It’s Never Too Late to Clarify Your Impact and Activate your Purpose

4 min readMar 16, 2021

Inspiring Capital’s Purposeful Growth Fellowship is a thought-provoking, action-oriented, customizable learning experience for leaders who want to accelerate the movement toward Inclusive and Sustainable Capitalism. The Fellowship provides knowledge, tools, guidance, and community during a fully virtual, 10-week program. Ideal Fellows come from diverse ages, industries, and backgrounds but share the desires to better align their professional work with their personal purpose and uniquely contribute to Inclusive and Sustainable Capitalism.

Today we are interviewing Mac McGoldrick, a Fall 2020 Inspiring Capital (IC) Purposeful Growth Fellow who is a current Vedic religion professor at Colorado State University and who spent 10 years as a Buddhist monk. Mac gives us his views on the importance of activating one’s purpose and the role the Purposeful Growth Fellowship (PGF) played in his personal development.

Tell us about yourself!

I am currently a professor at Colorado State University where I teach courses in Vedic religion, which primarily encompasses Hinduism and Buddhism. I have a couple of degrees there, and I was a Buddhist monk for 10 years. On a day-to-day basis, I teach classes and carry out research, which entails translating ancient texts, and I contribute to some documentary work with BBC. On the side I have been doing consulting work with a few Silicon Valley companies on corporate wellbeing, health and resiliency programming. I helped develop a program at Intel and am now working with a few other companies of varying sizes. I am starting to formalize this work by creating a business, rather than it being merely a side hustle. I plan on continue teaching, but also looking to expand this consulting work. I am also working on a book project that will incorporate some of the things that I began to think about during the Purposeful Growth Fellowship.

What led you to pursue your current career and why did you decide to join the Purposeful Growth Fellowship?

My calling has always been to be a teacher. When I was a monk, I was in what is called a Shedra, an academic and rigorous philosophical program. I thrive in an opportunity where I can learn and I love that my work affords me the opportunity to learn from hundreds of students every year and the opportunity to engage in the kind of research that I do.

I became aware of the PGF last spring (2020) after taking a four-week course with Nell Derrick Debevoise (CEO of Inspiring Capital), and I became very interested in the concept of purpose from a teaching perspective. I wanted to learn the language and the philosophy of purpose that that I could being to incorporate that into my teaching and my lectures, but also as a kind of field research for how these concepts might inform some of the corporate consulting work that I do.

In regards to having a purposeful career, why it is important to clarify your impact and activate your purpose?

In Tibetan Buddhism there’s a concept called “precious human life.” This concept basically says that if you and I were to try to figure out how we got to this interview today, it’s inconceivable because there are innumerable causes and conditions that had to happen for us to be having this conversation. To a certain extent it is called “precious human life meaning” because if you really sit down and think about it, it is extraordinary that we are who we are and that we have the opportunities and the skillsets that we have, which is why you can’t waste this gift.

Activating your purpose allows for you to recognize how extraordinary the opportunity of life is.

I hope we recognize that all of us have something amazing and extraordinary to offer, which I call our “unique genius,” and to help facilitate that is a great honor. I hope that everybody can activate their purpose so that people don’t waste what they are and who they are by doing something un- or less-purposeful.

What role does professional development work and the Purposeful Growth Fellowship play in helping someone identify and activate their purpose?

I think the Purposeful Growth Fellowship was really great in activating purpose. The readings and exercises that were presented every week gave me a focused opportunity to really think through concepts like purpose, mindfulness, health, wellbeing, resilience. While these concepts are all very interesting platitudes, I noticed that unless someone really takes the time to help you understand them and how to turn them into action, these learnings are not informative of professional development.

The PGF gave me an extraordinary opportunity to take the necessary time to think through these things, and the community and space to transform them into real action. What I liked the most about it is that at the end of the sessions I felt like I was really inspired. It lit a fire for me, as I hope it did for others as well.

Final words of wisdom: What would you tell someone interested in a purposeful career? Any final insights, advice, perspective, ideas on where to start, etc…

As a professor and as a religious practitioner I always defer to the idea that you have to do the work or else you may be nominally a student or nominally a Buddhist or Catholic.

I encourage people to recognize that they can work with people like Nell (who I think is the bee’s knees!) to guide and support your learning and growth in ways you couldn’t have come to on your own.

The PGF is a cool opportunity if you invest yourself, dig in and be vulnerable. Another important piece of it is to allow yourself to be vulnerable and not expect yourself to have all the decisions and understandings for what your future looks like. Embracing this vulnerability is critical to one’s personal success in the program.