“How do I find my purpose?” is two questions wearing one sentence. Half the people who ask it already know their purpose and have a reason not to honor it. The other half do not have the data yet, and the answer for them is to act first and read the fulfillment backward. Underneath both sits a confusion about what a purpose is, and a model of fulfillment thinner than the real thing.
So this post does three things. It separates a goal from a purpose. It lays out what fulfillment is made of, which turns out to be four ingredients, not one. And it takes the two halves of the question in turn, because the help they need runs in opposite directions. One group needs permission. The other needs data. It is a long post. The next section is the summary, the maps and the worksheets carry it too, and the headings are there so that anyone can skip to the half they are in.
Reading Fulfillment Backward worksheet
A four-page worksheet that takes two fulfilling experiences and reads each one backward for its ingredients, then asks what state we were in, who the purpose makes uncomfortable, and what a small expression of it looks like this week.
The Theory in Short
Most people ask the question as “what is my purpose?” The whole post arrives at an answer that sounds too simple until the four ingredients are in place: our purpose is to be fulfilled. This section is the short version. Everything after it is the long one, told through stories.
What fulfillment is
Fulfillment is the feeling of coherence: all the relevant parts of us lined up in response to the task of a given moment. The more we are within that moment, the more fulfillment we take from it. So our purpose is immersion within each passing moment, to achieve coherence between our emotional priorities in that moment, our strengths as they meet that moment, and the values our actions in that moment touch. The sentence is the same for everyone. The three variables inside it are each person’s own.
The four ingredients of fulfillment
Emotional
Our subjective emotional priorities, in that moment
Novelty, surprise, pleasure, challenge, usefulness, the feeling we have while being kind. They shift. Full on pleasure, we need challenge. Full on challenge, we need rest. They pay mostly now.
Ethical
Our subjective meanings, priorities, and values
The code we carry, always running, even when it looks irrelevant. It pays twice. In the moment, as coherence when we honor it or dissonance when we violate it. And later, as the baseline felt sense of our life when we reflect on it and find integrity, or despair and shame.
Contextual
Our aptitudes meeting our ecology
The interconnection of systemics with our learned and nature-given traits: how what we are good at interacts with the environment we are in. The same task is drudgery for one person and mastery for another. This is the part flow theory describes.
Relational
Shared, and with whom
Almost everything is enhanced by being shared. Told to someone who can hear it, the purpose becomes more true.
All four are subjective. Pleasure is what we call the first ingredient when the other three are missing.
The ethical ingredient pays twice
A fair question follows from the ethical ingredient: is fulfillment easier with less ethical and existential complexity? Take a meal. One person has never thought about how the food on the plate was produced, or holds no particular ethic about it. Another carries that question to the table and cannot put it down until it is answered. Does the first person get more fulfillment from the same meal? In that one case, maybe. But the more congruent, coherent, and integrated we become, the more our value code acts before thought, the way a schema sits before the emotional response in the four stages, and a value that fires before thought pays in the moment, not only in reflection. I am playing pickleball. I value being helpful. I see that my partner is there and would like to take the shot, so I let it go. We win the point, and the collaboration lands in that same moment. Fewer variables can mean a cheaper fulfillment. Clarity about all the related variables, held coherently, produces a greater final product.
A purpose is not a goal
A goal is concrete and finishable. A purpose is the set of conditions under which we feel most ourselves, and goals are the things we do in service of it. Above both sit our values. A purpose that violates a value still produces pleasure, and it produces dissonance beside it: euphoria and shame in the same moment.
The two halves of the question
The half who already know
The obstacle is a schema
They know their purpose and carry a schema, usually with a good value inside it, that interrupts their ability to own, allow, and welcome it. Their work is tolerance for other people’s discomfort, grown four ways: validation from someone who can see the purpose, exposure in small doses, dilution of the guilt rather than removal of it, and insight into whose reaction we have been internalizing.
The half who do not know yet
The obstacle is missing data
Fulfillment is felt before it is understood. Their work is to say yes to unfamiliar things, reverse engineer the experience for its four ingredients, account for the condition they were in, and dedicate themselves to the most probable activities long enough to pass through the anxious stretch.
Purposes are plural, and they change. The same mountain can serve a different purpose on a different day.
