Asher's Blog

There is a question I think every young person eventually runs into, and it almost never arrives at a convenient time. It shows up late at night, or in the middle of a job that pays the bills but leaves you feeling quietly empty, or sometimes right after what looked from the outside like a significant win. The question itself is simple, and it is brutal in equal measure.

What am I actually here to do?

Pure science cannot answer that question, and John Lennox speaks to this powerfully in his defense for the existence of God, making the case that some of the most important questions human beings carry are simply outside the reach of the scientific method, no matter how far that method advances.

I have been in that place myself, and that is exactly why I want to talk about it honestly, because I think we do young people a genuine disservice when we make purpose sound like a lightning bolt moment, like one morning the clouds part and you simply know, and from that point everything aligns. That has not been my experience, and it has not been the experience of most people I have had the privilege of mentoring over the years either.

Purpose is less of a discovery and more of a pursuit. You find it by moving, not by waiting for it to find you.

The pressure we put on the question

One of the first things I want to say is this: stop treating purpose like it is buried treasure that only a small number of lucky or spiritually enlightened people ever get to find. That framing is exhausting and it is not true, and the weight it puts on young people is doing more harm than we acknowledge.

The pressure we place on young people to find their passion early has actually been studied carefully. Researchers at Stanford found that telling people to find their passion can make them less resilient when things inevitably get difficult, because they have been conditioned to believe that if something is truly their passion, it should always feel natural and easy and energising. That is a lie, and it is a lie worth naming directly. Even the things you are most genuinely called to do will challenge you, frustrate you, bore you in seasons, and push you right to the edge of what you think you are capable of. Purpose is not the thing that always feels good. It is the thing you keep returning to even when it does not, the thing that pulls you back even after you have walked away from it in exhaustion.

How you actually find it

I will not pretend there is a clean formula, because there is not one, but there are patterns I have observed consistently, both in my own life and in the lives of people I have walked closely with over time.

1. Pay attention to what makes you lose track of time, and I do not mean that in a passive sense like scrolling through your phone at midnight. I mean what work, what conversations, what kinds of problems pull you in so completely that you look up and two hours have disappeared without you noticing. That is a signal worth following seriously.
2. Notice what genuinely angers you about the world, because this one surprises people but I mean it with full sincerity. The things that bother you at a deep level, injustice, inefficiency, people being overlooked, systems that are broken and nobody seems to be fixing them, those are frequently clues about where your purpose is waiting. Purpose is very often born at the exact place where your sensitivity meets a real and unmet need in the world.
3. Look at what people actually come to you for, and I am not talking about what you studied or what is written on your CV. I mean what do people seek you out for specifically, what do they trust you with, what do they bring to you when they are genuinely stuck. Sometimes the people around us can see our gifts with more clarity than we can ourselves, because they experience those gifts without all the self-doubt and internal noise we carry around.
4. Experiment far more than you plan, because a significant number of young professionals spend enormous energy trying to figure out their purpose entirely inside their heads, running the same loops over and over, and purpose simply does not reveal itself that way. It reveals itself through action. Take the opportunity even when you do not feel ready. Start the project even when the conditions are not perfect. Say yes to the thing that scares you a little, because you will learn more about who you actually are in six months of doing than you will in six years of thinking about doing.

The part nobody talks about: fulfilling it

This is where I want to spend some real time, because I think this is the part of the conversation that consistently gets skipped over, and I think it gets skipped because it is harder and less romantic than the discovery part.

A great deal of the conversation around purpose stops at finding it, as though discovery is the finish line and once you cross it, the rest somehow takes care of itself. But that is only half the work, and honestly it is the easier half. The harder half is the fulfilling.

Because once you know what you are here to do, you have to actually do it. Consistently. In the ordinary and unremarkable days when nobody is watching and nothing feels particularly significant or meaningful. In the seasons when progress is completely invisible and you are not sure whether you are moving forward or just standing still. In the moments when doubt walks in quietly and starts asking whether you were wrong about all of it and whether you should just go do something safer.

Fulfilling your purpose requires a kind of discipline that your feelings will not always cooperate with. It requires building habits and structures around the work especially when inspiration is absent, because inspiration is a visitor and not a resident, and you cannot afford to wait for it before you show up. It requires surrounding yourself with people who can remind you of who you are and what you are building in the moments when you forget, and those moments will come more often than you expect.

Viktor Frankl, who survived the Holocaust and went on to write one of the most important and enduring books of the twentieth century, said that those who have a why to live can bear almost any how. Purpose is not simply a nice thing to have when life is going well. It is structural. It is load-bearing. It holds you up when everything around you is shaking and you have no other reason to keep going.

A word to the young professional reading this

You do not need to have it all figured out right now, and I want you to actually believe that and not just read past it. Some of the most purposeful and impactful people I know spent years in genuine confusion before things became clear to them, and the confusion was not wasted time. It was formation. It was preparation. It was the slow and often invisible work of becoming someone capable of carrying what was coming.

But do not use that as a reason to stay still, because stillness dressed up as patience is just fear with better branding. Move. Try things. Commit to something even when you are not entirely sure yet, because commitment itself teaches you things that contemplation never will. Be honest with yourself about what lights you up and what slowly drains something essential out of you. Pay attention to both signals. Have the courage to make changes when what you are doing no longer aligns with who you are becoming, even when those changes are inconvenient or costly.

And when you do find it, that thread that connects your gifts and your values and the contribution you want to make to the world, protect it with real seriousness. Guard your time around it. Build your life deliberately in the direction of it. Learn to say no to the things that pull you away from it, and understand that some of those things will be genuinely good things, attractive things, things that other people will not understand why you are declining. Say no anyway.

Purpose is not a destination you arrive at and then rest. It is a direction you choose, and every single day you get to decide whether you are walking toward it or away from it.

Choose toward it.