How ‘spiritual soundness’ led Joe Moglia from Wall Street CEO to college football head coach

Sticking his head underneath his desk for a moment, Joe Moglia popped back up holding a heavy binder.

“See this file?” he said. “I have three of these.”

Thousands of versions of Moglia lie between the lines of those pages: A 19-year-old college sophomore supporting his wife and newborn daughter by driving a cab and post office truck in New York City while also working at his father’s fruit store in the Bronx. The successful CEO of TD Ameritrade. An award-winning head football coach at Coastal Carolina.

The connective tissue weaving all of those wildly different selves together is his “private notes,” a series of journal entries of over 50 years’ worth of attempts to peel back the layers of his subconscious. The notes represent a process Moglia believes anyone can use to learn more about themselves and make big decisions.

The process is straightforward. First, Moglia sits down in front of his notepad and prompts himself: What’s my favorite music? Do I like Bruce Springsteen? Why do I like him? What are my skill sets? What am I good at? And what am I bad at? What does my career look like right now? And what do I want it to look like?

The point of asking increasingly specific questions is to have them add up over time to answer a bigger and broader question: Who am…