Kevin W. McCarthy

The Professor of On-Purpose

On-Purpose®

Success without Selling Out: The Hidden Cost of Being the Reliable One

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Summary: Being the Reliable One can quietly devolve into a selling-out condition called bitterness. Beware of thin-skinned, testy, tough-hearted people. They’re often former Reliable Ones who lost their way. The On-Purpose Approach shows Reliable Ones how to do their heart work and become tender-hearted and thick-skinned while being authentic to their high character traits of service and dependability. Download A 3-Step Guide for Being On-Purpose®: Success without Selling Out.

Being known as The Reliable One is a noble character quality and often a mark of success. That is, until it crosses into a mental pit called bitterness.

When you’re the one who always comes through, people don’t just appreciate you… they lean on you. They assume you can handle it. They turn to you more often, engage you more frequently, and ask you to get even more done. You relish the responsibility and recognition of your capability and contribution.

You’ve likely heard the expression, “If you want to get something done, ask a busy person.” Here’s a twist for the Reliable Ones: If you want to get something done right, ask the Reliable One.

A Problematic Pattern of the Reliable One

The Reliable One label is complimentary, uplifting, and affirming. But left unchecked a quiet and problematic pattern of selling out emerges.

You know the game. People turn to you to “just do one more thing.” And before long, you’re carrying what was never yours to carry. The danger isn’t that you’re weak. Your kryptonite is that you’re good-hearted, able, and strong.

Now you’re carrying the lion’s share of the load. Others have offloaded their work and responsibilities on you. They go home to their pleasures while you stay late, toiling. The more you step up, the more they step back.

This pattern regularly occurs:

  • Between siblings
  • Between business partners
  • Between spouses
  • Between co-workers
  • Between consultants and clients

Despite all the external accolades, on the inside you increasingly feel the weight. You brain never shuts off. Responsibility follows you everywhere. Your to-do list grows faster than you can check it off. Rest feels like a guilty luxury. Saying “no” feels like letting someone down. As the flood of needs keeps rising, you frantically patch the dam to keep everything from breaking.

Why You’re Susceptible

You are the Reliable One because of your deep desire to serve and deliver results without fanfare. This combination of humble productivity and predictability opens the door to being gradually used, even abused, by others.

It sneaks up on you until one day you ask the sell-out question: “How did I get here?”

You finally recognize that what brought you success is also what’s bringing you down. You feel foolish for being so naïve, for letting others take advantage of you. You’re exhausted, out of order, and fed up with others dumping their work on you while they merrily carry on with their lives while reaping the rewards of your diligence and effort.

And then the resentment begins.

They took advantage of you.
They rode on your back.
They took credit for your work.
They got the promotion.

Welcome to bitterness.

Bad News. Good News.

The bad news: you’re officially bitter.

Your need to feed your “success identity” as the one who gets stuff done right drained your well-being. Unbridled reliability may have built your “successful” career, business, or relationship—but it came at the price of actually enjoying your accomplishments.

Or worse, you hate that you’ve become a doormat for deadbeats.

There it is—the hidden cost of being a successful person with the superpower of reliability.

The good news: you can regain your dignity and your spark for life.

Having recognized this symptom of selling out, it’s time to own it. Don’t wallow in the blame game of what they did to you.

You did this to you. Swallow the bitter pill and let it pass through your system for what it is—psychological waste.

The Hidden Secret to Reclaiming Joy

Intellectually, you know your strength has become a weakness. But efforts to change your habits, environments, or relationships haven’t lasted.

In other words, you can change careers, spouses, bosses, and co-workers—but as a Reliable One, you’ll fall into the same selling-out pattern.

Take heart. Recovery isn’t about becoming less reliable, service-minded, or kind-hearted. Nor is it about doubling down—becoming an even more Reliable One to expose others’ deficiencies.

No. Don’t go there.

To turn bitter into better, focus on who you are—and who you are becoming. Learn to be the Reliable One for yourself. Put your remarkable superpower to work on making your own life make sense.

