Side Quests to Significance

TrulySignificant.com honors writer, advocate, and co-founder of Children's Arts Guild Alexander Kopelman.  His profound book is For Real: Helping Children Remain Their Authentic Selves in a Limiting World. 

Alexander has guided programs that help young people challenge limiting cultural messages and express who they truly are through creativity, reflection, and self discovery. His philosophy is simple yet powerful: when adults show up authentically, childnen gain the courage to do the same. 

Before founding the Gulld, Alexander served as Director of Marketing at Girls Inc, the leading girls empowerment organization in the United States. 

Key message: Childhood is NOT a waiting room for humanity. 

Tom Jasper is truly significant. His career on Wall Street led him to a pioneering role in the $800 TRILLION derivative market. 

Tom is debuting his book Wall Street Maverick: Musings on a Career of Innovation, Derivatives, Credit, and Risk.

Finding your mentor is a central message from Tom along with knowing when to take risk and challenge the establishment. 

More about Tom....he is a Risk Magazine "Risk Pioneer" and 2002 Risk Hall of Fame inductee for his profound contributions to the field of risk management. He was instrumental in creating the foundations for today's $800+ trillion derivatives market, among other successes, during his 40+ year career on Wall Street. A business creator and innovator throughout his career, Jasper was a managing director at Salomon Brothers, where he established and led its interest rate swap business. While at Salomon, he founded and co-chaired the International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA). Jasper went on to become chief executive of Primus Guaranty Ltd., a highly innovative credit default swap business. He is currently a managing partner of Manursing Partners, LLC, serves on several Blackstone Credit and Insurance (BXCI) Fund boards, and continues to give back to his community. He and his wife reside in Connecticut.

By a miracle, Jenna Phillips Ballard is alive today. After a horrific brain injury and coma, she re-arrived in life as a visionary leader, transformational coach, artist. She is now the founder of I•▲M—a global movement dedicated to helping people embody their highest selves and live in alignment with purpose, prosperity, and love. 

She began her career in 2006 as a certified personal trainer and mindset coach, working with A-list clients including Ben Stiller, Blink-182, and Saudi Arabian royalty. Quickly becoming one of Los Angeles’s most sought-after fitness experts, she was featured on Dr. Phil, The Doctors, KTLA, and Good Morning LaLa Land, with editorial spotlights in Harper’s Bazaar, Lucky, Allure, and Madame Figaro.

 In 2011, Jenna discovered emotional intelligence and somatic healing, igniting a deeper mission to awaken the leaders of the new era. She immersed herself in leadership trainings and transformational coaching, helping top executives and influencers access their highest potential and create legacies rooted in integrity and impact. In 2016, Jenna and her husband, Brad Ballard, co-founded Ascension Leadership Academy (ALA)—a premier emotional intelligence training company that has transformed thousands of lives, helped businesses 10x their growth, and raised over $4MM for charity. Now based in Austin, Jenna continues to mentor high-level leaders, founders, and creators while expanding her I•▲M ecosystem—which includes her transformational book I•▲M Her Now.

Honoring Dr. Greg Allgood, leader at World Vision, focused on clean water to 700 million people in need.  World Vision works in a variety of sectors, with water being a central focus.  

Greg shares a life changing story of Mercy, a woman was taking toxic water to her family. Greg offered his P&G product, a water purification packet, that instantly cleared the muddy water. He saw changed and improved lives. 

Visit worldvision.org and drop down to water or go to www.drgregallgood.com. It only takes $50 to transform a life or buy two copies of his book Thirsty for a Miracle and Greg's team will contribute $50 to help an individual with clean water. 

What makes Greg's story is that he didn't simply give to people in need. He used science, business, partnerships, persistence and personal conviction to build a system capable of helping millions.

1. He made clean water a life mission Dr. Allgood spent 26 years at Procter & Gamble and founded the P&G Children’s Safe Drinking Water Program. With his background in toxicology and public health, he recognized that P&G's water-purification technology could do far more good as a humanitarian program than it could as a conventional commercial product.
2. He turned corporate capability into humanitarian impact This may be the most significant part of his story. Allgood persuaded P&G to create a nonprofit model around its water-purification technology. The little packets could transform contaminated water into drinkable water in about 30 minutes. The program eventually delivered more than 23 billion liters of clean water, reaching millions of people.
3.  Greg became a bridge between unlikely partners Allgood understood that no single organization was going to solve the global water crisis. He helped build partnerships involving P&G, World Vision, the Clinton Global Initiative, the Gates Foundation, UNICEF, WHO and USAID. That's a powerful Side Quest to Significance lesson: sometimes your calling isn't to do everything yourself. It's to connect the people, resources and institutions that can accomplish something together that none could accomplish alone.

Arie Kruglanski is a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland whose career spans human judgment, motivation, goal pursuit, cognition, group behavior, and radicalization.

He has published more than 300 articles, chapters and books, and in 2024 received the Association for Psychological Science's William James Fellow Award for lifetime contributions to psychology. His most significant contribution: the Quest for Significance Kruglanski's breakthrough idea is Significance Quest Theory: human beings have a fundamental motivation to feel that they have worth, dignity, respect and meaning.

His 2022 formulation describes the quest for significance as the need to have social worth. That idea becomes especially powerful when connected to Side Quests to Significance work. Kruglanski essentially asks: What makes a person desperately want to matter? Side Quest work asks a complementary question: What if we intentionally discover the things that make us matter—to ourselves, to others and to the world—and pursue them? Enjoy hearing about the fascinating bridge. 

Glenn Llopis rocks our network with the most provocative podcast of the year. We have lost our identity and the next generation is danger. Part of the solution lies in taking an old fashioned immigrant's mindset. After all, we are ALL immigrants. Hear Glenn, the Identity Catalyst, take his immigrant spirit of survival, renewal and reinvention, sprinkle in a dose of agency to the next gen, focus on significance and you find the super power within to be authentically yourself. Read Glenn's latest book Earning Conviction- Practice that redirects leaders from exhausted to unshakeable.

Discover the origin of Side Quests from one person who has studied the concept for 17 years, but has 7 decades of "xplain this Ricky."

Cara Truitt's story is worth listening to and embracing. According to Cara-"The only thing you can count on is that everyone is going through something."Thus, the power of community is increasingly important .

Imagine, losing your sister, marriage and your business within one week. Cara redefines resiliency and how a network, best known as net-weaving, becomes an intentional life-line.

What stands out in the conversation is Cara's superpower to make your ideas impossible to ignore. 
Inside that, pay attention to micro moments that matter. Hear about rituals as "sacred play" bringing real meaning that could lead to community. 

Community building is Cara's tapestry. It's inescable. 

That includes creating a TedX talk for and with you.

To learn more, email [email protected]. 

Terry Young, former McKinsey and Omnicom execs debuts his provocative book Possibilities Science. You will learn about Possibility Gaps, and how Side Quests awaken something in us that our primary career doesn't. Hear about the role of curiosity, experimentation and "following the INTERESTING thing" to discover true significance.

Embrace the concept of "curiosity cash" and how to compound ideas within your company, regardless of the number of employees.