Discovering Your Life’s Purpose: Alec Santiago Of Kitsune Bio On How to Align Your Goals with Your True Self
An interview with Dr. Bharat Sangani
Let your future self be your mentor. Picture yourself at 75 years old, having lived a life that you were proud of and speaking directly to current you in your head. Let Future You weigh in on every decision. What choices would they advise you to make? That voice often holds many of your true values in it, so be sure to listen in.
Finding and living in alignment with your true purpose can be a transformative journey. Yet, many struggle with identifying their life’s purpose and aligning their goals with it. In this series, we aim to explore how individuals discover their purpose and create a life that reflects their authentic selves, leading to greater fulfillment and success. As a part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Alec Santiago.
Alec Santiago is the Cofounder of Kitsune Bio, creating shape shifting therapeutics to treat difficult diseases. Alec is also the author of Seeing Inside, Self-Actualized Goals, and the Godmaker Project. All are available for free at www.seeinginside.us.
Thank you so much for your time! I know that you are a very busy person. Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?
Of course! The beginning is not very pretty. I was raised in a heavily abusive environment, surrounded by hard drug use and poverty. When I was 14, I moved in with my aunt and uncle, and things changed. Having enough stability to let my mental energy move away from focusing on survival meant that I could begin to thrive. I ended up with a full ride to college, a PhD in Molecular Genetics, and a love for entrepreneurship. The young version of myself would be mystified to know that he would grow up to lead a biotech company.
None of us can achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person that you are grateful for, who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?
The smallest of kindnesses can stick with someone forever, and for nearly three decades, I have been exceedingly grateful to my elementary school teacher Mrs. May. In the midst of some of the more troubling times, she nominated me for a summer camp at a local private school, Albuquerque Academy, asking for a tuition waiver. I was accepted, and spent the summer in awe. I still remember being enchanted by the powerful air of academia that the library held, and the joy of being around other students whose creativity and enthusiasm for learning was not tainted by daily struggle. That was my first glimpse into a world other than my own, and the first light the illuminated the way for broader paths. It was the birth of hope.
You are a successful leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
The first is empathy. People trade their time for pay, but they give their hearts for purpose. Understanding what motivates and inspires the people around you helps to shape the culture of your company into a united and deliberate force. Otherwise you are not a leader, you are just a manager. When we created a new company from scratch, no one could predict how successful the company would be, or even if it would last longer than a year, so we had to ensure that our team believed in the value enough to trade the potential of their lives being disrupted again. They had to feel the reward was worth the risk.
The second is an unwavering sense of deep gratitude. Even in the darkest times, I pride myself on being able to find the thinnest sliver of light. As a college student, I lived in a home infested with rats, using free condiments to add any variety I could to my twice-daily meal of cheap noodles. Yet each night, as I laid in bed and listened to the rats scratching in the walls, I was grateful to at least be on a path to a better life. I had the luxury of being afforded opportunity, even if I could not afford food.
The third is a strong sense of agency. In any situation, I trust myself to be able to find the way around it, over it, or through it. Agency is the ability to use your own action to manifest a reality, to rely on yourself to solve your problems. My current position is the end result of a string of very methodical, intentional steps to go from where I was to where I wanted to be. They included leveraging one program to join another, seeking out specific individuals in that program to connect me to a job, working that one job just to gain specific skills, using those skills to scout technologies from all over the country, and building a company from that technology.
Ok, fantastic. Let’s now turn to the crux of our interview. Was there a defining moment or experience in your life when you felt a clear sense of your purpose? How did it influence the goals you set from that point forward?
As a graduate student, I participated in a group based on life science entrepreneurship, called Enventure. We were just a group of twenty-somethings, still in school, dreaming of when we could do something bigger. Enventure grew from a group of five kids around a table, up to six-figure contracts with top pharma companies, all while being led by dreamer grad students. Being in this group was the first time my lofty ambitions felt not only seen, but fully understood. Where everyone around me was taking steps beyond what our resumes suggested we were capable of. Where believing in yourself was the default, and believing in your friends was joyful and powerful. This group revealed the energizing electricity of entrepreneurship, while showing me how hard work and consistent effort was ultimately the most fulfilling aspect of a goal. From that time forward, creation and entrepreneurship has been my calling.