Help for Your Heart

Your outer work is merely a reflection of your inner work. When something is off in your outer life, the source of the problem is within.

Dig into who you are, where you want to go, how you’ll get there, and what truly matters. In deep-strategy terms, that’s your purpose, vision, missions, and values.

By discerning what matters most—and being strong enough to protect it—you are living On-Purpose.

Here’s help for your heart.

Download A 3-Step Guide for Being On-Purpose®: Success without Selling Out.
It’s a proven, simple way forward to reclaim your authentic self while still being the Reliable One who is happy and whole.

Be On-Purpose!
Kevin

When Success Starts to Feel Like Selling Out

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Forlorn man contemplating his life over coffee while looking a people running around like ants.

What happens when from the outside, your life looks good; your work and you are highly respected; your calendar is full, your income is solid; you’re productive, reliable, and admired; and by most measures, you’re succeeding.

But something is off. “Selling out,” in this context, isn’t a matter of greed, moral failure, or succumbing to bribery. We’re not talking sinister motives. You’re a good, upstanding person.

Nothing dramatic happened. Nothing was suddenly broken. It’s just this persistent unsettling sense that something feels out of order in your approach to life. 

Selling out is something subtler and all too common. It is more like “How did I end up here?”

What “Selling Out” Really Means

Selling out isn’t about making money or achieving success. It’s about small compromises over time that eventually led to being in a place never intended. Accompanying this can be a forlorn sense of a lost dream or an out-of-character fear of rocking the boat. 

Selling out involves quietly exchanging something (or someone) that truly matters, such as your values, your standards, or your sense of self for external rewards like approval, status, or security. What’s fleeting is chosen over the enduring. 

It doesn’t happen all at once. It happens in small, seemingly logical decisions over time with the compound effect catching up with you. It happens when you are:

•       Saying yes when your gut says no
•       Staying busy to avoid pondering deeper questions
•       Accepting work that pays your bills but drains your soul  
•       Engaging in entertainment while neglecting responsibilities
•       Convincing yourself “This is just how it is right now” 

From the outside, it plays as progress.
From the inside, it lands as distress.

What Selling Out Is Not

You can be successful, busy, and well compensated without selling out. Selling out is not lack of ambition or responsibility. It’s not forgoing your family or failing to get the job done.

Selling out only occurs when success comes at the expense of your identity and purpose. It happens when what you’re doing no longer reflects who you are or who you’re becoming. And it eats away at your spirit and you start disliking who you are becoming. 

The Quiet Warning Sign

The most reliable signal that you’re selling out isn’t guilt or stress. It’s numbness, a secret apathy that’s set in. You care, but you really don’t care. The emotional disconnect is real. You’ve fallen out of love.
You stop asking Is this still worth it? And you start asking Is this how I want to live the rest of my life?

You discount those questions with But I don’t really have a choice.
That’s when settling and accepting has become your unsettled way of life. 

Why High Performers Are So Vulnerable

The problem is that your success keeps rewarding the very behaviors that created your disorientating condition. Your outer, public persona demands growth and expansion, while your inner life can’t keep up and quietly shrinks for fear of exposure.

It isn’t failure. It is success at something that no longer fits. It is climbing the proverbial ladder of success, peering over the wall, and questioning, Is this what I’ve been working so hard to achieve all these years? In other words, the reality didn’t meet the anticipation. 

Reframing Success without Selling Out

Success is no longer what you can accumulate. It’s become not betraying who you are. In a word: authenticity. No more faking it, impostor syndrome, or playing an ill-fitted role. You’re stepping up to be the leader of your life. 

Here’s six authenticity anchors:
1.     Integrity over optics  
2.     Sustainability over expediency  
3.     Stewardship over indifference  
4.     Meaning over materialism
5.     Strategy over trial and error
6.     Simplicity over complexity

Why On-Purpose

Being On-Purpose happens when success is defined internally and expressed externally with intentionality. Selling out happens when success is predominantly defined externally.

