Meaning: What Makes It Powerful and Why No Leader Should Ignore It
- nisraely
- 10 minutes ago
- 14 min read
“Meaning makes some things matter more than others, helping determine where we invest our finite lives.”
As far as we know, from unicellular organisms to mammals, no other living creature begins the day by asking, “What is my mission?”, “What is the meaning of my life?”, “What do I want to be remembered for?”, or “What is my dream?” A monkey may seek food, a lion may hunt, and an antelope may try not to become the lion’s meal, but humans do something remarkably different: we can ask whether our lives matter and what would make them meaningful.
Humans have a recurring desire not merely to exist but to matter, and across history we have acted on that desire in countless ways. We do not want to pass through life like a shadow that briefly crosses the ground and then disappears without a trace. Whether or not permanence was their intention, prehistoric hands remain imprinted on cave walls tens of thousands of years after their makers disappeared; artists sign works they hope will outlast them; athletes strive to be the first or the best; explorers seek places no one has reached before; and others devote enormous effort to creating, discovering, building, leading, and achieving something that distinguishes their lives. Some leave marks on a much larger scale. Egyptian pharaohs built monuments that have survived entire civilizations, while rulers and conquerors changed history so profoundly that their names remain familiar centuries later. But how do we know whether our lives matter? Because significance itself is difficult to see or measure, we often look for visible evidence in what we achieve and in the recognition we receive from others. Wealth, status, awards, records, followers, rankings, valuations, and titles can all seem to provide such evidence. Yet they are imperfect measures of significance. Some of the people who matter most to us have no monuments, fortunes, records, or famous names. We remember a parent, teacher, friend, colleague, or relative because something about who they were changed who we became. Their mark may be invisible to history but unmistakable in us, suggesting that visibility and significance are not the same thing.
For much of my life, I wanted to do something significant. Part of me wanted others to recognize my work as proof that my life had mattered, and if they did not, I at least wanted to believe it myself. Only later did I understand that leaving a mark and living meaningfully are not the same thing. A mark can be enormous or almost invisible, admired or condemned, while fame can endure for centuries without telling us whether the person who achieved it experienced life as meaningful. Recognition, remembrance, significance, and Meaning can overlap, but they are not interchangeable.
The deeper question is therefore not whether we leave a mark or receive recognition, but why some people, relationships, activities, ideas, responsibilities, and futures come to matter to us at all, and why that significance can become powerful enough to shape how we use the finite life available to us. I will not try here to explain why human beings developed this need or capacity. It is enough to begin with the fact that some things matter to us more than others and to ask: what makes something matter?
Meaning
We can become highly capable without knowing what is worth doing with those capabilities. Knowledge, skill, wealth, technology, or influence may expand what is possible, but they do not tell us which possibilities should matter to us. Among the many possibilities available, some come to matter while others do not. We may devote years to understanding a scientific problem, care deeply about another person, build something, preserve something inherited, raise children, or work toward a future whose consequences may appear only much later. Although these pursuits are very different from one another, they all matter to someone. Before we can understand why people devote years of effort, care, or sacrifice to one path rather than another, we first need to understand what makes some possibilities significant in the first place.
What these very different pursuits share is not what they are, but the fact that they have become significant to someone. This is the particular sense in which I will use the word Meaning here. Meaning is experienced significance: the condition in which someone or something comes to matter to a conscious being. What matters need not be useful, productive, or measurable. A person can matter before contributing anything, and a relationship, memory, place, responsibility, or experience can matter without producing an identifiable outcome. Meaning, therefore, describes a relationship of significance, not a property stored within the thing that matters.
Meaning cannot be reduced to pleasure, success, ease, or recognition. Some of the things that matter most to us can be difficult, uncertain, or painful, while pleasurable experiences may pass through our lives without becoming important. Raising children offers a familiar example: responsibility, worry, cost, and effort can coexist with profound Meaning. Yet difficulty itself does not create Meaning, because many difficult experiences remain meaningless. Rather, when something matters deeply enough, costs that might otherwise seem excessive can become worth bearing. That willingness to bear costs reveals another consequence of Meaning: when some things matter more than others, we begin to organize our limited time, attention, and resources around them. Meaning therefore helps establish priorities, while Purpose begins to orient what we do because something matters. A person may know that family is deeply significant without yet knowing how to organize life around that significance.