What practical steps can someone take to begin uncovering their life’s purpose if they feel lost or unsure about their direction?
I talk a lot about this in my book Self-Actualized Goals, where I walk through the process of digging deeper into our desires to understand the humanity at the root of them. For instance, when we say we want to lose weight, that’s just the summit of a mountain of secondary reasons. For some of us, it may the shame of being perceived as lesser by others due to being overweight, or the fear of not being able to fully participate in our children’s lives. This example is one that tells us what our deeper human convictions may be, and once we’ve put names to them (and thus ourselves) we can either accept and work with them, or reject and work to change them. A more concrete example is saying “I want to own a business and be rich”. Through dedicated effort, one might uncover that what they really want is an uncle to give them more respect, or for their family to never feel the fear of going hungry. That gives a new avenue of attack that leads to true fulfillment. Perhaps you know that helping people leads to a lot of self-fulfillment, so you become determined to be a doctor because you’re sure that doctors are the highest form of helping others. But further self-examination shows you that helping animals is actually more fulfilling, due to their relative helplessness and your kinship with them of often being overlooked. You then discover that working with your hands provides a more concrete sense of tangible effect in the world than using your brain, so you decide not to work in a clinic. You’ve ultimately determined that using your body to directly protect some of the Earth’s most vulnerable species, who do not have the capacity to help themselves, is the richest sense of fulfillment that you can achieve in life. You end up becoming a National Park Ranger instead of a doctor, and every day feels gratifying. To summarize, introspective understanding and thorough molding of an intentional self is the way to uncover your life’s purpose. Once you determine the factors that uniquely bring out the best in you, you can combine and direct them into one aim that calls your name.
How do you differentiate between external pressures — like societal expectations — and the inner calling that aligns with your true self?
This is incredibly challenging in a hyper-connected and increasingly more shallow world. The easiest way to determine internal versus external purpose is to watch your fantasies as you begin to think about your goals. If you dream of being a real estate investor and see yourself walking across the stage to accept an award, or start to picture your social media validation after sharing your closed deal, then it is external. Look instead for the callings that lead you to fantasize about others benefiting from your work, especially if they don’t even know it was you. A real estate agent who feels excited about creating the perfect match between a client and a home, balancing all of their desires and their budget to find the diamond in the rough and fight for their negotiation, is more likely to be pursuing it for internal reasons. Look for the wins that make you feel good without telling anyone. Those are the genuine pursuits.
Can you share an example of a time when you adjusted or abandoned a goal because it no longer aligned with your deeper sense of purpose? What did you learn from that experience?
For quite a while, I tried to build a tech-forward pet food company. We worked diligently to do customer discovery, find the hole in the market, prove the science, and validate our concepts. However, I noticed myself having to force my hand into action, with my enthusiasm eroding rapidly. Over time, I came to accept two things: the company bored me and I didn’t get a sense of connection from my cofounder. He was a phenomenal human, but the click wasn’t there for us. The opportunity was there, but the field could never intrigue me long enough to ensure success. I saw the writing on the wall and it spelled ‘BURNOUT’. I needed to pursue
What advice would you give to people trying to pursue their purpose while managing the demands of day-to-day life, such as work, family, and other responsibilities?
If something matters to you, make time for it. If you’re not willing to make time for it, then it doesn’t matter. Whittle your list down to 5 things, and if an activity isn’t related to those 5 things, axe it. If you want to care about something else, then you have to lose one from the list. Mine are Company, Working Out (lifting and BJJ), Jewelry Crafting, Writings, and Meditation. I fit socializing in wherever I can, but only if it doesn’t interfere with the other 5. My social life will be better if I am fulfilled by maintaining my goals. To do so, I said no to other projects, I deleted social medias, I put limiting apps on my phone and computer, I wake up very early, and I learned to streamline my chores by reducing what I use. Be ruthless in how you spend your time and the rest will follow.
What are “5 Ways to Align Your Goals With Your True Self”?
