What do I want this next part of my life to be about?

You can be thirty-five and offered the promotion you've spent years working towards, only to realise that you aren't sure you want the life of the person whose job you're about to inherit.

You can return to work after having children and discover that the career which once made complete sense to you doesn't fit quite as neatly around the person you've become.

You can build a successful business, make some money, prove something to yourself and then find that doing more of the same isn't quite as exciting as it used to be.

Perhaps you've started thinking about helping others.

Teaching.

Mentoring.

Building something.

Starting a business.

Supporting a cause.

Working somewhere completely different.

Or perhaps nothing is wrong at all.

You don't have to be unhappy or facing some great crisis to question where you're going.

Sometimes life is perfectly good and you simply begin to suspect:

There might be more of me that hasn't been used yet.

We often talk about purpose as though it is buried somewhere inside us waiting to be discovered.

I'm not convinced life works like that.

Think about how many important things in your life happened because of something you couldn't possibly have planned.

A person you met.

A place you visited.

A conversation.

A boss who saw something in you.

A subject you accidentally became interested in.

A difficult experience.

Something happening in the world that made you think:

Surely we can do better than this.

An opportunity you weren't looking for.

Life has a habit of introducing us to versions of ourselves we didn't know existed.

That's why sitting alone and thinking harder isn't always enough.

Sometimes the problem isn't that you don't know yourself. Sometimes you haven't exposed yourself to enough possibilities.

More people.

More places.

More ideas.

More experiences.

More cultures.

More learning.

More conversations with people whose lives look nothing like yours.

Sometimes clarity comes from introspection.

Sometimes it comes from getting out into the world.

There is another trap.

You can become very good at climbing a mountain without ever stopping to ask whether you chose the mountain.

One decision leads naturally to another.

You study something.

You find a job.

You become good at it.

You get promoted.

You earn more.

You acquire responsibilities.

Leaving becomes harder precisely because you've become successful.

David Brooks describes something related to this as the First Mountain and the Second Mountain.

The first is often about establishing ourselves.

Achievement.

Identity.

Career.

Independence.

Security.

There's nothing wrong with any of those things.

But sometimes another question starts appearing:

What am I going to do with everything I've learned?

For some people that means building something.

For others it means teaching.

Mentoring.

Investing.

Helping.

Creating.

Community.

Charity.

Public service.

Or simply using the career they already have differently.

Purpose doesn't require abandoning ambition.

And contribution doesn't require abandoning your career.

The question is whether your definition of success is still yours.

This exercise isn't designed to produce an impressive sentence about your purpose.

We're looking for evidence.

When have you felt most alive?

What gives you energy?

What drains you?

What fascinated you before somebody started paying you?

What do people repeatedly ask you for help with?

Who do you admire?

What exactly do you admire about their life?

What problems make you care?

What have you quietly wondered about doing?

What might you regret never exploring?

And perhaps most importantly:

Have you actually experienced enough of the world to know?

We're looking for patterns.

Not slogans.