Here is a list of nine ways to think about your direction in life.
When I was a kid, I used to be irritated when people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I didn’t know yet. I had topics and activities that I was passionate about: horses, flute playing, observing plants and insects, reading fiction. None of those seemed like careers.
Later, I had to contend with that classic interview question: What are your plans for the next three years? The next five?
For me, despite my aversion for those judgmental questions of the past, throughout life there have been a number of times when I’ve worked hard at deciding where my passions lay next. Some of these moments were in transitions: The end of my first marriage. In considering a surprise job offer. At the conclusion of a big grant.
I’ve compiled some exercises to help in looking for your individual purpose, the sense of what matters in your life. The goal is to have a sense of direction and intention. It’s when you feel energized and inspired and alive, explains Naina Dhingra her article about finding purpose at work (Dingra and Shaninger, 2021)
Some of us are so fortunate that we can pursue our idea with our work, that is, we can change jobs to pursue our passion. Others of us have constraints that limit the pursuit to a smaller fraction of our time. No matter how you pursue, it’s the having and the pursuing that can give us greater purpose and fulfillment, more joy, and more identity.
Recently I conducted a highly unscientific poll on the social media platform X. I posted, “Curious…what’s your relationship to the statement, “I have a purpose in life.” Of the ~150 respondents, 28% said they had had the same purpose for at least 10 years. Another 32% said they usually had a purpose, but it changed at times. Twenty percent were searching for a purpose but not yet finding one, and the final 20% said they did not believe in the idea of a purpose.
Based on these results, I might estimate that about 50% of the people I talk with are searching for, or may soon change, their focus. This assemblage of ideas is for you, the 50% that I’m a part of.
Here are some tools to try as you think about your greater purpose, your work, your avocation. For me at least this is a lifetime process: You don’t have to have the same answer throughout your life. In fact, there are no rules here, just, I hope, a joyful search.
1. A simple start: Keep a list of the things you love
Sometimes it’s not even obvious to yourself what you love doing or thinking about the most. Notice especially when you are doing something that makes you feel like your most authentic self. Whenever you find yourself in that moment, write down what you are doing. Keep the list going. Look for patterns. If you see patterns or an idea or vision or concept begins to stand out to you, then work gradually on making it more specific: A goal.
2. Make a creative manifesto
“My recommendation:” says Cara Stevens in her Medium article, “Start a journal of intriguing questions and let them fuel your exploration, allowing it to transform your curiosity into a defining creative force.” She recommends starting by writing declarative, courageous statements that start with “I AM,” “I DO,” or “I WANT.” See what you come up with. The resulting personal creativity manifesto help you make choices that are more faithful to who you are and your creative goals (Stevens, 2024).
3. Stretch yourself to generate new perspectives and ideas
Getting out of your usual rounds, the paths you usually walk, the conversations you usually have, is critical to thinking freshly about new goals. Ayse Yemiscigil, a professor at Fordham University and a member of the Human Flourishing Project at Harvard University, recommends pushing your boundaries in your search for purpose (Yemiscigil et al. 2023). She offers these questions:
- Who or what inspires me to get out of my comfort zone and connect with the world beyond me?
- How can I connect meaningfully with individuals and communities with different backgrounds, beliefs, and values than mine?
- What is a simple first step I can take right now to start exploring socially useful career opportunities?
Reflect on what you learn, and then discuss with friends, and accumulate feedback. Mix all these ideas into the results of the other investigations you are doing.
4. Examine your values
Think about a person who really inspired you, who you would want to work with, or even be. What are their most compelling attributes? Write them down.
Then, think about what your top two or three values for life are, the ones you think are non-negotiable, the ones you most strongly aspire to. Give it a good hard try until you have some words you could sign your name to.
Then, look at the list of values at the bottom of this essay. This list is compiled from the several times I’ve led workshops on value-setting; you can find other lists online. Anything there leap out at you as critical, something you might have overlooked? Anything make you frown, or that you reflexively reject?
Keep these top values, along with the ones you don’t want to promote, and check in on them as you make decisions. Do your ideas of what you might make your next individual purpose serve those values?
5. Consider your values, Take 2
McKinsey (2020) says your life purpose can be mapped onto 9 universal values. They have produced the graphic below, where the horizontal axis is the target of our activities, and the vertical axis is the motives for our actions. Think about how your values from the above exercise map onto this conceptualization, and as you come up with ideas for directions, projects, new jobs, and the like, think about where those ideas lie on the axis of who is served, from self to others.
6. Choosing self or other
Let’s take a closer look at that horizontal axis, from serving self to serving other. Sometimes values or goals that serve primarily yourself can be, or should be, criticized. Fame is a great example. If your goal is to be famous, as a colleague of mine once shocked me by announcing, please ask yourself why you want that. Do you need to feel special? Do you imagine fame will bring wealth? If that’s the reason, then zoom in on that in its turn: Why do you want wealth? What counts as wealth to you? Question your other goals or values similarly: Ask yourself, why?
