the research offers a simple reframe. Meaning isn't waiting at the end. It's built into how you operate now. Into contribution over status. Into progress over milestones. Into relationships treated as central, not peripheral. Into reflection treated as part of the job, not an indulgence.

That doesn't remove difficulty. But it changes what the difficulty is for. And that difference matters more than most people realise.