This Simple Exercise Can Help You Figure Out What To Do With Your Life
Find out your purpose and then give the world a taste of your gift.
I just did a quick Google search of “what to do with my life”.
It yielded 13,200,000,000 search results in 0.78 seconds.
It’s a question we’ve been asked since we were kids.
“What do you want to do when you grow up?”
Personally, I thought I wanted to be an engineer.
Why? Because I was great at math and my uncle was an engineer. And for some weird reason, I thought that was a cool job. That was until grade 11 physics class showed up and I came to realize engineering wasn’t my true calling.
So I decided to go to business school instead. And several times throughout my twenties, I experienced the worst feeling in the world: the feeling of being lost.
It’s when you know you need to make a change but you’re not sure where to start. You know you want to move your life in a different direction but you’re not sure how you’re going to get there. All you know is that what you’re doing with your life, isn’t what you truly want to do.
I felt lost after graduating from university.
I felt lost while working at Google, knowing that despite people telling me “I’ve made it” it wasn’t exactly what I dreamt I would be doing in my life.
I knew I needed a change, but I had no idea what I wanted to do.
So I quit my job at Google to start my own business and give that new path a try. But half-way through it, the feelings resurfaced again: this isn’t what I want to do with my life.
And then, at the turn of my 30th birthday, I had a revelation.
Looking Back to Connect The Dots
Steve Jobs famously said:
“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward.”
And he’s 100% right.
You see all I did was take the time to sit down and re-read through my journals. I ran through my memories and adventures — the highs and the lows. I reflected on the projects I personally created over the years. And through them, I uncovered one re-occurring theme.
Here’s what I realized.
When I was in my teen years, I used to write poems for my mom and dad’s birthdays. When I was upset with someone, I would write that person a letter with words spilling right out of my heart. At university, I would flunk my multiple choice exams but ace my essays.
In my twenties, as I traveled through 40 countries, I journaled and re-told stories. I started a blog to document my adventures. I then turned that blog into a collaborative story-telling platform where people could upload a photo and write a short travel story about it. My objective was to inspire people to get out and explore the world around them.
While working at Google, my team called me sunshine. In their eyes, I was the only positive person on the team who managed to keep the spirits upbeat by transforming any negative or difficult situation into a “sunny” perspective.
When I had an accident and spent three weeks in bed recovering after surgery, I wrote a 90-page memoir for myself.
Do you see the trend?
Have you picked up on the theme?
What I want to do with my life is one simple thing: I want to write.
I want to use my words as a voice of hope and inspiration — to empower people to live their truth, pursue their artistic calling, use their ideas to create more good in this world and become better humans in the process of doing so.
The Exercise: Look Back to “Connect The Dots” And Find That “One Thing”
This exercise of “looking back to search for a reoccurring theme through the connecting dots” can really help you find the clarity you long for.
But it’s important to remember that this doesn’t happen overnight. It happens through constant and conscious reflection.
You need to make it a habit to do the following:
- Get into a comfortable space.
- Grab your old journals (if you don’t keep a journal, pick up old photo albums so you can stimulate your memory) along with a pen and paper.
- Go year by year and ask yourself these questions: “What did I enjoy doing when I was 10? What did I enjoy doing at 15? What did I enjoy doing at 20? What projects did I start? What did I love about job X? What did I watch a lot of in my twenties? What kind of books did I read most? How did I express my emotions? What was I good at? What creative outlets did I turn to when I struggled through life?”
Your goal is to list them all out on paper and then go through that list and circle the reoccurring themes.
Look for a pattern.
For me, the most reoccurring themes were: travel, creative ideas, story-telling, inspiration, and writing.
But the one thing that was present in all my life was writing, and that’s how I realized that my truth lies in the act of writing, and my purpose lies in inspiring people to grow and transform.
I love this quote by James Joyce:
“In The Particular Is Contained The Universal.”
You are “the particular” and within you lies “the universal”. All that you dream to do lies within you. All the answers you seek are there. You just have to look back and reflect to discover them.
So, use this simple exercise to figure out your “one thing”. Look for the ongoing theme.
And once you do, all that’s left is for you to go out into the world and confidently do it.
Give the world a taste of your gift. That’s the secret to living a purposeful and true-to-self life.
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