In the McKinsey formulation above, “tradition” is on the “serving others” end of the axis. Does that mean serving others is the traditional value and more modern ones are more selfish? (I hope not!) Does it mean that serving others is traditionally viewed as positive?
The best advice I’ve heard in years comes from Arthur C. Brooks’ astounding book From Strength to Strength: Choose what gives you pleasure, even if it doesn’t make you special.
7. Consider the connection between kindness and thriving
George Saunders, a fiction writer with a deeply human and also often confounding and compelling voice, gave a commencement speech at Syracuse University that, for me, says it all. Saunders says he got little response at the time (Saunders, 2022), but afterward his speech was posted on The New York Times’ website, and it received the attention it deserves, including being published as its own small book (Saunders, 2014).
A cure for selfishness is kindness; another is gratitude, says Saunders. Find out what makes you kinder, what opens you up, brings out the most loving, generous, and unafraid version of you and go after it like nothing else matters. Find your secret luminous place and clear away everything that constrains it.
Those words — find your secret luminous place and clear away everything that constrains it — are what I am trying to do, what I hope you are trying to do. We can all feel, if we pay attention, when we stray from it.
8. Think way out into the future
In a move that every university should emulate, Arizona State University offers some of its rising leaders the help of executive coaches, and that is how I found myself some years ago working with May Busch. We were talking about setting long-term goals. May said, now is not the time to think in terms of three-year or five-year goals. They cause you to take steps that are too small. Think instead about the most important thing you could hope to achieve in twenty years, or in thirty years. Make that leap over the short-term goals. She drew an image like this one.
Then, think of a person who is doing the closest thing to your goal that you can imagine. Think of that person, and map out what it takes to become your own version of them.
9. Make room for your new goals and projects
On our way to defining my new goal, May had another great tool, which I have edited a little bit here. Take all your current projects, or all your future ideas, or both, and categorize them in one or more of these three categories:
A. Only I can do it: You can’t delegate it, and you are singularly good at it.
B. Aligns with my greatest goals and vision: Ideas that have made it through the refinery of your thoughts and the seven process ideas above in this essay.
C. Fuck yes. (Heck, yeah?) If you don’t know immediately that this is a great idea for you, if you find yourself making excuses or listing caveats, then the answer should be NO. Life is too short for anything other than FUCK YES (or its original, somewhat less rude, HELL YEAH!). This category is based upon an essay by Mark Manson, who was applying the idea to dating, but we think it works really well for all things we throw our energy and care into.
Put all your items into the Venn diagram. You goal: Work only on the things that lie in that beautiful yellow area where all three categories are true.
P.S. In my family we liked the “Fuck Yes or No” idea so much that one holiday season, a season when I was suffering tremendously through chemotherapy and so the framing seemed especially apt, we painted tea towels to remind ourselves. Granted, these couldn’t be given to everyone on our holiday list, but there were a few who completely got it. The towels were so good that we made a second edition a few years later:
—
It took me years of exercises like these to realize I was as motivated by how well a team worked together and what happened for each of its members as I was by what the team was producing. That realization brought me to understand that I would gladly sacrifice some of my time doing science for time in leadership, trying to help the organization serve everyone better. That motivation and those goals stay with me strongly as the years go by, but new inspirations, new chances to be luminous, come along, too. Good luck, and report back!
— — List of values
Boldness
Courage
Courtesy
Creativity
Critical thinking
Decision-making
Determination
Directness
Empathy
Equality
Fairness
Fame
Fearlessness
Fun
Generosity
Good citizen
Graciousness
Gratitude
Honesty
Humbleness
Humility
Humor
Improvisation
Inclusivity
Influential
Justice
Love
Mutual respect
Optimism
Patience
Perseverance
Perspective
Persuasiveness
Pleasure
Power
Respect
Respect for others
Self-awareness
Self-questioning
Self-reliance
Socialization
Spirituality
Striving for quality
Tolerance
Transparency
Trustworthiness
Willingness to take action
— -
References
Brooks, Arthur C. (2022) From Strength to Strength, Penguin Random House, New York.
Dingra, Naina and Bill Schaninger (2021) The search for purpose at work. June 3, 2021 | McKinsey Podcast
Manson, Mark. Fuck Yes or No. https://markmanson.net/fuck-yes
McKinsey & Company, Do you know your life’s purpose?, McKinsey Quarterly online September 11, 2020.
Saunders, George (2014) Congratulations, by the Way: Some Thoughts on Kindness, Random House, New York.
Saunders, George (2022) A Lost Speech, Found. Substack: https://georgesaunders.substack.com/p/a-lost-speech-found
Stevens, Cara (2024) Ten Questions, Zero Answers, One Simple Recipe for Living Your Most Creative Life, Medium.com
Yemiscigil, Ayse, Melis Sena Yilmaz, and Matthew T. Lee (2023) How to Find Your Purpose, Harvard Business Review, https://hbr.org/2023/09/how-to-find-your-purpose