What Fulfillment Is Made Of
Fulfillment is not one thing. There are multiple ingredients to the thing we call fulfillment, and when I take apart my own experiences of it, four keep showing up. Whether something was fulfilling, as opposed to pleasant, usually comes down to which of the four were present. All four are subjective. What follows is my configuration, offered so a reader can notice where theirs differs.
Emotional: the steak
The first ingredient is the one most people mean when they say fulfillment. It is our emotional priorities in a given context, and the easiest way to feel it is food. Can I experience fulfillment eating my absolute favorite dinner? Yes. A steak with the crust the Maillard reaction makes, crunchy on the outside and juicy in the inside, with the perfect amount of salt to sweet to acid, maybe a little spice in there. That is fulfillment almost exclusively on the emotional dimension: I took actions, the environment participated, and I got an apex experience of the emotions I happened to be prioritizing that night, which for me usually includes novelty and surprise. And the priorities move. It is almost like filling a cup from the emotional side. Do I always need pleasure? Sometimes I am full on pleasure and I need a bit more challenge, a bit more novelty, a bit more usefulness, a bit more of the feeling I feel while I am being kind.
Ethical: the cow, and the restaurant
The second ingredient is the value system, and we forget it in the steak example because it does not seem relevant. It is always in play. For some people, their fulfillment in eating that exact same steak would require knowing the origin of the cow and that it passes their ethics test. For other people that question never arrives at the table. Does it for me? Yes. And a lot of that gets predetermined by the choice of restaurant, so that at the table I can release into seeking fulfillment from the emotional side alone. The ethical ingredient was present. It had been handled in advance. This ingredient pays twice: in the moment, as coherence when we honor it or dissonance when we violate it, and later, as the baseline felt sense of our life when we look back and find integrity, or despair and shame.
Kind, on the seam
Some words sit right on the seam between these two. Kind is not typically an emotional word, and yet, can I feel kind? Yes. Is kind also a value disposition? Can I see kind in someone else? Yes. It is both at once, and I suspect that is why kindness is so reliably fulfilling: it pays on the emotional side and the ethical side at once, in the same act.
Contextual: sorting recycling, or reimagining it
The third ingredient is contextual fit, and it is the one I most need to be careful about, because it is the most subjective of the four. I feel a sense of pride using my intellect to be helpful, and being helpful sits on the ethical plane: I believe it is useful for me to be participating in my cultural ecology. Now suppose the helpful task is sorting recycling. All of the emotional and all of the ethical ingredients are in place, and something about the contextual variable does not feel nearly as useful, for me. Whereas if I get to offer a talk at the local high school on a psychotherapeutic topic, or sit on a think tank that reimagines how we recycle, the same value and the same emotion produce something much larger. If someone told me I was the fastest at sorting plastic, and I am an environmentalist and I would love it if we were better at recycling, the manual aspect of it would not give me much. The strategic aspect would.
Twelve intelligences, and whose they are
That is me. In my own framework, the Architecture of Human Systems, a person runs on twelve intelligences, and the contextual ingredient is the question of which ones an activity runs on and which ones are strongest in this person. Sorting runs on kinetic intelligence: timing, force, coordination, the body completing a movement without the mind interfering. The think tank runs on strategic and cognitive intelligence. Mine are configured toward the second, so that is where the fulfillment is. Somebody with an incredibly high kinetic intelligence could sort so fast and so clean that it would literally look like a magic trick. The awe they would receive from the people watching would be fantastic. For them, the sorting would be the fuller fulfillment by a wide margin. Intellect is not a higher variable. It is my variable.
Where flow theory lives
This is also where flow theory lives. Csikszentmihalyi’s account of peak experience is this. There is a goal, there is a skill, and the skill sits right at the edge of what the goal demands, with clear feedback on whether we succeeded. Within the pushing of ourselves, we enter a state of timelessness. The activity has to use our strengths, at a level of challenge that stretches them. In my framework the experience of flow is not owned by any one intelligence. It runs through all of them, whichever ones the activity is calling on.
Relational: the solo, and the wall
The fourth ingredient is the one flow theory does not carry, and it is where my theory adds to his rather than replacing it. Flow is solitary in Csikszentmihalyi’s account. On a strict reading of it, hitting a tennis ball against a wall should produce flow, and in a narrow sense it can. When the wall gets too easy, give it a waveform so the ball comes back unpredictably and the perceived difficulty rises with the skill. Hit it and we succeed. Miss it and we do not. The theory holds. But how fun is it to hit a tennis ball against a wall? Not that fun, and everyone knows it, which is what tells me flow is one component of fulfillment rather than the whole of it. What I am describing is an integration, not a replacement: flow is the contextual ingredient, and the other three sit beside it.