What people prioritize often involves others: family, relationships, care, responsibility, or participation in something shared. This raises another question: why can belonging make life more meaningful without requiring us to lose what makes us distinct?
Belonging
Much of what matters deeply in human life appears in relationships with other people. Family, friendship, love, care, community, and shared work can all become sources of significance, but that observation raises questions rather than answers them. Do people matter to us because of what they contribute, or can they matter independently of usefulness? A child makes this especially clear; a newborn contributes very little in any functional sense while requiring enormous care, time, and responsibility. Yet imagine loving parents being offered another child who was healthier, more intelligent, easier to raise, more likely to succeed, and less costly to support. For most parents, the comparison itself would be a fundamental failure to understand what their child means to them. They do not love a category called “child” or a collection of capabilities that could be exchanged for a superior one. They love this particular child. Even if that child is born with serious limitations or later loses capabilities through illness or injury, another more capable child does not become an equivalent substitute. The child matters not simply because of what they can do, but because of who this particular person has become within the relationship.
The distinction between usefulness and significance persists throughout human life. Functions and capabilities can often be substituted: an organization may replace one accountant with another, or a farmer may replace one machine with a more efficient one. Deep relationships do not normally work that way. A partner, sibling, or lifelong friend is not interchangeable simply because someone else could perform similar functions more effectively. Particular people become embedded in memories, affection, responsibilities, shared experiences, and histories that belong specifically to those involved. Their significance is therefore not merely instrumental; they become part of the “we” through which we understand our own lives. Yet the people who become significant to us are not born as the finished persons we later know. We begin with different biological inheritances and developmental histories, but much of who we become emerges through ongoing interaction with family, culture, relationships, experience, and the wider environment. What becomes “me” is therefore neither fully determined in advance nor simply imposed from outside.
Early in life, much of the world that shapes us is not of our choosing. We do not choose our parents, first language, surrounding culture, religion, appearance, or many of the expectations through which we first learn what is praised, discouraged, or desirable. As we mature and gain greater agency, however, we become better able to examine what we inherited, retain some parts, reject or reinterpret others, and seek different relationships or environments. We become who we are, in part, through what we receive from others, while growing agency gives us greater ability to reshape what we received. In this sense, the Southern African idea of Ubuntu, often summarized as “I am because we are,” captures something important: we do not become ourselves apart from other people, even though belonging does not make us all the same.
Belonging does not require the loss of individuality. In cults, totalitarian regimes, and other coercive systems, however, the individual may be expected to dissolve into the group, suppressing difference to become an indistinguishable part of the collective. Other forms of belonging work differently. Families, friendships, organizations, and communities can become stronger precisely because their members remain distinct and bring different perspectives, experiences, judgments, and skills. The deeper form of belonging may therefore be not the surrender of the “I” to the “we,” but the creation of a “we” in which distinct individuals can remain themselves while becoming more capable together.
Yet greater Capability cannot be our measure of Meaning. Some relationships remain profoundly significant even as Capability declines rather than grows. Caring for an aging parent or staying beside someone who is seriously ill may not increase either person’s functional Capability, yet the relationship can still matter deeply. People matter not only for what they help us become or produce, but for who they have become within our lives. Belonging can support development and collective Capability, but its significance runs deeper than usefulness.
Once someone or something becomes part of the “we” through which we understand our lives, that person or thing’s needs and future can begin to claim part of our own limited time, attention, and resources. Belonging therefore turns Meaning into something practical: what matters beyond the isolated self can begin to compete with other possibilities for priority in our lives. When something beyond the isolated self has become part of what matters to me, what am I willing to give up, postpone, or leave unrealized to remain committed to it?
Commitment
Once something matters enough to claim priority, choosing it carries a cost because other possibilities must be left unrealized. Commitment begins when we continue to give that priority despite competing possibilities, changing circumstances, costs, and uncertainty about the outcome. Meaning helps establish what matters; commitment gives that priority enough durability to keep shaping how we live over time.
Commitment also raises a question of autonomy: are we continuing because something genuinely matters to us, or simply because it was expected of us? A commitment can originate in family, culture, religion, or community and still become our own if we can examine and endorse it rather than merely obey it. This helps distinguish autonomy from optionality. Optionality concerns how many alternatives remain open to us; autonomy concerns whether the commitments shaping our lives are sufficiently our own. Preserving more options does not necessarily make a life more autonomous, while an autonomous choice can deliberately close future options. Marriage, a profession, a long scientific undertaking, or responsibility to a community can all narrow what remains available. Human beings can therefore exercise freedom partly by deciding which possibilities they no longer wish to reconsider each time circumstances change.
