February 2025

I want to start this newsletter by flipping the script on a common refrain:

The first step to recovering is admitting you have a problem.

That’s a profound and important truth, but the framing is unnecessarily negative. What if we said something equally true, but much simpler:

The first step to achieving a goal is admitting you have a goal.

We have to name the things we want—whether it’s defining our purpose or owning our various identities as parents, business owners, or ______. Why is naming things so important? Glad you asked!

“I’m Morgan, and I’m a business owner.”

If we met at a party, and you asked me what I did for a living, I might tell you I’m a financial advisor. Or maybe I’d say I’m a musician. (Depends on the venue.) I rarely lead with, “I’m a business owner.” And that’s something I’ve had to work on. Because I *am* a business owner. And the more time I spend helping entrepreneurs build intentional businesses, the more I realize how important it is to identify as a business owner.

But… what’s in a name?

It sounds silly but the title can help you acknowledge that you run a business. Again, that sounds obvious, but businesses have multiple components—from the financial side to the marketing side, plus legal, HR, and everything in between. When you acknowledge that you own a business, you acknowledge this complexity. And that’s the first step to figuring out what parts of your business you might be able to outsource or optimize… it’s the first step toward building a business on purpose.

If you’re not sure how to approach that mindset shift, I put together some tips.

“Our goal as a family is to get organized”

Naming your goals isn’t just a business strategy. It’s equally important for people and families. I talk about this a lot when I discuss defining your purpose or creating a family mission statement.

This doesn’t have to be huge and lofty. It certainly can be—you might your family values community service and giving back. That can translate into big things—from a charitable giving strategy to an estate plan. But it can also translate to smaller day-to-day activities.

I also encourage families to set smaller goals, or intentions, for life.

So for example, with my family, we’ve said that we value calm time at home as one of our big picture values. That’s part of our mission statement, because it keeps us grounded. But for the last few months, we’ve had a goal of getting organized. Our kids are getting older, we have toys and clothes to cycle out and new ones to put away. And so, “getting organized!” has become a bit of a rallying cry. We check in every week to see how we’re doing on it.

Guess what? Naming it made it much easier for us to make progress on it.

If you want to get started setting smaller goals for you family, consider having weekly family meetings where you start naming and tracking these things.

New music coming soon

I’ve said it before, but saying that I’m a musician in a band out loud helped us manifest our dream of releasing a produced studio album. And the first singles are now, officially, only weeks away.

I can’t think of a better way to prove that owning your identity can help you manifest it than by sharing Cardinal with you.

Be yourself, on purpose.

The point of this email isn’t to get you to claim identities that you aren’t comfortable with, or lock yourself into goals you’re not ready for. Rather, it’s to guide you into putting words to the things you’re already doing.

Having a purpose is a bit like having a budget or a diet.

You HAVE a budget, whether you track it and acknowledge it or not.

You HAVE a diet if you put food into your body—that’s true even if you aren’t intentional about it.

What you do for work, or as a parent, or as a person… it’s all going to have an impact on the world. So why not make sure you have the impact that you *want* to have?

If you’re going to do something, you might as well do it on purpose.

(It’s much harder to be successful by accident.)