The relational ingredient affects the degree of fulfillment nearly universally. Does it matter if I rip the absolute best solo of my life if nobody else can hear it? Let me put it precisely. If I had a recording of James, my drummer, and I played over it and landed full in the pocket, I would still have a degree of fulfillment. It would not be even close to what I feel when James and I manifest that in the actual moment, in the same room. And even my silly perfect-dinner example, how could that not be impacted by the presence of another person? Oh my gosh, this steak is so good. There is something in the sharing of the story that solidifies the reality of the purpose. That is true for every example in this post. Would the canyon trip have been the same if Brian and I had not gotten to talk about it afterward, break it down, go over every pivot? No. Part of this is that I happen to really like being with people, so there is an innate fulfillment that enhances anything. But part of it is the other thing: told, it becomes more true.
Fulfillment has four ingredients, emotional, ethical, contextual, and relational, and pleasure is what we call the first one when the other three are missing.
The test to run on a memory
So pleasure is not the opposite of fulfillment. It is fulfillment on one dimension, and it goes thin when the others are absent or violated. That gives us a test we can run on a memory. Which of the four were there? Which was missing? Which one was being violated without our noticing? The answers are usually obvious once the question is asked.
A Purpose Is Not a Goal
One of the confusing things about this question is that when people state their purpose, they almost always state a goal. Compete in a triathlon. Learn how to make a vase in a pottery class. Get the promotion. That is a slightly incorrect hierarchy. A goal can be in the service of a purpose, but a purpose is not a goal.
Goals are helpful, and they are not the thing
Goals are helpful. A goal is the tangible, behavioral action item, the thing we can put on a calendar, and it gives a strategy something to point at, a compass toward moments of fulfillment. But it is not the actual thing. A purpose is closer to a mechanism of fulfillment, a particular combination of conditions under which we feel most congruent and most engaged. The triathlon is not the purpose. The purpose might be mastery, or the pleasure of a body pushed to its edge, or the companionship of training partners, or proving something to a younger self. The triathlon is one of many ways to get there, and when it is over the purpose remains and looks for its next goal.
Values sit above the purpose
Above the purpose sits something else again: our values. Purpose is subjective and relative, and it requires an integration of our value system, which creates complexity. I want to win. But the winning cannot come at the cost of some other value, like being fair, following the rules, not cheating, not causing unnecessary harm. Winning that costs me one of those still feels like something. It feels like winning, and it feels like shame, at the same time, because it violates a value that sits higher than the win. The purpose has to be integrated with the value system or the fulfillment arrives with dissonance folded into it.
The bike in the rain: why values pay later
The values layer is where this post meets the eleven dialectics behind ethical dilemmas. All the variables in this post are interconnected, and the ethical ones are interconnected with the emotional ones in a particular way that I want to show with a small example, because the big examples hide it.
It is raining and I want to take my bike down the mountain. Riding in the rain is fun. It is also the thing that ruins the trail for everyone who comes after me. So my value of the collective overrules pleasure, immersion, excitement, surprise, novelty, all of it. The value is the one about following a rule that was written for the long term and not for my afternoon, about being systemic rather than only present. The value system goes up against the emotional system and the value wins. Here is the interesting part. In the exact moment of not riding, do I get much of any emotional gain from aligning with my value? Not really. Almost none. And if I had ridden, I would not have felt only the fun. I would have felt euphoria and immersion and guilt all at once, on the trail, in the rain. The emotional ingredients pay mostly now, in the moment. The value pays mostly later, in a time of reflection, a time of being with who I am and my identity and seeing that what I did is consistent with it. Neither one is pure. The ride carries the guilt with it, and the reflection carries some of the forgone pleasure. That is why values lose so often in the moment without being wrong. It is the same long-term versus short-term tension that runs through the ethics post, and it means congruence is a form of fulfillment that arrives mostly on a delay.
