When someone doesn’t know what their purpose is, they almost always assume they have to create it. That they need to go out and find a new idea, a new cause, a version of themselves that doesn’t exist yet. So they spend years trying different paths, hoping one of them will finally feel right.
I believe that, in most cases, purpose isn’t something you invent. It’s something you recognize. And to recognize it, you don’t need to look forward — you need to look back.
The Pattern That Was Already There
I know a woman, an engineer by training, brilliant, creative, with an enormous capacity for work. She built a solid career in a technical field, the kind of field people admire from the outside precisely because it seems to demand a logic far removed from any artistic sensibility.
But since childhood, she loved painting. Not as an occasional hobby, but as something constant: the canvases, the brushes, the hours mixing colors while everything else she was interested in changed over the years. That part of her never disappeared, not even during her most demanding professional years. It simply stayed in the background, treated as a pastime instead of a signal.
Today she no longer works as an engineer. She paints. And the interesting part isn’t that she found something new along the way. It’s that this thread was there from the beginning, quietly holding on through all the years she spent building — with real effort and real talent — a different career.
She didn’t invent her purpose the day she left engineering. She simply stopped postponing it.
Why We Don’t See It While We’re Living It
Purpose rarely announces itself through a job title or a conscious decision.
It shows up in how you solve problems, in the kind of conversations you’re drawn to without noticing, in what has attracted you since before you had the words to explain it, in what comes easily to you while people around you struggle with the same thing. And precisely because it comes naturally, you tend not to take it seriously.
We dismiss as unimportant the very thing we do best, simply because it costs us no effort. That’s exactly why it’s so hard to see from the inside. You need some distance — time, or another person’s perspective — to connect the dots that, lived one by one, seemed unrelated.
The Exercise That Actually Works
Instead of asking yourself “what is my purpose?” — a question that invites you to invent something from scratch — try a different one: look back over the last ten or fifteen years and write down, without filtering anything, the specific moments when you felt you were doing exactly what you should be doing. Not the most impressive achievements on your résumé, but the moments you remember most clearly, even if they seemed small at the time.
Then look for what repeats. Not the industry, not the job title, not the type of organization. Look for the specific action that keeps showing up, disguised in different contexts. That’s the thread. It’s almost never an industry — it’s almost always a verb: connect, simplify, defend, teach, fix.
What Changes When You Stop Inventing and Start Recognizing
When you understand purpose as something you recognize rather than something you invent, the pressure changes shape.
It’s no longer about finding the perfect idea that doesn’t exist yet. It’s about taking seriously a pattern you’ve already been demonstrating for years, even if you’ve never called it by name.
The question is no longer “what am I going to do with my life?” It’s “what have I been doing my whole life without giving it a name yet?” Or even “what have I been putting off, telling myself there will be time for it later?”
So before you rush off to find something new, go back and look at the old. The answer is probably not waiting to be discovered in the future. It’s already written, repeated more than once, in your own past.
Bisila Bokoko
