How to figure out what to do with your life

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Original Article: How to figure out what to do with your life

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I think it's possible to reliably identify what to do with your life. There's a super quick test for it. When doing the test myself, I realized something:

I never want to start another startup. It feels uncomfortable to say that, but now I know—in my heart—that it's true.

Here's what happened. I spent an hour listing out everything I care about: human connection, self-education, wealth, and so on. In the process, I surprised myself: there's a much better way to achieve all my goals than starting another startup.

So I'm publicly sharing my framework to help others come to similar realizations: What should you really be working on?

Perhaps you'll conclude that you should pursue startups. They're wonderful, but know why you're doing them.

Or perhaps—like me—you'll realize you've chased an outdated dream. That's the tragedy: Without self-reflection, we ride the momentum of whatever we're already doing and whatever we stumble across. This means we work on the wrong things by default, because our core values shift over time and they're often not what they used to be.

So, let's develop a framework for periodically breaking out of life's inertia to identify what we should be doing today.

The afternoon that changed my life

To design my framework, I took pen to paper and listed all the values I cared about when pursuing a new project.

These are the values I identified:

Knowledge — Do you become more knowledgeable and skilled from it?
Adventure — Do you accrue novel, memorable experiences?
‍Fame — Do you build an audience you can later leverage?
‍Power — Do you acquire resources and connections?
Money — Do you increase your financial wealth?
Exercising Talent — Do you leverage your skill and creativity?
Human Connection — Do you bond with others?

It took 15 minutes to realize that those are the things I care about. What's crazy is that I didn’t do this exercise until I was 27. In 27 years, I never took 15 minutes to be more deliberate about my pursuit of... life itself.

My goal was to determine whether I should pursue startups or double down on content creation at Julian.com.

Which pursuit better satisfies my values listed above?

As a first step, I ordered those values by what I care most about today. Then I drew checkmarks next to those that were fulfilled by startups and writing

Knowledge — Do you become more knowledgeable and skilled from it?
Adventure — Do you accrue novel, memorable experiences?
‍Fame — Do you build an audience you can later leverage?
‍Power — Do you acquire resources and connections?
Money — Do you increase your financial wealth?
Exercising Talent — Do you leverage your skill and creativity?
Human Connection — Do you bond with others?

I ordered the values by what I care most about today. Then I drew checkmarks next to those that were fulfilled by startups and writing.

I call this the Personal Values exercise. It was eye opening: it turns out that writing has far more top-ranked checkmarks than startups do.

Here's the dialogue that played out in my head:

One benefit of startups is that they can make a lot of Money. But, making a lot of Money is low on my values ranking. It used to be a lot higher, but this exercise is about being authentic to your present self.

The remaining two startup checkmarks were Adventure and Exercising Talents. Adventure is near the bottom of my list, so that leaves Exercising Talents. I rank that h...

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