A friend sent an exercise to me titled “How to Discover Your Life Purpose in About 20 Minutes” which immediately activated every skeptical muscle in my body. Yet I committed to trying the exercise.

It is an exercise to continue writing sentence after sentence until you find something that resonates with you…

…and makes you cry.

I didn’t think it would work, but I ended up in tears after my 18th iteration. I’m a bit nervous to share something like this, but here is what I ended up writing that made me tear up:

Connect as a real friend to people to give them the courage to create, help simplify the world to enable people to imagine new possibilities, and continuously be more brave in discovering the people and things that matter in my own life

I’m definitely still a bit skeptical of anyone who claims to have a defined purpose, but this exercise definitely brought to the surface something that means a lot to me – friendship – as a way of engaging with the world. I’m going to explore that more, especially as I am physically far from so many people, while always seeing which new people appear in my life.

I’d love to hear others experiences if they try the exercise. Let me know what happens.

33k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here