Five hours on a mountain
The same delay explains something people find confusing: that exhaustion, grief, and sustained pressure can be fulfilling. It is the same thing. If somebody is bleeding out on a mountain and we take off our shirt and wrap the wound and hold it while our hands go numb and freezing for five hours and we save their life, why was that fulfilling? It is not for everybody. But if we value our ability to take critical steps to help people in moments of crisis, we are going to experience fulfillment, and it will arrive mostly afterward. Asked what the purpose was, that person might say: to take action intuitively and decisively in moments that are critical. They did not find that purpose. They recognized it in retrospect, in the reflection, which is where the value pays.
When the value pays immediately
That raises the fair question from the summary. If a person has never processed how their food was produced, or holds no particular ethic about it, do they get more fulfillment from the meal than I do, carrying the question of the cow to the table? Looked at algorithmically, in that one case, maybe. The delay on the value’s payment is not fixed, though. It shrinks as the value integrates. The more congruent, coherent, and integrated we become, the more our value code acts before thought, the way a schema sits before the emotional response in the four stages, and a value that fires before thought pays in the moment. I am playing pickleball. I know I value being helpful. I see that my partner is there and would really like to take the shot, so I let it go. We win the point, and the collaboration and the sharing land right then, with no reflection required. So the bike and the pickleball shot are the same value at two stages of integration. On the bike, the collective is a rule I follow and the payment comes later. On the court, being helpful is a reflex and the payment comes now. Fewer variables can mean a cheaper fulfillment. Clarity about all the related variables, held coherently, produces a greater final product.
The Half Who Already Know
I recently spent a very long and productive session with a client going over this question. He is unique in that he already has a purpose, and he already knows what it is, so the question was related to something else. He also has a high intellect, a high philosophical ability, and a high experiential variable. He has spent extended amounts of time doing something solitary and demanding that he found incredibly fulfilling and purposeful, and he can describe the fulfillment precisely. The problem was elsewhere. He felt guilty at the reality that he is able to find his purpose, that he knows what it is, while other people are not and do not. And he felt guilty about other people’s perception of him when he is congruent and fully engaged in it.
What a schema is
That might seem ultra-specific. It is not. If there were quadrants of people asking this question, I think this is a huge section of the population. It is not that they do not know what their purpose is. They do know. And there is some other wounded, automatic emotional reality, a schema, telling them they cannot do that. A schema is an automatic emotional construct, learned early and usually in relationship, that fires before thought and tells us what we are and what is allowed. It is not a belief we hold so much as a reaction we have, which is why arguing with it does so little. And a schema of this kind usually carries a value inside it, a good one, grown past its scale.
My own: do not cause discomfort
I can speak for myself here. I have a strong schematic value of not causing other people discomfort. And a lot of the things I do for fulfillment are going to cause people discomfort.
Escalante
This fall I went on a trip with my good friend Brian Buca through the canyon country outside Escalante, and it was unbelievably fulfilling. Here is the catch. On two of the days we hiked routes through the canyons that we thought would be passable. We did a car drop, the two points maybe ten miles apart, which in canyon mileage is far, and the cars an hour and a half apart by road. The route required going through slots, going up and over slots, dropping back into them. We had reason to believe it would work out. We also, more than anything, had this wonderful thing where both of us trust our own capacity, so that either way it was going to work out. Meaning: if at some point the canyon became fully impassable, too dangerous or literally impossible to continue without flying, we both had faith that we could handle what came next. Yeah, that situation would suck. We would hike back to the previous car, and it would be exhausting and really far. Then it would be a pain in the ass, because we would have to drive the hour and a half for nothing to go get the other car at the drop-off point. We knew that. We could absorb it.
And here is the interesting thing about that piece of fulfillment. It was dangerous, and the danger was part of what created the flow state. Both of us are orienteers. Both of us are hikers. Both of us love immersion in a beautiful natural landscape, and we wanted an adventure, not a walk. So we went on this wonderful adventure. We went to Cosmic Ashtray outside Escalante and then found our way toward Red Breaks. I am not even sure we got all the way down that one, because we had to take so many pivots to get down there at all. More than once a slot became too tight to pass, and then we were surrounded by cliffs we could not climb out of. So we had to go back, traverse over a plateau to get into another canyon, and hope that one did not cliff out too. We were in and out of all three of the connecting canyons at one time or another. There had also been quite a lot of rain recently, so some of them might have been more passable on a different week, and there was an additional water variable on top of the route variable. Self-trust, real danger, the unknown, two friends, a landscape. All four ingredients were present, and the relational one was carrying a great deal of the weight.