Don’t step back. Don’t abandon ambition, making money, or career advancement. Far from it. Roar into the marketplace. However, step up. Broaden your definition of success so your inner life can comfortably sustain your outer life. Grow up by getting your life in order, on-purpose. 

Be On-Purpose!
Kevin

Download for Free:
A 3-Step Guide to Being On-Purpose: Success without Selling Out

Part 2: Preparing to Cast Your Vote in the US Presidential Election?

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Trump and Harris Presidential Election 2024. The meaning of life

My post last week provoked a number of readers, particularly this observation: “Therefore, when it comes to casting your vote for president, look beyond the rhetorical barbs, attack ads, and commercial sound bites designed to appeal to our secular selves. Harris unabashedly leans into a culture of death. Trump awkwardly leans into a culture of life.”

Readers were particularly curious about the terms “culture of death” and “culture of life.” I borrowed these phrases from watching The 1916 Project documentary. Gain context by watching the film for free on the X social media platform. I highly recommend it.

What is a culture of death?
This is a societal moral state whereby human life is deemed to be expendable, meaningless, and without innate purpose. This phenomenon challenges traditional values regarding life and morality and is exercised through abortion, euthanasia, and certain ideologies linked to eugenics and materialistic views. Therefore, putting others to death essentially without due process is justifiable in the situational eyes of the beholder and carries no legal, ethical, or personal consequence. The Holocaust is the ultimate example of this notion carried to its logical conclusion.

The Project 1916 documentary traces our current culture of death as rooted in a 1700s population control philosophy. Like frogs in the proverbial kettle, this once creeping ideology is accelerating into acceptance as a present-day societal norm and practice. Therefore, the convenient removal of an inconvenient tissue mass with a heartbeat from within a woman’s womb is of no consequences to the mind, body, or spirit.

On February 3, 1994, at the National Prayer Breakfast, Mother Teresa  addressed the societal and personal impact of abortion (13-minute mark): “But I feel that the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because Jesus said, ‘If you receive a little child, you receive me.’ So, every abortion is the denial of receiving Jesus — is the neglect of receiving Jesus. It is really a war against the child, a direct killing of the innocent child, murder by the mother herself. And if we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another?”

According to a report on National Public Radio, in 2023, the number of abortions performed in the US was 1,026,690 — that’s an average of 2,813 terminations of life per day. This represents an increase in abortions since the overturn of Roe v. Wade. The world was horrified on 9/11 as 2,996 souls died in the terrorist attacks, as seen on television. Ending an inconvenient pregnancy in the privacy of a healthcare clinic receives little outcry except perhaps for the one soul being legally executed as the final solution.

What is a culture of life?
This is a moral state where all life is celebrated as sacred, and each person has innate worth, meaning, and purpose, often in spite of our limited ability to see or understand it. These traditional value are rooted in the Sixth Commandment, “Thou shalt not kill.”

In 1776, the US Declaration of Independence put forth the following: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The concept of Life as a right is codified in the US Constitution, including the presumption of innocence — all are innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Therefore, an abortion like any death sentence demands thoughtful adjudication and rare use as an exception versus the rule.

Yet, like the aforementioned frogs being slowly boiled in a pot, our national and international norms continue a slide into a culture of death, i.e., abortion on demand without due process of the unborn — the most innocent of all and most worthy of our protection — is murderously wrong.

From carrying a baby to carrying guilt
If you are a woman who terminated a pregnancy or a man who pushed a woman for one and you are suffering because of your decision, you have a paradoxical choice. Just because you made a decision for a “culture of death” once doesn’t mean your soul is forever committed to it. You can make a tough shift switch toward a culture of life where healing and wholeness await you.

By definition, restoration is not possible in the culture of death. Philosophically, your abortion carries “no consequences.” “So what’s the problem? Move on with your life,” which was the point of the termination of the inconvenient pregnancy in the first place.

