From Profit to Purpose: Crossing the Gap Between Paradigms
Leaving Wall Street’s predator game and crossing the open sea between paradigms, toward an economy in service of life.
There comes a moment when you realize the world you mastered belongs to a self-terminating paradigm. For me, it was the world of finance — investment banking, private equity, the predator’s playground. I was good at it. Very good. And when you are good at it, the rewards are intoxicating.
Power is not abstract when you have money. It becomes an almost invisible, invincible energy that radiates dominance. You carry it like a second skin, stitched into the fabric of your Armani suit, cinched tight by the suspenders that mark you as a player in the arena of bulls and bears. You don’t need to announce it; the room registers it before you speak. It is not superhero strength, but super-predator confidence — the unspoken knowledge that you can move markets, buy time, and bend circumstances to your will.
It is a strength built on numbers flowing your way, on knowing you can hire, acquire, or fire with a signature. And it is magnified by comparison: those who enter the game with another set of values — humility, stewardship, caution — are at a handicap. They hesitate where you lunge. They calculate consequences while you calculate arbitrage. You are stronger because you play without those weights.
I remember once, early in my career, interviewing a junior hire. When the candidate left the room, my boss turned to me and smiled: “I like him. He has larceny in his heart.” At the time, I took it as the highest compliment. It meant he had the instinct to take, to exploit, to win. That was the measure of belonging in the culture we inhabited. Today, I hear those words differently. What I once accepted as praise now sounds like pathology — a window into the soul of a paradigm that mistakes predation for genius.
But being good at something doesn’t make it right. And when I finally allowed myself to see it clearly, I realized that what I was helping to grow was an economy that devours the very conditions for life. Extraction as virtue. Plundering and polluting as “growth.” Externalities brushed off like crumbs from the table. In that world, value is defined narrowly: if you don’t make money, if you don’t generate profit, you don’t create value.
When I stepped out of that game, something irrevocable happened. The power evaporated. People looked at me differently. They looked down on me, as if I were less, even worthless — a nobody who no longer carried the mark of value the old paradigm had once conferred on me. I could feel the contempt in their glances, the quiet dismissal. And yet it was not only disdain — it was confusion. They didn’t know where to place me. I was outside the circle of profit, no longer recognizable by its rules. Misunderstood, treated as naïve, at times even pitied — as though stepping away from the predator’s game meant I had stepped away from life itself.
The moment that cracked the surface came in a meeting with Stefan Schmidheiny, the founder of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development. He asked me a question no one in finance had ever asked: “What social, cultural, and economic value will you create with the money I am giving you?” I had no answer. Not then. His words landed like a stone dropped into deep water, rippling through me long after the meeting ended. It was the trigger that shook something awake — a quantum shift in consciousness, a recognition that money itself is not the end, only a means. And if the means serves nothing larger than extraction, what does it really serve?
So I stepped out. At first into what was then called sustainability, today evolving into regeneration. It was not a clean arrival but a passage — a limbo between two paradigms. Uncertain yet inevitable. Strange to those whose minds were still tethered to the old set of beliefs. To them, my shift was threatening, even absurd. But the deeper truth was that sustainability and regeneration were never “profitable” enough, not because they lacked value, but because they could not compete on the same terms as the extractive predator economy that offloads its costs onto the commons. When the air is free to pollute and forests are free to clear, the plunderer will always outbid the steward. That is the false math of a dying world.
The limbo I entered was not only a personal exile but a mirror held up to the blindness of an entire system. To minds still anchored in comfort zones, ignorance, or the more dangerous refuge of denial, the crossing I had begun seemed incomprehensible. Yet once the question had been asked, I could not go back.
Something in me refused to keep playing. I stepped off the well-paved path and into the limbo between paradigms. It felt like exile. To leave finance was to leave behind not only income and security, but identity, recognition, even belonging. I entered the open sea: uncertain, disoriented, every certainty dissolved. The temptation to return was always near — the comfortable paycheck, the prestige, the predator’s mask that fit so easily. But my values had shifted. The old harbor was no longer home.
This limbo is not a void, though it often feels like one. It is a crossing. Imagine you are in a ship that has left the safe waters of a familiar lake and now ventures into an ocean without charts. The waters are alive with currents, reefs, sudden storms, and waves that tower over the deck. You sail without instruments, because what lies ahead belongs to an entirely different set of values and beliefs. The old compass does not work here.
And yet, these seas are not ruled by the calculating mind — they are ruled by spirit and by heart. Courage is what carries you forward, and the word itself reminds us of its origin: cor, the Latin for heart. It takes that kind of heart-courage to keep thriving in these waters with conviction, with pure intention, with a purpose that cannot be shaken by circumstance. That is what enables you to dismantle a paradigm built on extraction, competition, and profit, and begin to glimpse a new way of seeing the world.
The gift of uncertainty is that, in the present moment, you can be wholly convinced of what you are doing, even while doubt, anxiety, and moments of despair wash over you. It is difficult to live in this no-man’s-land between paradigms. But then — slowly — you start to notice the signs. The shift of the wind. A swell that rolls differently, suggesting the safety of land ahead.
The smell of earth carried faintly on the breeze. A branch, stripped of leaves, drifting on the tide. A cloud bank forming not over ocean, but above unseen mountains. The sound of gulls calling from somewhere beyond sight. These are not the land itself, but they are its heralds. Proof that something awaits.
That is where we are now. The regenerative paradigm has not yet become the dominant economy. It has relied heavily on philanthropy, fragile and peripheral, unable to compete head-to-head with extraction’s easy profits. But new signals are arriving — frameworks that measure what was once invisible, instruments that finance not depletion but restoration, investors awakening to risks that can no longer be hedged. They are like those seagulls on the horizon: faint at first, but undeniable once you’ve learned to look.
The old world insists there is no value without profit. But the truth is that profit without life is the ultimate worthlessness. An economy that terminates its own foundations cannot be called wealth — it is liquidation. The new paradigm will not be built on liquidation. It will be built on an economy and a financial system consciously placed in service of life itself. Profit still matters, but not as plunder. It becomes the natural surplus that arises when value circulates in coherence with living patterns — the way forests share sugars through roots and fungi, strengthening the whole. In this frame, profit is not the prize of extraction but the signal of thriving, the overflow of systems aligned with reciprocity, resilience, and adaptability. Finance, too, must be re-patterned: not as a predator in suspenders, but as the mycelium of the commons, channeling nutrients where they are needed most.
The very word economy comes from the Greek oikos — home. To re-member this is to restore its purpose: not growth for growth’s sake, but the care of our shared home. Finance in service of life, economy as care, profit as the overflow of aliveness — these are the foundations of the new covenant we must build.
Sailing the open sea between paradigms is disorienting, exhausting, even terrifying. You lose the confidence that comes from clear rules and fixed charts. But you also gain something else: the courage to live by your values even when the shore is not yet visible. And then, one day, you notice the wind smells of pine, or you hear the gulls, or you see driftwood floating by. And you realize: the land is closer than you thought.
The crossing is not forever. The limbo is not a mistake. It is the necessary passage from a world that devours itself to a world that can sustain us all.