What people hear
Wow. So that is risky. I do not want you to go. This makes me uncomfortable because I am worried you could die.
What people hear, and what I do with it
Tell people the specifics of that story and that is what some of them hear. It is a reasonable response. And it puts a person with my value system in a bind. Do I not know what my purpose is? Do I not know how to achieve fulfillment? That is not the issue at all. The issue is that I am uncomfortable with the idea of doing something which makes people uncomfortable. So I might not even allow myself to see it, that my purpose involves doing things that make other people uncomfortable. Or I go further: not only do I know my purpose and engage in it, but I say that I do not know it, as a kind of protection against misunderstanding and discomfort in other people. Or, and I think this is what happens most, I do not go. I go to Bryce Canyon instead.
Bryce Canyon instead
We did go to Bryce Canyon, on another day of the same trip. It is like Zion. Tour buses, trails at times wide enough for a horse, signs everywhere. Really, really pretty. It was great. We took some good photos. And it was nowhere near as fulfilling. Not even close. I get the natural environment, the connection, hanging out with my friend, hiking, the somatic experience and the pleasure of being in the body, even the small win of finishing the hike. All of that is on the list. But it was missing the unknown, the novelty, the freedom, the picking our own path. The adventure aspect was necessary for the highest level of fulfillment, and Bryce has none of it by design. And yet the values thing would not have been compromised at all, because I would not assume anybody is going to be scared about me going on a hike in Bryce Canyon, or Estes Park, or anywhere with signs. So do I just go to Bryce Canyon? That is the whole question in one sentence.
Where other people’s fear belongs
Their fear matters to me. So does the experience. Knowing my purpose does not make those two values stop interacting, and the eleven dialectics are the honest way to say where the line is: it moves. Freedom and safety, loyalty and desire, the individual and the collective, all weighted by context. The canyon at twenty-five and the canyon with two kids at home are not the same decision, and neither one is settled by someone else’s fear alone. Our choices ask things of other people and create consequences, and some of them need discussion or negotiation. Caring about that is part of living congruently with our values, not an exception to it. But another person’s discomfort does not, by itself, tell us what we need to know about a choice.
“I do not know my purpose” is sometimes the safest available sentence for a person who knows it exactly.
A tolerance problem, not a search problem
So the first half of the question is not a search problem. It is a tolerance problem. What happened with my client is that he had offered himself the incorrect hypothesis. He thought he did not know what his purpose was and needed other people to validate it, and so he had been looking in the wrong place. The insight he eventually landed on was not a new purpose. It was this: my purpose is something I can honor once I increase my tolerance for the discomfort of the fact that sometimes my authentic self will cause uncomfortable emotions in other people.
Growing the Tolerance
Tolerance for other people’s discomfort does not arrive with the insight. It is grown, and four things grow it.
One: validation
The first is the obvious one, and I nearly left it out: validation from someone who can see the purpose. Suppose a person’s purpose is to be a ballet dancer, and he carries gender-normative constructs that make him feel his father would be embarrassed by a son who wants to dance. He comes into my office and I can see it anyway. I see the fluidity and grace of his micro-movements, even in what his hands do while he talks. So I say it. My gosh, you move like a bird or a gazelle. What a wonderful way to sublimate that. That is not flattery. It is someone outside the schema validating the congruence of the hologram, and for the half who already know their purpose it does two things at once. It lets them embrace the sense of purpose. And it gives them the confidence to take action and make goals, knowing they will not be abandoned by everybody, and maybe not fully abandoned by anybody. There will be injury. The father’s construct around ballet is real, and it is some of the poison in the water. But there are other people who can see the fluidity so clearly that they are validating the congruence, and they are in the water too.
Two: exposure
The second is exposure in small doses, and I will not spend long on it because it is behavioral psychology in its most obvious form. Say a smaller true thing. Survive the response. Say a slightly larger one.
Three: dilution
The third is the one that is novel to me, the one I have been thinking about even in terms of trauma recovery, and I think of it as dilution. Picture a glass of water with poison in it. There are two things we can pour into that glass: more poison, or more water. The automatic mind pours poison on its own, unconsciously and half consciously. It keeps reminding me of the negative. There are probably a lot of people who were scared whether you were okay. You should keep that part of the story out. That is pouring more poison in. It is not that we can help it. We cannot really turn off the radio, that automatic talking thing in the mind that I have written about before. What we can do is dilute the water with intentionality. I can pour water into the canyon trip: I am so grateful for the experience. I can celebrate how well it went and how connected it was and how significant the adventure was. I can practice gratitude, which is the pouring of the water. And I can connect, tell it to other people who can attune to it, which further validates the water. The guilt is still in the glass. It is a smaller proportion of the glass.
