Don't look for your life's purpose right away. Start by turning your passion into your day job.
Simplify your search for meaningful work by dedicating yourself to projects and consulting your curiosity.
For most people, there isn’t an obvious way to find your life’s purpose.
It’s vague and abstract. Trying to figure it out can be difficult to do prematurely, and without the right approach.
But starting small — with curiosity, passion, and projects — can help you get you on the right path.
Change the way you frame it
Life lasts for some unknown span of time. During that stretch, some of the things we do are important; other things not so much.
But the tasks we believe to be important are the ones that make us feel fulfilled and motivated while we’re doing them.
In large part, if you’re pursuing something you are passionate about, “purpose” can be extrapolated from there.
Instead of asking yourself, “What is my life’s purpose?,” it can be more productive to ask “What is something that is important I can do, that I want to do?”
That makes it more manageable and grounded, while still pushing you closer to your ideal.
It’s worth noting that “importance” is something you get to pick. That may be taking yoga classes, or launching a YouTube channel or podcast. Perhaps writing a book.
To gauge how important you believe certain tasks are, observe yourself when you are doing various things at work or at home.
Write down which ones feel like they take forever, and the ones that feel like time flies.
When you are interested in something, you can keep at it without tiring for much longer compared to things you do begrudgingly.
Consult your curiosity
Think back to your childhood.
What impressed you? What captured your attention? Did you have leanings toward certain interests?
Who would you be today, if you’d had the foresight as a child to dive deep into one of those curiosities a decade ago?
It’s not too late to start. What are you most curious about today?
Consult your sense of wonder. It’s our best bet at building momentum, and it can be your direct point of contact for doing work that fulfills you.
For me, I’ve always been an obsessive reader. Books have always gripped me like nothing else.
Eventually, I realized I wanted to start writing — and once I began I couldn’t stop.
Curiosity is excellent at carrying you through projects and developing new skills because it is an intrinsic motivator. Your curiosity doesn’t diminish or increase based on the presence of a paycheck.
It’s just there, inside you, whether you answer the call or not.
As I’ve written before, these questions can help you pin down your curiosities:
What would I love to do every day?
What attainable skills do I wish I had?
What are my favorite 5 topics to read about?
Where do my personal interests and job overlap?
Once you’ve done some thinking and after you’ve consulted your childlike sense of curiosity, it’s time to take action.
Dedicate yourself to a project
That doesn’t mean start a website for your writing or an Instagram page for your art out of eagerness, only to stop after two weeks.
You can’t build something with any staying power in a brief time. It takes diligence and consistency.
If you start a project, then stop after some weeks or months, you’re not giving yourself a long enough runway to get it off the ground. Save overnight successes for characters in movies, not your passion projects and ambitions.
Figure out what it is you are genuinely interested in. Figure out what it is that you would love to get paid to do everyday. Then start (without stopping).
Leverage projects to gain skills and level up your career
Curiosity will help you discover your passion — the thing you would do regardless if someone paid you — which will allow you to do the things you enjoy more often, via side projects.
Eventually, if you stick with it, others will notice those projects. Initiative, skill, and progress are magnets for opportunities.
I launched this website in 2018 as a tiny, obscure travel blog. For a long time no one besides my family read anything on here.
But I kept at it. My writing improved. The website started to look better. It started to resemble not just a place to post articles but a cohesive brand.
Some sixty articles later — about 50,000 words — and the blog helped me land a job as an editor at a newspaper, which then led to my subsequent job in a global media outlet and two bestselling books.
But if I had given up on my little project early on, when no one was reading, my career as a writer and journalist never would have started.
My blog gave me a place to develop my skills, train myself as a writer, and make mistakes. Then, by the time it came for a “real world” test at a job with a paycheck, it felt like I’d already done the task a million times before — because I had.
That’s what projects can do for you. It is for practice and volume; the chance to build a portfolio. An opportunity to show your work so that when the time comes, you have something tangible to prove yourself and raise your confidence.
Plus, a project tells other people that you have the zeal and initiative to work on your own, when no one’s watching and no one’s paying you. That enthusiasm, many employers say, is worth a salary all on its own.
Diving deep into your curiosity and turning that into a project is how you build real-world skills and, if you don’t stop prematurely, a body of work that is entirely your own — and one that will eventually convince someone else to pay you for your skills.