Tuesday Email: Research + Pillars

Happy Tuesday!

Every Tuesday I'd like to offer strategies for the week ahead and a thought to fuel your action. This week’s insight comes from one of the most important studies we’ve ever done—and you can download the full study here.

What if I told you that 71% of millionaires would still work even if they didn't need the money?

This isn't about work addiction or boredom. It reveals something counterintuitive about human nature: financial freedom isn't a number—it's a feeling that money can't buy.

The Accomplishment Trap

For most of my career, I lived in what I now call "the accomplishment trap." Each business milestone brought the same cycle: euphoria, followed by an empty feeling, followed by the desperate search for the next achievement that would finally deliver lasting satisfaction.

The trap felt real because the stakes were real. I wasn't just chasing success—I was running from the fear that without constant achievement, I'd discover I wasn't enough. The problem wasn't that I was failing; it was that succeeding never felt like enough.

Then my business coach asked a question that changed everything: "What does freedom actually mean to you?"

Not financial freedom. Not time freedom. Just freedom.

After months of digging, I discovered something that surprised me: I wanted freedom to be curious without judgment. Freedom to explore ideas on a Tuesday morning without someone telling me I should be at my desk. Freedom from the invisible rules about how successful people are supposed to spend their time and money.

This revelation shifted everything. I stopped chasing accomplishments and started chasing alignment with what actually mattered to me. And here's what happened: my baseline level of satisfaction—what psychologists call our "set point"—actually moved higher.

What Our Industry Missed

Our clients are telling us the same thing, and we're not listening.

The data from our most recent national study of affluent Americans doesn't lie:

• 57% of affluent Americans rank financial freedom as a top goal

• Only 12.6% define wealth as an actual dollar amount

• 65% don't feel confident they'll have enough to retire

• 66% don't feel confident they can live the lifestyle they want in retirement

Here's the insight that changes everything: People with robust financial plans and successful portfolios still don't feel financially free.

They need something portfolio performance alone can't deliver: a sense of purpose that connects their money to what matters most.

What's Really Happening Beneath the Surface

There's something our industry hasn't fully grasped yet: we're witnessing the emergence of what is commonly referred to as "purpose anxiety" as the defining challenge of our time. Research shows that 91% of people experience depression and stress stemming from their inability to figure out their life's purpose. Think about that for a moment. Your clients may have their asset allocation perfectly optimized, their tax strategies beautifully coordinated, and their estate plans elegantly structured—but they're still lying awake at 3 AM wondering if they're living the right life.

This isn't a peripheral issue that occasionally surfaces during annual reviews. It's the core issue that colors every financial decision they make. When someone can't articulate why they're accumulating wealth beyond "security" or "comfort," they'll never feel secure or comfortable, regardless of their account balance. They're chasing a moving target because they've never defined what they're actually aiming for.

What makes this even more significant is that we're simultaneously experiencing a fundamental shift in the nature of value itself. We're moving from an industrial mentality focused on hard skills, analytical thinking, and tactical execution toward something that requires entirely different capabilities: creativity, emotional intelligence, and genuine human connection. These aren't "soft skills"—they're the most human skills we possess, and they're becoming the most valuable because they're the only skills that can't be automated or commoditized.

While we've spent decades building our practices around our ability to analyze markets, construct portfolios, and optimize tax strategies, our clients' deepest needs require something fundamentally different: the ability to ask questions that haven't been asked, hold space for difficult conversations about meaning and legacy, and help people discover what they actually want their money to accomplish in their lives. The challenge is that most of us weren't trained for this kind of work, and it feels uncomfortable because it's so different from what made us successful in the past.

What makes this evolution urgent rather than optional is that the demand isn't coming—it's already here. Our own research reveals that 88% of affluent Americans believe helping with life purpose should be part of their advisor's role, and 81% want to work with an advisor who connects their life purpose to financial planning. Meanwhile, 57% of affluent Americans who are currently using a financial advisor say they wish they better understood their own life's purpose, and 78% say it would be really useful if their advisor could help them clarify it.

The gap between what clients want and what we're delivering isn't small—it's enormous. And it represents the single greatest opportunity our industry has seen in decades.

The Two Barriers Standing in Our Way

Understanding that our clients want this kind of deeper engagement is one thing. Actually delivering it is something entirely different. Through working with hundreds of advisors who've attempted to make this transition, I've identified two critical barriers that determine success or failure in this evolution.