What I did with my client
That is what I did with my client. Late in the session he landed on a profound moment of helping a family member, and he started crying. You could tell he felt overwhelmed with fulfillment and congruence and pride, and yet he was a little bit guilty even sharing it with me, his therapist. I completely celebrated with him. Then I encouraged a process where this can spread to other relationships: how can we celebrate his immersion in his purposes, beyond this room? That is dilution. We cannot ever really make a feeling go away. We can add complexity to it. Yes, I feel guilty going down the canyon. And I feel exhilarated, and I feel excited, and I want to tell the people who can hear it and who are not going to hand the guilt back to me.
Four: insight
The fourth is insight, which is where differentiation comes in. When I was in high school I had long hair, and it was a prep school. Some of the faculty would look at me with disdain, or maybe their own embarrassment and frustration, a desire that either my hair was not long or that I was not there, honestly. For a long time I was internalizing that and using it as a mechanism of my identity without knowing I was doing it. The insight was simply to know it. Oh gosh. This is a hard environment for me to be in, and it is not my responsibility to internalize, or to do anything about, their emotional reaction to my authentic aesthetic. Knowing that furthered the differentiation and opened some compassion for the kid who was in it, and it is the same move a person makes in any room that would prefer they were someone else.
All four in one sentence
Something else happened in the session that belongs here, because it was all four at once. My client is philosophically astute. Partway through he came up with his own philosophical hypothesis for what was going on, a good one, and then did his guilt thing: He said, tell me if this is not ok, I have my own idea, but of course if it is not helpful just tell me. I said, yes that makes sense… your guilt just arrived which is great as we can work on it in real time. You have a schema telling you that I am the leader of this, that I am philosophically superior, that there is a hierarchy. So if you say something I have not thought of first, you are going to make me feel inferior. I showed him that was not true, and then I offered an experiment in the moment. Why don’t you just own it? You are my philosophical equal. I just happen to practice the language more. Believe it. Say it out loud. He did. It was harder to say than it sounds, and it held. Validation, exposure, dilution, and insight, in one sentence.
This is the same move as the canyon. The purpose was never missing. What was missing was the tolerance for being seen inside it. I have written before about how compassion can silence self-worth when it is over-expressed, and that is the mechanism: a value that is good in itself, do not cause discomfort, grows until it is the thing deciding which parts of us are allowed to exist.
Diluting the Guilt worksheet
For the half who already know their purpose. Four pages: the purpose and the schema with the value inside it, who can see the purpose and the first small true things to say, what the radio pours in and what we can pour beside it, and the sentence to say out loud this week.
The Half Who Do Not Know Yet
Now the other half, the people who actually do not know. It is not a protective mechanism, as with the first group. They do not have the data. I get this question a lot from them: do you have to fake it till you make it? Do you have to just do it? And part of the answer is absolutely yes. The reasoning matters more than the instruction, though, so here it is.
Say yes first
This whole intervention of saying yes to things is the answer. Go out and try a new sport, a new food, a new class, a new group of people, a trip somewhere unfamiliar. All of it gives us the visceral information necessary to reverse engineer the experience and find out what the purpose was. Fulfillment is felt before it is understood. Once it has been felt, we can take it apart and pull out the variables that produced it. Not the concrete variables, which tend to be goals, but the abstract ones, and now we have four headings to sort them under.
Reading an experience backward
Take my canyon example. I already did it, so I can read it backward. What was in it? Freedom, immersion, nature, companionship, challenge, natural beauty, the somatic pushing of myself, orienteering, self-confidence, and a friend to break it all down with afterward. Now take another one. Franziska and I went on a three-day trip to a resort in Baja, which was atypical for us, because usually we are both adventurers, and this had almost nothing of the canyon in it. It was amazing. So read it backward: what was it? Passion, pleasure, relaxation, freedom, creativity, romance, sexuality, and a deep interconnectedness that was emotional, conversational, and sexual at once. All of that sits under some meta-category like recovery and pleasure, and it was deeply fulfilling. Almost all of it emotional and relational, with the ethical and contextual ingredients settled in advance and out of the way.
