Beyond Happiness: Finding Fulfillment Through Purpose and Service with Tullio Siragusa

**SPEAKER_2** (0:04)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:17)
Hello and welcome back to the show. Today, we dive into a topic that resonates deeply with all of us, and it's been a question pondered over the ages. What is the difference between happiness and fulfillment? Our guest is no stranger to these concepts or no stranger to us.
Mike, introduce our guest today.

**Michael Liwski** (0:42)
Our special guest, absolutely.
So today with us, we have Tullio Siragusa, who many of you know. He is a seasoned business strategist, author and speaker renowned for integrating disruptive technologies with emotional intelligence or EQ to drive transformative growth through the combination of those two things. With over 35 years of experience, he's empowered leaders and organizations to achieve sustainable, purpose-driven success. And so for our listeners today, they're really going to have some key takeaways from those components. As the founder of Inventrica, advisory Tullio provides strategic guidance, serving as a fractional chief operating officer and leadership development coach. His leadership philosophy centers on fostering fulfillment through service, purpose and empathetic connection. A philosophy he brings to life as the producer and host of our show, The Bliss Business Podcast. Tullio is deeply committed to promoting a human-centric approach to innovation, exemplified through significant roles such as being on the advisory board at the University of California Riverside, design thinking executive program, and as the co-founder of Radical purpose.org. Through his multifaceted endeavors, Tullio has helped organizations achieve billions in revenue, create purpose-driven cultures, and pioneer new standards for leadership and innovation, which we're going to key in on today. When he's not coaching or building high-performing teams, Tullio shares his insights through various platforms, including in his writings, writing the challenges of conventional thinking and inspired change. Tullio, I am not only pleased to have you as a colleague, a member of our team at Zero Company, but I'm thrilled to have you back on the show today. Welcome.

**Tullio Siragusa** (2:42)
Thank you. Thank you.

**Stephen Sakach** (2:46)
I like having the questions turned around on us here as kind of an annual act of empathy with our guests. So this is Tullio's turn here. Tullio-

**Tullio Siragusa** (2:57)
I'm in the hot seat today, huh?

**Stephen Sakach** (3:00)
Tullio, great to have you on, of course. So let's start with your personal journey.
So your blog paints kind of a vivid picture of fulfillment, being rooted in purpose and service. Can you share how this philosophy has shaped your life and career? Was there a defining moment that shifted your focus from that happiness to fulfillment?

**Tullio Siragusa** (3:27)
Yes, very much so. Thanks for that. I'm excited to be the guest this time.
There were a few things that definitely shaped me in this direction. Maybe I need to go back a little bit before this was my thinking. And perhaps a good way to describe it was my life when I was living in New York and in London. I split my life between living in New York City and in London. I had a flight in London and had a flight in New York City. And I had a black American Express card and a lot of the checklist items that many of us perhaps subscribe to as the vehicle towards happiness. And I really bought into that. If you have all these things and you accomplish all these things, you'll be happy. And I chased that and succeeded at chasing that. But found myself empty. I wasn't fulfilled in just making myself happy, striving for things to be happy. And I think probably the best thing that ever happened to me was losing everything. I had started a company out of the UK, invested a lot of my money into it.
Just a lot of fun. And the markets collapsed, this was around 2017, 2018, and couldn't raise money for the company, so moved the headquarters to New York, and then the markets collapsed there too, and found myself having to start over, and going through bankruptcy, and essentially realizing, okay, I don't have all the stuff that I used to check off that made me happy, or at least gave me the impression or the illusion that I was happy. What's my source of happiness now? It was very dark time, and I was fortunate to have some amazing mentors and coaches that really helped me out of that time. I'll never forget there was one in particular who inspired me to go volunteer my time, which is something I have adopted too. My coaching practice too, when people have a difficulty being empathetic. I was like, what is that going to do? I'll never forget he volunteered me to go organize a storage facility at some something. I don't remember exactly what it was, but it was a storage facility that needed to be organized. I happened to have a skill in being able to see a mess, like a puzzle with all the pieces, fragment it, and then put it together and organize things. It's like a little gift, right? So I went through this, and day in and day out, I'm over here organizing this warehouse, and labeling things, and creating a spreadsheet where everything was. I'm like, how did I go from being at the top clubs in London, building a company, flying from London to Paris on a private helicopter with my, quote-unquote, a Victoria Secret girlfriend to organizing a dusty old warehouse? Where have I gone wrong? So, but it was such a humbling experience that I did this for about a month, that it changed me. It made me realize for the first time, probably in my adult life, what it was like to do something that had nothing to do with me, where I was offering a service that I was capable of, or the benefit of someone else for an entire organization. And it really opened my eyes to the fulfillment that I received in being purposeful and being of service, even as a volunteer. I had experienced joy I had never experienced before in that month. Doing something that would have otherwise been against my ego. So that was the defining moment for me to realize the difference between chasing happiness, which can be fleeting, and being purposeful in being of service and activating fulfillment. And what followed from there, this is about 15 years ago, was a commitment to not only learning more about them, but to helping others make. So I've made this my life mission, to help people step into empathy, to step into service, to step into purpose as a way to feel truly empowered and experience lasting fulfillment in their lives.