In contrast, only within a culture of life is your complex imprisonment of emotions compassionately recognized as carrying hauntingly adverse consequences. As a result of grace, forgiveness, and acceptance, your deep hurt can be redeemed and your wellbeing restored.

“Elections have consequences.”
In January 2009, shortly after winning the presidency, former President Barack Obama uttered these three words that have become a political truism. The 2024 election will have consequences.

Because of the two-party system, US elections are largely binary events: VP Harris or former President Trump. “Either-or” choices create stark contrasts in what can otherwise be a complex web of competing thoughts. Hopefully, this death or life contrast of cultures offers guidance if you’re feeling lost in the moral trees, having lost sight of the forest fire burning around us.

On-Purpose, for example, uses an “on” light switch as a reminder we are either off- or on-purpose — in the dark or in the light. It’s a subtle nod to another binary choice: Life is either meaningful or meaningless. Naturally, with on-purpose, I unreservedly advocate the “life is meaningful” choice. And I uphold your free speech right to respectfully disagree by voting your conscience.

Be On-Purpose!
Kevin

How To Be On-Purpose in Business & LIfe

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You never really know how your work touches another person’s life.While I’ve known Dr. Jim for over 30 years, I had no idea until this interview the impact of our working together on his 2-word purpose. Here’s the interview in its entirety.

Jim, as you’ll see, is a bright guy with a curious mind and a steward’s heart. His strong Christian faith comes through in this interview — as does mine. Thanks to his inquisitive mind, we go deep with some on-purpose principles. Given our relationship, there’s a natural comfort in our conversation, which I hope translates into a deeper appreciation and application of your 2-word purpose.   As always, your comments are welcomed.

Be On-Purpose!

Kevin

Dr. Jim Harris

Daring Business Owners to Profit the World

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Why does your business exist? Pause and answer. 

Image of man fanning one hundred dollar bills with the question, Why does your business exist?

Over the decades, I’ve posed this question to business leaders and audiences. Here’s the four most popular and consolidated responses of my unvalidated survey:

  • 50% to make money or to profit the shareholders
  • 20% to sell goods or services to customers
  • 20% to provide jobs
  • 10% to raise the standard of living in society

So what did you answer?

The first three accurately describe what businesses do (missions), but not the reason why businesses exist (purpose). Confusing missions as purpose creates an “it’s all about me first” approach to leading a business. Such a self-centered orientation distorts the business and ironically diminishes performance. 

Unfortunately, this is the prevailing principle at work within the CEO-system of business administration. Most business owners are unwittingly placing mission ahead of purpose from ignorance, not malice. Regardless, the adverse effects remain the same.

Purpose provides a point of origin to meaningfully resolve, satisfactorily align, and fluidly blend otherwise competing interests in service to God, self, and others. Purpose (being) informs vision (seeing) and is expressed through its missions (doing) while guided by its values (choosing).

Businesses hold the special opportunity to profit (add value) to the world’s people. Business is first a social construct whose greatest potential to earn, sell, and hire ultimately relies upon improving the lives or standard of living of people — shareholders, team members, customers, vendors, and more. This common good mindset is akin to answering the question, “How does our business make a difference or the world a better place?”

If your business doesn’t have a 2-word purpose, you’ll find in Chief Leadership Officer the suggestion to use “We exist to serve by Increasing Wealth.” One caveat for using wealth (state of weal or well-being) is to embrace the whole person perspective (body, mind, spirit, and financial) plus working and living conditions — one’s standard of living. 

My bet is you don’t have a purpose statement. Rather you have a vision or missions and you’ve haven’t a clue what its costing your company in lost financial profit.

Business has a high and noble role to play in society. We are to profit the world–to make the world a better place. I dare you to re-consider how your business purpose is stated, communicated, and integrated throughout your company.

Let your business reformation begin!

Be On-Purpose!
Kevin

PS: Need some help sorting out purpose, vision, missions, and values. Schedule a time to Pick Kevin’s Brain.