| Experience | What was in it | What was thin |
|---|---|---|
| Canyon route with a friend | What was in itNovelty, risk, competence, beauty, self-trust, companionship, the story afterward | What was thinNothing, which is why it ranks so high |
| Three days in Baja with my wife | What was in itPleasure, rest, romance, creativity, intimacy | What was thinChallenge and mastery, by design |
| Mount Zirkel with my family | What was in itBeauty, effort, pride, gratitude, watching competence in people we raised | What was thinNovelty and risk, and it did not matter |
| The perfect steak | What was in itPleasure, surprise, the ethics settled by the restaurant | What was thinChallenge, fit, and often company |
| Not riding in the rain | What was in itCongruence, mostly in reflection | What was thinPleasure and novelty, forgone in the moment |
Purposes are plural, and our condition belongs in the question
Here is where the question usually breaks down. People try to look at the canyons and the trip with my wife together and say, I am having a hard time with the overlap, so I must not have a purpose. Oh, wait, no. All purposes are mechanisms of achieving fulfillment. They have a great degree of diversity, and they change. This is where we need to allow ourselves different purposes at different developmental stages of life, but also at different times, different weeks. Is recovery and relaxation always going to be fulfilling to me? No. I remember really early in our relationship, Franziska and I had just finished a semester of college and we went on a backpacking trip, and we were burnt out. So it was not fulfilling. It rained too much. It was really hard. We had to engage in all this strategy of survival, a lot of the same things that were in the canyon trip, and it was not fulfilling at all. In that instance recovery would have been the better play for us. The canyon ingredients, which I love, produced nothing, because the context was wrong. The ingredients did not change. Our condition did, and our condition belongs in the question.
Mount Zirkel
The third row in that table is the one I did not expect. For my birthday this year we climbed Mount Zirkel, Franziska and me and our two boys. All the same things as the canyon were there: unbelievable beauty, the altitude, the effort, the natural difficulties of camping at eleven thousand feet or wherever we were. It was very fulfilling. And in that instance it was not the most fulfilling thing for me. The most fulfilling thing was this sense of pride and gratitude for the family we have created, that the boys were so fun and such good, kind, well-rounded spirits, and also that they were so competent. High, high levels of competence as hikers, outdoorsmen, mountaineers, campers, dealing with the elements, dealing with the cold, and handling it not only with competence but with their own sense of fulfillment and enjoyment in it. That brought an immense fulfillment and satisfaction to me and to Franziska. Same mountain, same body, a different purpose doing the work, and the relational ingredient carrying almost all of it.
How long do we keep saying yes?
This is the question everyone asks next, and it is a magic wand question. How do we make the unquantifiable quantifiable? How do we know when we have had enough love? How do we know when we have sat within the reality of our mortality long enough that we are good? Everybody wants those answers, and they do not really exist. There is no number, and I would distrust anyone who gave one.
A pickleball shot
What I can do instead is what I do in the room, which is use of self: if I have had purpose and fulfillment, I share an example, and the more trivial the better, so the reader can calibrate. When I play pickleball there is a shot I hit. It is a tennis shot, really, a forehand hit straight down the line, maybe a little to the right since I am right-handed, aimed at the line, and it is a very hard shot. When I hit it, the sense of fulfillment is so high that it encourages me to keep doing it. All these things line up at once: I want to win the point, it is fun, it is beautiful. Even though mathematically I probably lose the point more often than I win it with that shot. The perfect, beautiful shot is more fulfilling to me on an operational level than winning the game. I am more interested in beauty than in winning. That is not advice. It is a reading, offered so someone else can notice what they are looking for by how it differs from mine.
What flow theory gives the question
Flow theory does give the question a shape, if not a number. Until a certain level of skill, anxiety will be dominant, and anxiety impedes the feeling of fulfillment entirely. So sampling forever never gets there. At some point the yes has to turn into dedication to the few most probable yes activities, long enough to pass through the anxious stretch and find out what is on the other side of it.
What reverse engineering looks like
Pick one experience that was unmistakably fulfilling. Describe it concretely, then strip the concrete away. Not “the hike” but what the hike contained, sorted under the four headings: which emotions it met, whether a value was honored or violated, whether it used our strengths, and who was there. Do it for a second experience that looks nothing like the first. The overlap is less important than the two lists. The lists are the purpose, in its current form.
