You Don’t Need a Nobel Prize-Winning Purpose

M​ost people feel overwhelmed by the idea of identifying a core purpose in their lives or work. They’d like to know what their purpose is, but pinning it down feels enormous, like a test they might fail.

For starters, purpose might not be what you think it is. Purpose is an intrinsic motivation to contribute to something larger than yourself. When you have purpose, you feel fulfilled. You have a sense of your core aims and direction, and you understand that your life has inherent value. You have a sense that you matter and that your life has meaning. This isn’t just a nice feeling: a sense of purpose is associated with lower depression and anxiety, better health and greater longevity, and following through on our healthy intentions.

Purpose is often paired with meaning and confused with passion. Here’s how I think about the difference: purpose is a positive, future-focused form of meaning, and it’s what fuels our passion, not the other way around.

You won’t find one true purpose

Identifying what gives you a feeling of purpose isn’t like trying to find a soulmate. Just as there probably isn’t one true love out there for you, there isn’t one true purpose for you over a lifetime. Your purpose will change as you do.

In college, I found a tremendous sense of fulfillment working on causes related to preventing violence against women. There’s a paradox in that, because working with women who’ve been abused is obviously not a happy thing. But it gave me so much purpose that it also brought me happiness. After I graduated, I struggled for years to find something that fit in the same way. Something was missing. I felt anxious a lot of the time, and I hopped from job to job, searching for work that felt meaningful.

What I know now is that I wasn’t failing to find my purpose. I was looking for it in the wrong places, the same places almost all of us look.

What purpose is not

We tend to believe a really good purpose is one that leads to a big impact. We want a fame-inducing, Nobel Prize–winning purpose. But purpose is not our motivation to pursue external rewards or recognition, and chasing those things tends to leave us burned out, exhausted, and afraid: afraid of failing, afraid we’ll never match our earlier success, afraid of losing whatever we’ve gained.

When we’re intrinsically motivated, we enjoy the process of what we’re doing rather than fixating on outcomes. That means purpose isn’t reserved for the elite and the exceptional. It’s created simply by doing the things we love. But because we so often confuse achievement with purpose, we need to watch out for these five S’s of false purpose, the things purpose is not:

1. Status or Success. Outcomes and achievements might temporarily make us feel special or important, but they will never feed our souls or bring us peace. Purpose brings meaning and contentment. Status brings pride, and then the fear of losing it.

2. Stolen or the Same. We look at people we admire and think we’d like to adopt their purpose as our own. But your purpose is the unique gift you bring to the world, and you won’t feel fulfilled pursuing someone else’s.

3. Somebody else. We all know parents who’ve made their children’s success and happiness their purpose. Many people find real fulfillment in the activities of caregiving, in the process itself. But you cannot anchor your purpose to another person’s outcomes, because, try as we might, we cannot control other people’s health, happiness, or success.

4. Selfish or Self-enhancing. Purpose doesn’t come from the motivation to increase your own value at work, in the eyes of someone you respect, or in the mirror. Purposeful activities do the opposite: they help us transcend our self-focus.

5. A “Should.” We might think we should become a dentist because Mom was one, or that we should stay in a field we’re good at even though we don’t enjoy it. But we find purpose in what we want to do and choose to do, never in what we feel we should do.

Notice when you’re pursuing one of the five S’s. Ask yourself: Am I doing this because I love the process, or because I’m chasing something external? Your honest answer will point you toward the real thing.

You already have a purpose

Many people worry that they don’t have a purpose or that they’ll never figure out what it is. If that’s you, please put that fear down for a minute.

Your purpose doesn’t need to look important to our culture or to anyone else. It doesn’t have to come from curing cancer or serving marginalized people. It doesn’t have to come from a career at all. You have a purpose because you are human, and we humans are meaning-makers. Our ability to make meaning from our lives is one of the things that distinguishes us from every other animal.

Don’t worry if you’ve lost touch with what fulfills you. From the moment we’re born, we’re surrounded by external influences that shape us, and over time it gets genuinely hard to tell whether our ambitions come from our family, our culture, the media, our social circle, or from our deepest sense of self. The good news is that what you’re looking for is always within you. You are like the block of marble that Michelangelo carved “The David” from. David was always in there. The marble just needed to be chipped away.

Which means the only way to find your purpose is to look at who you are; you will not get there by lamenting who you aren’t. Something liberating happens when we stop hunting for things to criticize about ourselves. So set aside what you’d like to change, and look instead at the unique gifts you bring to the world right now.

How to get started

Begin from your strengths, not your weaknesses. It’s counterintuitive, but people don’t tend to grow from a place of deficiency or fear that they aren’t good enough. Identify some of your unique attributes or your character strengths; you can take the “Values in Action” questionnaire to find them. What are the things that make you you, without the social influences of everyone around you?

Think about what makes you feel alive or at peace. Reflect on times you’ve felt passion or a deep sense of contentment. These things might be common, like helping others, or quirky, like an ability to identify owl calls. They don’t need to be interesting to anyone but you. If nothing comes, consider what you loved as a child, before the world started telling you what you should and shouldn’t like. When did you feel a spark of mystery, adventure, or magic?

Set an aspiration for how you’d like to live. Think of a story or memory that captures one of those passions or attributes, and use it to name something you aspire to. One of my clients set this one: “I aspire to channel Brother James to inspire others to do hard things.” Brother James was a teacher who truly saw his potential, and my client feels most alive at work when he treats his colleagues the way that teacher treated him. Nobody else needs to understand your aspiration. It only has to be meaningful to you.

Purpose isn’t something we find or discover so much as something we create. And you don’t create it by becoming someone new. You create it by finally getting a clear look at who has been in that marble all along.