How to discover your purpose

It's worth spending some time figuring out what you want to do with your life one day. Because well it's what you're going to be spending your life on... These tips may help you.

How do I know what to do?

Fair question. It’s not just enough to be curious and discover widely: you also need to know how to effectively analyse and synthesise information to proactively help you make better decisions about your future. Innovation and marketing expert and founder of the Non-Obvious Company Rohit Bhargava’s “Haystack Method” is a trend-curation tool that can be repurposed to help you discover more about what career or role may suit you in the future and what the purpose is that drives you.

Your job is to gather the “hay” – information about your strengths and skills available career paths and information ideas articles interviews experiences hobbies and behaviour that appeal to you. Then you’ll use what you’ve gathered to define a “needle”: your core motivation or the “why” of why you do what you do. This needle can be a golden thread and gives meaning to all the information you’ve gathered.

Using the five steps of the Haystack Method below you can try to answer the following question: “What kind of career will I be happiest in?”

1. Gathering

Important information stories and interesting ideas related to different career paths found while reading listening seeing and experiencing which you then make note of and save or collect somewhere. The results of Career Quizzes and chats with industry experts or family members can form part of “gathering the hay”.

2. Aggregating

Take individual ideas and disconnected thoughts you discovered really appeal or “speak” to you or really repel you and group them together to identify a broader theme or possibilities. What underlying need of yours do these themes or ideas speak to? Is there a vague trend towards liking outdoor work or the idea of working with animals? Are you attracted to stories or ideas about making a difference? Do you have a bias against working with your hands?

3. Elevating

Identify underlying themes that align a group of ideas to describe a single bigger concept. This is the tricky part: condensing all you’ve learnt so far to find a key non-obvious insight into something: the specific industries that might suit you best for example. Does it look like working for a non-profit might be your thing? Or do you want to be an entrepreneur?

4. Naming

Describe a collection of your powerful ideas in a memorable way to make it easy to understand. This could be condensing each “idea collection” into a “role name”: Creative Director at World Wildlife Fund or Fire Station Chief or Sustainable City Planner and Architect or Surf Instructor working with people with a disability – try to describe what is core to you in a few actionable words.

5. Proving

Validate your ideas. Think about the roles you “named” – what speaks to you? What doesn’t? Do you need more information? “Test” your ideas by talking to friends family career advisors thinking about pros and cons – and if you’re unsure do more research (start gathering the hay again!). Once you’ve run through this process it’s time to apply the ideas or make the decisions. In your case you can use it to help you decide which Year 12 subjects to choose which training pathways to follow towards your end goal what kind of industries you want to work in and even what your dream role may be.