When Nothing Comes to Mind
Some people cannot answer the first question at all. They tell me they cannot remember ever being fulfilled. This is a different starting point, and it usually has a history in it.
Pizza or tacos
I start with emotions that tend to always happen.
What I ask
Tell me a time you were surprised.
Tell me a time you were in awe.
Tell me a time you were in a significant amount of pleasure.
Almost the easiest one, the one I always cycle back to, is food. How do we know we like pizza better than tacos? For most people the answer is immediate and bodily. And sometimes they do not know that one either. That tells me something. Ultimately there can be deeper things, a trauma or a neglect somewhere upstream that led to a disassociation from the soma, and when a person cannot locate a preference between two foods, the work has to start further back.
The hand exercise
So sometimes we almost have to start over with some of my more somatic work, like the hand exercise. I have somebody close their eyes and I guide them in a meditation of entering into their hand.
The hand exercise
Feel the air on the top of your hand, and on the bottom. The temperature. The weight of it. And then, all the way in, the heartbeat in the hand.
That is a simple reintegration, and from there I will elicit something: a time in their life when they felt surprised and proud at the same time. Maybe an image or a story comes up. For some people it comes readily, and the question can be as plain as whether they have ever been to the ocean. For other people we go all the way to the depth, especially if there was trauma or neglect, and the surfacing is itself the first piece of fulfillment they can read. The information we need at first can be small. Nobody has to begin with an account of what their whole life is for.
Into the Week
Small enough that it cannot fail
Once someone has identified the abstract variables, say helpfulness, freedom, intimacy, mastery, the question becomes how we translate that knowledge into the actual week. This is where all the habit research and behavioral psychology earns its place. Do something super accomplishable. What is an idea of freedom that we can do right in this moment? What is an empowerment we can do right now, today, at a scale that cannot fail? The canyon is one expression of freedom. So is leaving the phone at home on a walk. The ingredient scales down without changing its nature, and a week with a small dose of each one in it is a different week from one that waits for the canyon.
The capacities underneath
This is also where the living balance of our emotional and social capacities comes back in, because engineering a life toward fulfillment means motivating our aptitudes, growing the ones that let us progress toward it, and tolerating the ones we do not have yet. The question of enough sits nearby, since one of the ingredients most people underweight is recovery itself.
The whole post on one page
For anyone who wants to carry this rather than read it twice, everything above fits on one page: the hierarchy, the four ingredients, and the two halves of the question with the work each one needs.
Common Questions
Do I have to fake it till I make it?
Yes, in the sense that fulfillment is felt before it is understood. Saying yes to unfamiliar things produces the visceral information we then read backward. No, in the sense that we are not pretending to feel something. We are collecting data on what we actually feel.
What if my purpose makes the people I love uncomfortable?
Then the work is tolerance, not search. A value like not causing discomfort is worth keeping. It is not worth letting it decide which parts of us are allowed to exist. The guilt will not vanish, but it can be diluted by what we pour in beside it: gratitude, celebration, and the people who can hear the story.
What is the difference between pleasure and fulfillment?
Pleasure is fulfillment on the emotional dimension alone. Fulfillment, in full, has four ingredients: the emotions we were prioritizing, a value honored rather than violated, an activity that used our strengths, and someone to share it with. An experience can be very pleasant and thin on the other three.
Is it a problem that my purpose keeps changing?
No. Purposes are mechanisms of fulfillment, and they are plural and contextual. What fulfilled us burnt out at twenty-two is not what fulfills us rested at forty-five, and the same mountain can serve a different purpose on a different day.
What the Question Is Asking
“How do I find my purpose?” assumes there is one, that it is hidden, and that finding it is the hard part. More often there are several, they are already visible in the experiences we remember most vividly, and the hard part is either reading them accurately or letting ourselves be seen inside them. Which raises the last question, the one underneath all of the others: what is anything without being in relationship to another? Is a purpose fully a purpose without someone to witness it? I do not think fulfillment requires a witness. I do think the degree of it almost always depends on one, and that something in the telling makes the purpose more real than it was in the doing. Sometimes the work is identifying what matters. Sometimes it is growing the capacity to let it matter in the life we actually have, with the guilt still present when we speak, and the pride and the fulfillment of having participated present alongside it, and someone there to hear both.
