The Three P’s of Professional Fulfillment
Why performance, passion, and purpose don’t add up. They multiply.
The inspiration for this framework was a conversation with my friend Parimal Deshpande, who works at Adobe. He told me that ever since he started a new role, he had been able to tap into his creative side. He was energized in a way he hadn’t been before, because he has been a creator all his life. Suddenly his job felt meaningful. That conversation got me thinking about what actually drives professional fulfillment. This framework is the result.
There are three pillars. They are simple to name but difficult to align.
Performance
The foundation is performance. This is your competence and skill in the role you occupy. You must be good at your job, and that competence comes from experience, capability, and the relevance of your skills to the context you are in. That last part matters more than people realize. You might be a phenomenal guitar player. But if you’ve been asked to play the piano, your talent is real but misplaced. Skill without fit is potential without traction.
If your job were a human body, performance would be the muscle and the mind. It is the starting point. But functional competence must be maintained and matched to context for it to translate into results.
Passion
The second pillar is passion. If performance is the muscle, passion is the heart. This is what inspires you, motivates you, and makes you excited about what you do. Think about when you wake up in the morning. Are you looking forward to the work ahead?
For a salesperson, passion might be the thrill of closing a deal. For me, it is helping students learn and watching them grow their careers. Passion may sound lofty, but it can be about small things. You might be a barista who takes pride in creating the perfect cappuccino. You might be a hotel front desk clerk who delights in making guests feel welcome. Passion is your in-the-moment satisfaction. It is the rocket fuel that converts a competent employee into an exceptional one.
Purpose
The third pillar is purpose. This is your mission. Do you derive meaning from your job? Are you making a difference?
Some professions are naturally purpose-driven: nursing, teaching, firefighting, public service, the military. Some organizations also index higher on purpose within their industry. I served for ten years on the board of Reliance Jio, a company whose purpose was crystal clear - bring affordable data connectivity to a billion Indians. Microsoft, Nike, The Body Shop, Patagonia: these are organizations where purpose is baked into the culture. A sense of purpose is what makes people go for the moonshots.
The Trifecta
Performance is the body. Passion is the heart. Purpose is the soul. When all three are present, you have professional fulfillment.
Think of your career as a ship sailing the seas of professional opportunity. Performance is the sails: strong, broad, and able to push the ship forward. Passion is the wind that fills those sails. Purpose is the North Star: the destination you are sailing toward. If that destination is meaningful, and the sails and wind are working together, you have a ship that is not only seaworthy but headed somewhere worth going.
Here is the critical insight. These three elements do not add together. They multiply.
Fulfillment = Performance × Passion × Purpose
If any one of the three is zero, the product is zero. You can be highly skilled and deeply passionate, but if the work has no meaning, fulfillment collapses. You can be mission-driven and competent, but without passion, you are grinding. You can be passionate and purposeful, but without competence, you are ineffective.
The Japanese call this alignment Ikigai: the discovery of your reason for being. The three P’s are my way of making that idea actionable. Find the role where your skill meets your energy meets your meaning. That is where fulfillment lives.
Lovely. In 2007, I created a framework that I called Tresonance or Transformational Resonance. I figured that we often look for our purpose but fail to find it because it is a lagging indicator. So we must search for and manifest the leading indicators. These are Thrill (what we are passionate about) and Skill (what we are naturally, spontaneously and effortlessly good at - our inborn talent). They first have to be uncovered or discovered. The next step is to find a drill, a choice of profession or vocation, in which both of these align. Once we do so, we attain a Tresonance, and what reveals to us is the divine Will, the purpose of our life. Those who are fans of the 4Ps of Kotler can call this Passion, Proficiency, Profession and Purpose. When we attain Tresonance, we feel fulfilled.
This is a beautifully constructed framework, and the multiplicative insight is the most important part, and also the most honest. So many career frameworks treat these elements as additive, which leads people to think they can compensate for a deficit in one area by doubling down on another. The multiplication model captures something true: a zero is a zero, no matter how strong the other factors are.
I’d push on one thing, though. The framework assumes these three pillars are relatively stable properties of a person in a role. But in practice, they’re deeply dynamic, and they interact with each other in ways that aren’t always intuitive.
Passion, for instance, often follows competence rather than preceding it. Cal Newport has written about this extensively, and it maps to experience: people frequently discover passion after getting good at something, not before. That has real implications for how you use this framework. If you’re early in a career and don’t feel the passion pillar yet, it may not mean the role is wrong. It may mean the performance pillar hasn’t matured enough to ignite it.
Purpose is similarly slippery. Parimal’s story is instructive here: the creativity wasn’t new, but the context that made it feel meaningful was. Purpose often isn’t found, it’s constructed, through the stories we tell about our work, the people we do it alongside, and the moments where we see our impact land.
That doesn’t diminish the framework. It actually makes it more useful as a diagnostic tool than a selection filter. Rather than asking “does this role have all three?” before you take it, the better question might be: “which of the three is currently the weakest, and is there a realistic path to strengthening it?”