Finding your life's work

Surprising lessons I learned about purpose by listening to my heart

Photo by Aditya Saxena

What is a life’s work?

I found one answer to this question on a wall in Silicon Valley a few years ago:

You only get a few shots at building your life's work—the kind of work that makes a difference, that can't happen without you.

The quote evoked a sense of meaning that was largely absent from my life at the time. How grand it would be to make a real difference, I mused. Indeed, I’d recently quit my job in the hopes of building something more meaningful.

What unfolded in the years that followed was not quite what I expected. I hope my learnings will spark something interesting for you, especially if you're making a pivot in your career or wondering what you're here to do.

The never-ending search for purpose

A woman at peace with herself is usually not obsessed with questions of purpose. She carries about her life in a grounded way—comfortable in her own skin, grateful for her blessings, generous with her love.

I wasn’t at peace with myself when I came across the quote above. Just a few months prior I’d found myself standing over a sink of dirty dishes, sobbing, “God, do what you will with me.” I wasn’t even sure what I meant by “God” but some sort of divine intervention seemed necessary.

It wasn’t the dishes that had me rolling in despair, of course, but a sinking feeling that something had gone terribly awry with my career and that if I didn’t find my way out I would be permanently doomed to a lackluster sort of existence.

Wow. This bit of drama seems incredible to me now, but I’m including it to acknowledge that many of us suffer silently (and needlessly!) while feeling like we’re half-alive, like there’s something off but we can’t seem to fix it. And the despair can sometimes reach crisis levels.

Many of us attempt to address the malaise by changing something about our external world–a new role, a new manager, a new company, a new vision for making an impact in the world. We overlook the possibility that there’s something within us that’s responsible for the undercurrent of despair. I certainly did.

Through the course of my career I’d pivoted from engineering to academia and then to product management, each time in the hopes that I would find something that I thought made a real difference. Each transition was intentional, and the result of careful introspection, yet nothing had succeeded in satisfying my soul. Instead, a constant dissonance–with the seemingly pointless products, the cultures of arrogance, and the corporate nincompoopery–had me yearning for my true purpose. (Which I thought would deliver fulfillment and solve my problems once and for all.)

It was all rather confusing. Was I standing in my truth? Or was I engaged in a random walk of career-defeating moves? To my mentors it would seem like I was squandering my potential. I lived with the shame of not having a coherent story while others around me seemed to be happy and making progress within their chosen professions. I was a “jane of all trades” whose life was not adding up to anything substantial, or so I feared.

Choosing to look within

Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakens.

~ C.G. Jung

Desperate times called for desperate measures. I decided that I would look inward and listen to my heart, whatever that meant. Like many of my peers, I was extremely head-centric and skeptical of anything that could not be understood analytically–listening to my heart seemed to me like the wackiest possible idea. But the logic and pragmatism that had dominated my decision-making to date had failed to deliver fulfillment. And I had nothing left to lose.

I made a commitment to myself. Every decision, no matter how small or large, would now be subject to my heart’s approval. This was harder to do than it sounds, not least because of my analytical tendencies. My next article will be about how head-centric people unintentionally torture themselves on their personal growth journeys, and how they can do a little less of that. But I digress…

Listening to my heart unleashed an alchemical process of healing and growth–not what I expected from an attempt to decipher my inner longings and find my life’s work, but in hindsight it’s what I needed. It became imperative to slow down, to become still, and to practice radical self-honesty and self-acceptance. Meditation, time in solitude, journaling, and a host of other psycho-spiritual methods and inquiries all served to help me explore my consciousness.

In that space, many of my issues bubbled up to be resolved, most of them for good. Feelings of being an outsider and not belonging anywhere. Concerns that I was not beautiful or smart or lovable enough. And much more.

Life is in fact very generous when it comes to revealing your issues. It is constantly offering you situations that help you understand yourself and evolve, which happens more smoothly when you’re open to the truth. The aim of every healing process is to make you more receptive to the truth and to help you strip out all that is false.

Often it starts with the dismantling of your beliefs–this is usually introduced more gently in the self-help literature as “overcoming limiting beliefs”, a method by which you drop any beliefs that hold you back from what you want in life.

For instance, you might hold a belief that being short means you’re doomed to make less money than tall people–which could turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy unless you drop the belief and discover that your height does not in fact limit your ability to make good money.

Belief-dropping led to the realization that none of my previous ideas about career progression or what it means to make a “real difference” even made sense! I could be fulfilled doing anything, just about anywhere (though I might have certain preferences). My story never needed to be orderly or to add up to anything. Ha.