The first barrier is mindset, and it's more fundamental than most people realize. This isn't just about being "open" to having deeper conversations with clients. It requires a complete reframing of what our value actually is. For decades, we've built our professional identity around being the person in the room who knows the most about markets, tax law, and financial products. Our confidence came from our analytical expertise and our ability to solve technical problems.

Purpose-based advising flips this dynamic entirely. Instead of being the expert who provides answers, you become the guide who asks better questions. Instead of demonstrating your knowledge, you demonstrate your curiosity about what matters most to your client. Instead of leading with what you know, you lead with what you want to understand about them.

This shift is uncomfortable because it requires a level of vulnerability that many advisors have never developed professionally. You must be willing to ask questions about someone's deepest hopes and fears, their regrets and dreams, their sense of meaning and legacy—and you must be prepared to sit with whatever answers emerge, even when they're messy or uncertain.

But here's what makes this particularly challenging: you can't authentically guide someone through an exploration of purpose if you haven't done that work yourself. This isn't about learning a new set of techniques or conversation frameworks. It's about developing the self-awareness to understand your own relationship with meaning, success, and fulfillment. It requires examining why you chose this profession, what drives your own financial decisions, and what you've learned about the relationship between money and happiness from your own life experience.

Many advisors try to skip this internal work and jump straight to asking purpose questions with clients. They fail because clients can sense inauthenticity immediately. When someone asks you about your deepest motivations, you know within seconds whether they're genuinely curious or just following a script.

The second barrier is leverage, and it's where even well-intentioned advisors get stuck. Let's say you've done the mindset work. You understand purpose, you've explored it in your own life, and you're genuinely excited about having these deeper conversations with clients. Then reality hits: you have 150 client relationships, and the idea of going through an intensive purpose exploration process with each of them feels impossible given your current operational structure.

This is where most advisors give up. They convince themselves that purpose-based advising is a luxury for advisors with smaller client bases or bigger teams. But that's not true. What's true is that delivering this kind of value requires an entirely different approach to leverage than what most of us have built.

Traditional leverage in our industry has been about delegation—hiring people to handle the tasks we don't want to do, so we can focus on the tasks we do want to do. Purpose-based advising requires what I call "systematic leverage"—building processes and infrastructure that allow you to deliver deep, personalized value at scale.

This means identifying which parts of the purpose exploration process can be systematized without losing their impact. It means using simple automation not just for routine tasks, but for creating the space and structure that allows meaningful conversations to happen more efficiently. It means understanding the first principles of purpose-based planning so clearly that you can eliminate unnecessary steps rather than just automating them.

Most importantly, it means building a team that understands not only the technical aspects of financial planning but also the emotional and psychological dynamics of helping people discover what they want their money to achieve. This requires different hiring criteria, training approaches, and measures of success than what most firms have developed.

The advisors who successfully make this transition don't just add purpose conversations to their existing process. They redesign their entire client experience around the premise that financial planning without purpose exploration is incomplete planning. They create systems that make deep, meaningful conversations not just possible, but inevitable.

The Questions That Will Define Your Future

Here's what I've observed: when advisors first encounter this data about purpose and financial freedom, they typically fall into one of three groups. The first group immediately pushes back, insisting that their clients just want good returns and low fees. They're convinced that all this talk about purpose is just consultant-speak that doesn't apply to their real-world practice.

The second group gets excited about the idea but then gets overwhelmed by the practical challenges. They can see why purpose-based advising makes sense, but they struggle to envision how to implement it given their current constraints, including time, team, and systems.

The third group—the smallest group—recognizes both the opportunity and the challenges, but they're willing to do the work anyway. They understand that this evolution isn't optional if they want to build sustainable, differentiated practices that AI or low-fee competitors can't replicate.

These are the FutureProof Advisors, and they share three characteristics: they've committed to doing the internal work required to understand their own relationship with purpose and meaning, they've built the operational leverage necessary to have these conversations at scale, and they've embraced the discomfort of innovation rather than clinging to what made them successful in the past.

The Choice Ahead

We stand at a crossroads. One path leads us toward becoming increasingly commoditized, competing on fees while technology automates our analytical value. The other path leads toward something that can never be automated: helping people discover and align with their deepest sense of purpose.

The data shows us which path our clients want us to take. The question is whether we're brave enough to take it.

The FutureProof Advisors—those who build the mindset, create the leverage, and embrace this innovation—aren't just preparing for the future. They're creating it.

Purpose isn't a retreat from financial planning. It's financial planning that finally addresses what money was always supposed to serve: a life well-lived.

Explore the findings from our recent national study: The FutureProof Advisor: A Blueprint for Tomorrow. Download the entire study today.

The best is ahead!

-Matt