What does it cost to win? A reflection on Mark 8:36
If you’re in a senior leadership role, the odds are that you’re extraordinarily good at calculating risk. You probably run scenarios, model outcomes, weigh trade-offs in your sleep. It's one of the core competencies that got you where you are.
So consider this one.
"What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?"
Mark 8:36
It's a short verse - 13 words in some translations. And for a text that is 2000+ years old, it has an almost uncomfortable familiarity with many modern leadership contexts. It doesn't speak in the language of religion. It speaks in the language of business. Profit. Gain. Loss. It takes the framework you've spent your career inside, and then quietly dismantles it.
The Ledger You Weren't Keeping
Leaders keep all kinds of ledgers - revenue, market share, headcount, valuation, promotions earned, deals closed, boards joined. These are the columns that get measured, reported, and rewarded. They are not unimportant. But Mark 8:36 suggests there is another ledger - one that doesn't appear in any quarterly report - and that the entries in that ledger matter more than everything in the first one combined.
The word translated "soul" in this passage isn't abstract or ethereal. In the original Greek, psychē refers to the self - the animating center of who a person actually is. Their interior life and their deepest values. The part of them that existed before the first promotion and will remain after the last one.
Jesus is asking a straightforward accounting question: what is the net position of your life, when you include that column?
The Slow Subtraction
What makes this verse genuinely confronting (rather than merely convicting) is that it doesn't describe a dramatic fall. It describes a transaction. And most transactions happen gradually.
The executive who arrives at the peak of their career having lost themselves didn't usually lose themselves in a single moment. The loss happens in the accumulated weight of small decisions: the compromise that seemed reasonable at the time, the relationship that got de-prioritized one quarter too many, the voice inside that raised an objection and was told, repeatedly, that now wasn't the time. The world was being gained. The other column wasn't being watched.
A Different Kind of Risk Management
The good news (and there is good news) is that the same analytical capacity that makes a great executive also makes a capable steward of the interior life. The skill isn't different, just the object of attention.
What would it look like to bring the same rigor you apply to your organization to the question of your own soul? To ask with the same discipline you'd bring to any strategic review: what am I actually gaining here, and what is it costing me? Is this trade-off one I'd make if I could see the full accounting?
These aren't rhetorical questions. They're the most important ones you’ll answer this year.
The world is available to be won. It has always been. The question Jesus puts to every high-achiever who reads this verse is the same one he put to his first disciples: at what price?
Christa Cordova is a corporate chaplain based in The Woodlands, TX, offering spiritual care for executives navigating the intersection of leadership and soul. Schedule a conversation.
