Why an MTP is Your Most Important Asset

Making a dent in the universe or solving the world’s biggest problems requires a TON of hard work. 

It also involves countless risks, setbacks, and restarts. 

Many of my own victories have been “overnight successes, after 11 years of hard work.” 

While some entrepreneurs appear to be lucky in how fast they achieve an exit, most success stories actually involve failure after failure, pivot after pivot, on the road to success. 

So how do you fuel that persistence? How do you keep going in year 8+ after 100 “No’s”? 

It involves getting clarity on your “Massive Transformative Purpose” (or MTP), and the emotional energy that powers it. 

In today’s blog, the second in a series based on my recently launched Exponential Organizations 2.0 book (with Salim Ismail), I’ll discuss what an MTP is, some initial steps you can take to develop your own MTP (or that of your company), and why it’s your most important asset.

But first, I’ll share a story about Elon, his MTP, and the founding of SpaceX… 

NOTE: Creating an MTP is a key focus for all the CEOs and Entrepreneurs in my private Abundance360 Mastermind (Singularity’s highest-level program). If you’d like to develop your Purpose and learn more about Abundance360, go here. 

Elon Musk’s MTP and How It Has Shaped SpaceX

To understand the power of—and sometimes the sacrifice required by—truly adopting an MTP for your company, consider the story of one of the most celebrated companies of our time: SpaceX. 

In founding SpaceX, Elon Musk’s MTP was to take humanity to Mars—and in the process, to make humanity a multi-planetary species. 

His MTP (though he doesn’t call it that) is: “To revolutionize space technology, with the ultimate goal of enabling people to live on other planets.”   

My friendship with Elon began in the days before SpaceX, and I had a chance to watch him brilliantly build one of the most extraordinary companies on the planet. 

When Elon and his team finally got Falcon 1 operating (after three sequential failures), rather than continuing to sell that smaller launch vehicle, Elon decided to “burn the ships,” discontinue the Falcon 1 line and instead focus 100% on the new, yet unproven Falcon 9 launch vehicle.  

Why? 

Because the move was more aligned with SpaceX’s MTP of making humanity multi-planetary. 

Fast forward a decade. I was in Elon’s office one day. It was a casual catchup meeting, and Elon looked agitated, even depressed. 

“What’s up?” I asked. 

He said, “Well, I just figured out that I’ve got to completely reorganize SpaceX because there’s no way that the Falcon-9 is going to get us to Mars.” 

What he meant was that the Falcon 9, even with its extraordinary success record and the reusable first stage, wasn’t sufficient to meet SpaceX’s Massive Transformative Purpose of making humanity a multi-planetary species. Soon thereafter, Elon announced his plans to shift the company’s future from the Falcon 9 to Starship.  

In other words, once again he was going to “burn the ships,” ultimately kill the Falcon 9 production line (the most successful rocket in human history!), and instead focus all the company’s resources on building and implementing Starship.

And that is what he is doing. Ultimately sacrificing the Falcon 9 at the altar of Starship. 

The lesson is: If you’re not going to constantly reinvent yourself, then someone else is going to disrupt you.

When you see something that’s not serving your MTP, kill it because you’re spending a lot of time and energy supporting something that’s not directly aligned with your broader purpose. Otherwise, you’ll waste energy, and you will never achieve your MTP.

Defining an MTP

A Massive Transformative Purpose is your highest aspiration—and that’s true for both you as individual and your company.

Here are the attributes of an effective MTP:

• It’s uniquely yours (or your company’s)...

• It feels true for you (you are proud of it)...

• It’s driven by emotional energy (wonder, awe, excitement, pain…), that fuels your drive to pursue big dreams…
• You are willing to commit your life to it (or at least the next decade).

As an individual, your MTP is what wakes you up in the morning and gets you excited.

For example, my personal MTP is:

“To inspire and guide entrepreneurs to create a hopeful, compelling and abundant future for humanity.” 

For a company, an MTP is the core, defining purpose of its existence. 

It describes the change in the world that you want to achieve, the fundamental problem you are trying to solve. Your MTP is designed to inspire focused action, express your passions, and create an emotional connection that drives you and others toward meaningful, positive, and common change.  

Here are a few examples of famous MTPs: 

• Google: “Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

• Danone: “Bring health through food.”

• Colossal Biosciences: “Bring back extinct animals.”

• XPRIZE: “To incentivize and accelerate radical breakthroughs toward an equitable and abundant future for humanity.”

• Singularity: “To support entrepreneurs to positively impact the lives of 1 billion-plus people.”

The Benefits of an MTP

An MTP is unique in that it is the prerequisite for all the other 10 ExO attributes (which we’ll be exploring in the remainder of this blog series). 

As such, it comes before all the other attributes and guides them. 

So why should you develop one?  

Here are several benefits of having an MTP: 

• Your MTP helps build community and creates a movement among stakeholders by fundamentally answering the question, “Why do you exist?”
• An MTP helps attract and retain top talent.
  
• It focuses your company during periods of hyper-growth, keeping it on track in the face of potential distractions or tangents.
• During periods of massive opportunities, your MTP helps you focus on those important to your mission.

• MTPs turn attention from internal politics to external delivery and helps an organization remain outwardly focused (customer, impact, stakeholders).

• It inspires new products, services, and activities.
  
• It provides meaning for the core team and especially the wider community.
  
• MTPs enable coherent exponential growth and bind collective aspirations.
  
• MTPs help align an organization and engender a cooperative/non-political culture.

The First Step to Developing Your Company’s MTP

As Salim and I describe in Exponential Organizations 2.0: 

“MTPs provide focus to enable exponential growth. A strong MTP forces your mind to break all the old models about how to achieve a task. It inspires innovation. And it gives you permission to think outside your own constraints and create a new model to support exponential growth.” 

So, what can you do TODAY to start developing your MTP?

First off, go to www.MoonshotPlanner.com, a generative AI engine that will help you develop both your MTP and your Moonshot. Check it out, it’s free and fun.

Having both an MTP and a Moonshot are key elements for the CEOs and Entrepreneurs participating in my private Abundance360 Mastermind (Singularity’s highest-level program).

The biggest imperative of an effective and worthy MTP is Purpose.  

Here are some of they key questions you’ll need to answer for yourself: 

1. What is it that gives you energy? What are your passions? What drives you?
2. Who are we serving? Who do you want to be a hero to?
3. How do you want to make the world a better place? What would you do if I gave you $1 BILLION and asked you to spend it in a fashion that makes the world a better place?
4. What are key “action verbs” that describe what you want to do?  For me, I love to “inspire” and “guide.”

Answering these questions is key to formulating a true MTP for yourself and your company.

Why This Matters

Most people spend the majority of their waking hours working. Unfortunately, much of that work isn’t connected to something meaningful—and as a result it’s often unfulfilling in the long run. 

MTPs are transformative because they connect your work to a broader sense of meaning and purpose.  

We live in an increasingly secular age in which emerging generations want more meaning in their work lives. 

Yet this desire remains largely unfulfilled. 

Would you rather work for an “aerospace company” or a company “whose mission it is to put humanity on Mars?”

I believe being part of a company or organization driven by an MTP can help fill that void by providing all-important context and meaning. 

Creating and living up to your MTP is hard work and will inevitably entail countless risks, setbacks, and restarts. But when you are trying to make a dent in the universe or solve the world’s biggest problems, it will be worth it. 

In our next blog in this ExO series, we'll begin looking at the SCALE Attributes and dive into the concept of Staff on Demand.