Commitments can bind us across time, allowing a decision made today to shape the lives of future versions of ourselves who will face circumstances we cannot yet foresee. This durability matters because preferences and emotions change, while long-term undertakings cannot survive if we constantly reopen every priority. Commitments, promises, disciplines, and responsibilities can preserve what matters through those fluctuations. Yet this creates a tension. To stay committed, we cannot reconsider everything whenever our mood shifts or a new option appears; to remain autonomous, we must still be able to ask whether the commitment remains truly our own. Persistence becomes dangerous when it turns into rigidity. Pressure, dependence, fear, or limited alternatives can make obedience feel like choice, so an autonomous commitment requires the ongoing ability to examine it and still endorse it.
Commitment, therefore, turns what matters into sustained investment. A relationship, question, or shared undertaking can draw years of care, effort, creativity, and persistence that might otherwise have been invested elsewhere. As that investment continues, it begins to shape the trajectory of a life and, when many people commit together, the trajectory of a group or society. Yet neither the strength of the commitment nor how genuinely it is chosen tells us whether that trajectory is constructive, sustainable, or good.
Direction
Direction describes the trajectory that sustained commitments create over time. Meaning tells us what matters, Purpose helps orient action around it, and Commitment helps sustain that action; Direction concerns where those accumulated choices and commitments are actually taking us.
A criminal gang offers an uncomfortable but useful test. For some members, it may provide belonging, identity, loyalty, protection, and a shared future, becoming part of the “we” through which they understand themselves. Their commitment can be genuine, costly, and deeply significant. If Meaning is experienced significance, we cannot deny that this is Meaning simply because we condemn the group’s actions. To do so would redefine Meaning as significance attached only to things we approve. Taking our definition seriously therefore leads to a difficult conclusion: the depth of our commitment is evidence of how much something matters to us, not evidence that it deserves to matter. People can sacrifice greatly for false beliefs, show courage in the service of cruelty, or remain loyal to destructive institutions. We often move from intensity to validation without noticing the step, as though sacrifice or conviction proved that the cause itself was worthy. They do not. Intensity tells us how deeply something matters to a person, not whether it is true, moral, or good.
For leaders, this distinction has practical consequences. When John F. Kennedy called on the United States to reach the Moon, he did more than set a technical objective; he framed it as a challenge worthy of collective effort, one that could help organize the country's energies and skills. Apollo still depended on funding, knowledge, technology, Structure, and coordination, but the significance attached to the mission connected thousands of specialized activities to something larger. The same principle appears on a much smaller scale in a controlled experiment by Dan Ariely, Emir Kamenica, and Drazen Prelec. Participants were paid according to the same declining schedule to assemble identical Lego models. In one condition, completed models remained visible; in the other, each model was dismantled as the participant continued working. The task and payment schedule were identical, but participants whose work remained visible built an average of 10.6 models, compared with 7.2 in the dismantling condition. A related field experiment by Adam Grant examined work that required communication, judgment, persistence, and emotional engagement. University fundraising callers who met a scholarship student and saw directly why their work mattered increased their weekly phone time by 142% and the money they raised by 171%; no comparable increase occurred among callers who did not have that contact. For leaders, the implication is difficult to ignore: resources, compensation, instructions, and Structure influence what people can and must do, while Meaning can influence how fully they are willing to invest their capabilities.
That power makes evaluation unavoidable: what does the resulting trajectory actually build or sustain? The Prosperity Framework and ULIC can help us assess whether a human system develops Capability, remains viable, and endures over time, but they cannot tell us everything we ought to value. Questions of justice, dignity, rights, and what constitutes a good life require judgments beyond Meaning, prosperity, or ULIC. Greater agency therefore gives us not only greater freedom to choose our commitments but also greater responsibility to examine what they produce in the world. Something can matter deeply to us and still harm others, weaken capabilities, or sustain a trajectory whose consequences we would reject.
Our commitments therefore have to be examined not only by how deeply they matter to us, but also by what they make possible beyond us. Do they strengthen or diminish other people, relationships, capabilities, and futures? Asking that question takes us beyond the Meaning we experience within our own lives to what our lives make possible for others.
