What to Do When You Don’t Know What You Want
For a long stretch of my thirties, if you’d asked me what I wanted, I’d have given you a reasonable-sounding answer that I didn’t believe. Security, I’d say, or success, or to provide for my family. All true and none of it an answer. The honest reply was that I didn’t know, and I was embarrassed by not knowing, because everyone around me seemed so sure.
They weren’t, mostly. And the ones who were had found out by a method, not a revelation.
Stop waiting to feel it
The idea that you’ll one day wake up knowing your purpose is responsible for a lot of wasted years. Clarity about what you want is not a feeling that arrives. It’s a conclusion drawn from evidence, and the evidence comes from doing things and noticing how they land. You can’t think your way to it. You have to collect data.
Notice what you keep doing anyway
Look back at the last few years for the things you did without being paid or asked. The subject you keep reading about. The problem you can’t stop solving for other people. The thing you do in the gaps. I’d been explaining technical things to confused people for free for a decade before it occurred to me that this was data about what I wanted, and that teaching was already happening, just unpaid.
Run small experiments
Don’t quit the job to find yourself. Spend a Saturday on a thing. Take one evening class. Do a small version of the work for one person. Treat each as an experiment with a question: did I want to keep going when it ended, or was I relieved? Relief is data. Wanting more is data. Six experiments over six months will tell you more than six years of wondering.
Watch for energy, not excitement
Excitement is cheap and fades by week two. Energy is the thing that’s still there in month three, when the novelty’s gone and you’re doing the unglamorous middle. The work I was meant to do never excited me the way I expected. It just didn’t drain me, and after years of work that did, that absence was the signal.
Eliminate first
If you can’t say what you want, you can almost certainly say what you don’t. The job you’d never go back to. The kind of people you can’t work with. The life that looks fine from outside and felt like a cage. Write those down. The space that’s left after elimination is smaller and the right answer is usually inside it.
Ask what you’d regret not trying
Not what you’d enjoy; what you’d regret. Picture yourself old, looking back. Which untried thing stings? That’s not necessarily what you want. But it’s where the experiment should start.
Accept that it changes
What I wanted at thirty-five is not what I want now. That’s not failure to find the answer; it’s the answer having seasons. Find the current one, follow it until it stops being true, then run the experiments again.
This month
List what you keep doing unasked. List what you’ve ruled out. Pick one small experiment and run it for a Saturday. Then notice, honestly, whether you wanted to keep going.
Launch list
Be there on day one.
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