- Be intentional. Write out your goals clearly and quantifiably. Then go one level deeper and ask yourself WHY you want that goal. Revise them accordingly and then go another level deeper. Repeat until you are at the core of the desire and you know you are being fundamentally honest with yourself without fear or shame. Your goals have to align with the BEST version of you, but fear and shame prevent that. Inner honesty will prevent that. For example, a goal to buy a Mercedes seems great at first, but why do you want it? Because rich people drive it? Because you think other people will respect you? Do you even want the respect of people who are basing their judgements of you solely on your car? Change the goal by challenging yourself.
- Let your future self be your mentor. Picture yourself at 75 years old, having lived a life that you were proud of and speaking directly to current you in your head. Let Future You weigh in on every decision. What choices would they advise you to make? That voice often holds many of your true values in it, so be sure to listen in.
- Be the emperor of your one-person kingdom. Prioritize your time ruthlessly and give yourself a set number of activities that you care about. I use 5, and make them specific enough to demonstrate exactly what that activity is. ‘Being Happy’ is hard to quantify, and can allude to many different, changing actions. ‘Writing my book, called Cows on the Moon’ is focused, achievable, and positive. Ruthlessly cut out everything else that isn’t listed in your goals, and only bring in new things when you’re finished with or ready to disengage from a current goal.
- Don’t be a dancing monkey. Focus only on the goals that bring you triumph without anyone else having to know about them. Achievement that we put on display is us performing for the entertainment of others. Seeking out wins for our own sake is driven by the need to see the goal accomplished and the sense of worth that comes from our effort. If you decide on a goal and your mind primarily begins to wander towards other people celebrating you, then your time might be better spent pursuing something more fulfilling.
- Set a high price on your peace. Do not engage in activities that steal stillness away from you, like engaging in heated political discussions on the internet or letting a distracted driver get on your nerves. Your peace lets you focus your energy onto things that matter, and not towards what only engages our emotions. Anger, jealousy, and mindless scrolling sap our energy, stealing our peace for nothing in return. It’s a hose that only works in one direction, pulling your brightness out of you then shutting off the faucet. Give attention only to what brings you peace and purpose.
What advice would you give to people trying to pursue their purpose while managing the demands of day-to-day life, such as work, family, and other responsibilities?
If something matters to you, make time for it. If you’re not willing to make time for it, then it doesn’t matter. Whittle your list down to 5 things, and if an activity isn’t related to those 5 things, axe it. If you want to care about something else, then you have to lose one from the list. Mine are Company, Working Out (lifting and BJJ), Jewelry Crafting, Writings, and Meditation. I fit socializing in wherever I can, but only if it doesn’t interfere with the other 5. My social life will be better if I am fulfilled by maintaining my goals. To do so, I said no to other projects, I deleted social medias, I put limiting apps on my phone and computer, I wake up very early, and I learned to streamline my chores by reducing what I use. Be ruthless in how you spend your time and the rest will follow.
How can our readers further follow your work?
I am most easily reached by email, but my Bluesky is @alecsantiago. I also have all of my books so far freely available at www.seeinginside.us
Thank you so much for sharing these important insights. We wish you continued success and good health!
About The Interviewer: Dr. Bharat Sangani is a cardiologist and entrepreneur with over 35 years of experience, practicing in Gulfport, Mississippi, and Dallas, Texas. Board-certified in Internal Medicine and Cardiology, he specializes in diagnosing, treating, and preventing cardiovascular diseases, including heart disease and hypertension. In 1999, Dr. Sangani founded Encore Enterprises, a national real estate investment firm. Under his leadership, the company has executed transactions exceeding $2 billion, with a portfolio spanning residential, retail, hotel, and office developments. Known for his emphasis on integrity and fairness, Dr. Sangani has built Encore into a major player in the commercial real estate sector. Blending his medical and business expertise, Dr. Sangani created the Life is a Business mentorship program. The initiative offers guidance on achieving balance in health, wealth, and relationships, helping participants align personal and professional goals. Now based in Dallas, Texas, Dr. Sangani continues to practice cardiology while leading Encore Enterprises and mentoring others. His career reflects a unique blend of medical expertise, entrepreneurial spirit, and dedication to helping others thrive.
Discovering Your Life’s Purpose: Alec Santiago Of Kitsune Bio On How to Align Your Goals with Your… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.