Beyond Ourselves
Once we ask what our lives make possible for others, “beyond ourselves” takes on a broader meaning. We began with the persistent human desire not merely to exist but to matter, often linking that desire to leaving something that endures after we are gone. Yet whatever endures usually does so through other people, relationships, ideas, institutions, or communities, which means that going beyond ourselves begins while we are still alive, whenever our lives become connected to people and futures beyond the isolated self. Nor does such connection need to leave a legacy to matter. Sitting beside a dying parent can matter profoundly even when nothing identifiable from that moment will survive us. What continues after us may express what mattered during our lives, but continuation is neither the source nor the measure of its meaning.
Meaning also resists comparison by any common external measure. Fame, difficulty, duration, sacrifice, wealth, or the number of people affected may tell us something about a life, but none tells us how deeply it mattered to the person living it. Scale can help us judge consequences, but not significance itself. There is no obvious common unit by which the Meaning of one human life can be ranked against another.
Because our lives are finite, we cannot pursue every possibility. What matters most to us may receive more of our time, attention, and effort, while other possibilities remain unrealized, even though our choices do not always reflect our priorities as well as we wish. After someone we love dies, we sometimes find ourselves thinking, “I wish we had spent more time together.” The regret reveals a painful gap between how much the relationship mattered and how much of our limited time we gave to it while we could. Capability expands what we can do; Meaning helps shape what we choose to invest in, but it does not guarantee that we will choose accordingly.
Some of what we choose to invest in, however, can continue beyond us. What endures after us is not our Internal Complexity itself, but parts of what we helped create through it: knowledge, relationships, institutions, methods, opportunities, or conditions others can build upon. A teacher may influence how a student thinks decades later, or a scientist may contribute knowledge that others extend long after the original work is finished. The same principle applies at the societal level. When a society helps people develop greater knowledge, judgment, skills, creativity, and capacity to cooperate, those capabilities do not remain confined to the individuals who developed them. They can return to the larger “we” through what people create, teach, organize, improve, and pass forward. A society that supports the Internal Complexity of its members therefore strengthens one of the foundations from which its own collective Capability can continue to grow.
From this perspective, my own desire to do something significant also looks different. I still want what I do to matter, and I would still like useful ideas, relationships, and contributions to continue beyond my direct involvement. But I no longer see recognition or permanence as proof of significance. My name does not need to remain attached to what follows from my life, and not everything meaningful needs to endure after me. This is not an easy idea to accept, because we often associate mattering with leaving something behind. Significance does not depend on permanence.
Meaning is not always easy to analyze directly, especially when we are trying to understand what matters most to us. Yet there is an intuitive expression for approach it: “follow your heart.” When choosing what to study, where to work, whom to spend our lives with, or which friendships and responsibilities deserve our time, following our heart can be a form of self-reflection on what matters most to us. It does not tell us whether the choice is wise or good, but it can help reveal where significance already exists. Reflection can then ask the second question: if this is what matters to me, where will following it lead?
We began by asking why human beings care so deeply about whether our lives matter. What emerged is that Meaning is powerful because what matters to us helps establish priorities among the possibilities available within a finite life, influencing where we invest our time, attention, care, effort, and capabilities. Belonging can extend what becomes part of our concern, Commitment can preserve those priorities over time, and Direction shapes where that sustained investment carries us. This is why Meaning matters to individuals, leaders, and human systems alike. Yet Meaning guarantees neither goodness nor permanence. What matters during a finite life need not survive it to have been significant, although some of what that life makes possible may continue through others.
We have seen how Meaning, Commitment, and Direction shape human lives and human systems. But humans are part of nature, not separate from it. Are all these phenomena unique to conscious human life, or do biology, chemistry, and physics contain mechanisms that perform functions analogous to those we have identified in ourselves?
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* I strive to stay true to the facts and the reality they reveal. If you find an error or see a need for clarification, your insights are welcome.
See you soon,
Nimrod
Dr. Nimrod Israely writes on the structural foundations of prosperity and human systems, and is the CEO and Founder of Dream Valley and Biofeed.
P.S. Fresh-fruit exporters: We will be closing some of our most attractive 2027 EU retail programs in October. If you are interested in participating, contact me before then.
P.P.S. Previous column: “Interfaces: Where Differences Become Productive.”
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