How Do You Measure Your Meaning or Purpose In Life?

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[This question in the blog post title was posted on Quora. Below is my response.]

Life is 100% meaningful so there’s no need to measure it. The simplest explanation is this, in the cosmic sense either life is meaningful or it is isn’t.

In some scientific manner, I can’t prove that life is meaningful. So it takes a leap of faith, not necessarily religion, to embrace the concept of absolute meaning. In short, each of us gets to choose our absolute worldview: either life is meaningful or it is not. Semi-meaningful isn’t a choice.

Given the choice of life is meaningful or meaningless, why choose coloring your life with the despair and hopelessness of the latter? Even when the current condition or situation or relationship appears meaningless, meaning is at work in the background waiting to frame it with hope and possibilities. It means being expectant and seeking it. The other option casts us deep into the darkness of the ultimate “living” void.

Purpose provides a more personal connection to the cosmic meaning of life. It’s our unique understanding of who we are and how we belong on the planet. Purpose, like meaning, is always present in our lives.

Where it gets confusing is our awareness of whether we are on our purpose–aligned with and giving expression to our purpose or not. That’s being on-purpose or off-purpose, respectively.

“Highest and best use” is a term used in the appraisal (measurement) industry. In times of “highest and best use” of the expression of purpose we’re apt to check the box and say, “Yes, that’s meaningful.” In “bad times,” we’re erroneously declaring, “That’s not meaningful.”

The measure of meaning, therefore, is relative against an absolute benchmark. In this sense, how meaning is measured is up to the individual to define their version of “highest and best use” and “lowest and worse use” and all that is in between.

The point is this: you have one life that is rich in meaning and capable of higher and better expression of your purpose. Your choice is free of your current condition or circumstance. Therefore, choose the life is meaningful worldview and you’ll inherently have a 100%.

Are You In The Midst Of A Tough Shift? (part 3)

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(This video was originally recorded on Valentine’s Day. Every day should engage your heart.)

Purpose is a matter of the heart!

Far too often we tend to think of the heart as a weak or soft place subject to vulnerability. Nothing is further from the truth. We’re most at risk when we don’t know the depth of our heart or who we are.

Your 2-word purpose statement is an expression of your heart that gives your head a way to use, remember, and engage the true strength of who you are. Not knowing your heart is a disadvantage avoidable only by you.

Would you like help in discovering your 2-word Personal Purpose Statement?

Go to ONPURPOSE.me. ONPURPOSE.me logoThis online app will guide you through a process of selecting a purpose statement, plus you’ll receive a 10-email course that’s practical to being on-purpose. The limited-time reduced launch price is currently available.

The graphic I’m using to illustration the heart and head relationship is called The On-Purpose Pal. He’s introduced in The On-Purpose Business Person and has advanced to a big part of all things On-Purpose. The “OP Pal” graces The On-Purpose Poster that clarifies the language of leadership: Purpose, Vision, Missions, and Values.

Explore Your Possibilities in 2017

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The fish is back! Some of you longtime fans may remember the fish from our old website. It seemed only appropriate to bring him back for the new year.

2017 marks a new message and movement launch from On-Purpose Partners. The launch of Chief Leadership Officer as the fresh replacement for Chief Executive Officer begins in earnest. By April of 2017, the book will be released but that’s just one modality for the message. Hang on for this ride because I’ve been there before. Prediction: by 2022, over 50% of new businesses founded will be led by CLOs. The business reformation begins in 2017!

In 1992, when The On-Purpose Person was released, the number of people who talked meaningfully about purpose could be counted on one hand. Today, all the world is talking about purpose. On-Purpose® still remains ahead of its time as most “experts” have a well-intended but light grasp of the soulful depth and possibilities for what it means to be on-purpose. On-Purpose will draft the winds of CLO so both messages are brought to a higher reality in more people’s lives and work.

From the team at On-Purpose Partners, we sincerely wish you an On-Purpose New Year in 2017!

Be On-Purpose!
Kevin