Finding Your Purpose as a Professional

Finding Your What?

Common advice when finding purpose in one's career is, "Find your why." I followed that for a while, but after a substantial career change midway through my professional life, the only “why” I could really carry with me was, "Provide for my family." Though powerful in the short term, its deepest long-term impact was the ability to grind through the workday to make money. Over weeks and months, that grinding came with a profound emotional and mental cost.

“What eventually helped me discover a broader and more fulfilling purpose in my work again was finding my “what.” Specifically, what problems do I like solving most of the time? I found this helpful for multiple reasons.”

First, at the heart of every job are problems that need solving: technical problems, logistical problems, structural problems, people problems, and on the list goes... Solving those problems carries with it feelings of accomplishment and usefulness. So, if you can find roles that let you solve problems that interest you at least most of the time, you can experience the meaningfulness of useful work most days.

The second reason finding your “what” is helpful is because solving problems requires curiosity, and curiosity is the wellspring of mastery. A master is someone whose curiosity has, over time, led them to discover skillful ways of solving complex problems over and over again. Working toward the feeling of knowing you can skillfully solve complex problems is a fundamental source of meaning for humans. Best of all, mastery — and the meaning it provides — is something you carry with you wherever you go.

The third reason finding your what — or better, your "whats" — is helpful is that there are so many interesting problems to solve. Maybe one problem eventually becomes uninteresting. No worries! You can pivot to another and renew the pleasure of curiously exploring solutions to it. Oftentimes you can make that pivot without even changing roles. Though if you do change roles (or careers) in order to start solving those new problems, you increase the chances of doing so with little to no existential crisis — if you're curiously solving problems rather than finding your why.

“Whys tend to attach themselves to our identities, which are hard to change: Who am I? Why am I here? Etc. What tends to attach themselves to our actions, which change all the time: What do I want to learn? What do I know how to accomplish? What am I doing today?”

So how can you know what problems you like solving, especially if you're at the beginning of your career? In a word: explore.

Explore what problems you've found it easiest to be curious about in the past. Explore what problems you find it easiest to be curious about now. For example, when I was in high school, I explored programming and software engineering problems. In college and graduate school, I explored people and communications problems. Early in my career, I explored financial problems. Later in my career, I explored strategic and change management problems.

Some of those problems turned out to be really interesting to me and some less so, but all of them were useful and valuable in making my workday purposeful and worthwhile. But without experimenting, I never would have known which ones. The same is true for you. Be curious.

Explore. And enjoy the journey.