Brevity demands that I skip a few details here. Or perhaps I do not have the words to express the beauty and depth of the transformation that unfolded. But suffice to say that it was more than a surgical removal of beliefs–it was a deeper recognition of the inherent wholeness of life that prevails regardless of one’s judgments and opinions about it. Failing to perceive this wholeness, we scramble to fix something outside of ourselves, just as I was hunting for some true purpose that I thought had somehow evaded me thus far.

With a growing sense of belonging and peace arising within myself, I no longer felt unsettled about my career trajectory or particular work environments. The source of my problems was in here all along, not out there.

Healing isn’t easy but it is wonderful to feel more free and expansive, to feel love flowing through and caressing all the unloved places. The temporary discomfort is worth the longer-term reward, and you can move through it. Please remember that, if that’s where you find yourself right now and are impatient for it to be over already.

Get curious about any undercurrents of malaise in your life before they become a deafening roar, e.g. in the form of a mid-life crisis. If you can devote some time to do the inner work now, both you and the world will be much better off for it.

Butcher, baker, or candlestick-maker?

Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.

~ Alan Watts

Eventually you realize that all beliefs or narratives are mere conceptual overlays constructed by your mind and don’t actually capture the process of life or who you fundamentally are. All ideas you hold about yourself are limiting beliefs, all of them. Self-definition is then seen for what it is—an exercise in futility and limitation.

A professional identity is one of many such limiting masks we wear in an attempt to define ourselves and navigate through life. Yet some of us hang on to these masks for dear life, defending our carefully-cultivated self-image, even if it means getting burned out doing things we’d rather not be doing.

We are at a tipping point where previous models of career progression are happily being questioned and revamped entirely. What if you gave yourself permission to drop any ideas that are potentially restricting your choices–ideas about which companies would look good on your resume, how much money you need to be making, what counts as “purposeful” work, what makes a real impact, what you think you’re capable of doing? What might you do differently?

As an aside, becoming more adaptable and mentally flexible will serve us well over increasingly long lifespans in a world where uncertainty is the new normal. (Multipotentialites, rejoice!)

So go forth in your brilliance! Take baby steps towards your desires if that’s what’s feasible right now. Have a gala time. And while you’re at it…

Choose love

Not the kind that earns you a spot on the cover of Time for saving the world, my love, if you are defined by your desire for saving the world. That self-definition will keep you attached to certain outcomes and keep you going in circles, revisiting the same issues over and over again. True peace will evade you. Are you tired of all the suffering yet?

But the kind George Bernard Shaw describes as the true joy in life, that which comes from making one’s life a selfless offering without any attachment to outcome:

…the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one…the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances...

I have not mastered this myself. But my heart has been broken open again and again in realizing that this is just how life works. Namely that actions borne of love are carried forward by the force that’s moving life towards harmony and, what’s more, lead to unexpected and magical blessings.

So what is a life’s work?

I will attempt an alternative answer based on what I’ve shared with you above.

As you shed all that is illusory and empty yourself out, you might find your identity expanding beyond your little sense of self to an underlying Self, the universal consciousness that is our true nature and that we share with everything. And then, paradoxically, you experience a very keen sense of being your own unique self because you are unconstrained by your mind’s stories about yourself or by any prior conditioning. Thus, in realizing the Self, you find your soul. Which, according to the mystics, is all we’re after.

We’ve all experienced some version of this from time to time, whether or not we’re aware of it, when we’re moving spontaneously with life’s energies, feeling calm, blissful, and very present, aware of the interconnectedness at the heart of existence and yet being completely ourselves.

In that mode you would appear to the outside world to have found your purpose. You would also realize, however, that there is no particular purpose that you are supposed to do or without which your life would be meaningless! You would recognize that defining some such purpose would be just another mind-created story that you would shed sooner or later. So it is not you who has any particular purpose. Rather life is its own purpose, which is to know and live that purpose through you.

But what does this all mean in more practical terms? How will you find what you are here to do?

The more you do the inner work, the more it becomes clear and all falls into place automatically. In truth, you do not have to find your life’s work; you are already doing it, whether you are aware of it or not. You can only recognize and align with the truth–that your work is to evolve and to propel life forward.

Love is the essence of this process. It is love that pushes you to endure and find your way out of your confusion–love for a particular person, love for humanity, love for Mother Earth perhaps. Love ensures that the right work finds you–perhaps in the form of that project that won’t go away no matter how much you try, that idea that won’t let you sleep at night. Love leads you to your soul song, your way to bring beauty into this world.

I have tried my best to articulate what I have gleaned from my life experiences and I hope it has been of benefit to you. But I am no spiritual teacher, and my understanding and explanations may shift over time–please take what resonates and ignore the rest.

Photo by NASA

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