Finding Direction When You’re Lost — Screw Your Passion

Not everyone has a clear idea of where they want to take their life.

Not everyone has been coding since they were four.

Not everyone has known they wanted to be a doctor since middle school.

A lot of us have to make decisions without an overarching goal defining and guiding our life.

But how do you go about making good decisions when you have no clue what you want to achieve?

Screw Your Passion

No one ever talks about what to do when you feel lost.

Yes, obviously it would be great just to decide on and wholeheartedly pursue a passion. No one is arguing that passion is bad. What is bad is acting like the world is black and white and full of either 1) helpless people who are doing it all wrong and wasting their life or 2) people with a passion that they can articulate on their LinkedIn profiles.

When you feel like the direction in your life is not comparable to that of the people around you that constantly make decisions based on their passion (founding a company, going to medical school, coding awesome code, working on Wall Street or for a big consulting firm) you’re forced into a perspective of the world that puts you firmly in the shitty “I don’t-know-what-I-am-doing” category and your acquaintances in the enviable “I-have-it-all-figured-out” category.

First of all, anyone who tells you that they have all the pieces to the puzzle is lying to you and to themselves.

Secondly, you can still make good decisions even in the face of either not having or having lost your overarching goal.

Set Your Foundations

Clear your head of all the noise everyone wants you to pay attention to and focus on yourself.

Think about this as your desert island scenario; you are stranded, figure out what tools you have, what you’ll eat, drink, and where you’ll sleep. Figure out the foundations.

Taking this analogy further, everyone sailing by the island yelling for you to hurry and catch up with them as they sail toward their bright future while ignoring the fact that you don’t actually have a ship of your own represents those with a clear direction in life that don’t understand why you’re not the same as they are.

You’re not dead yet, so quit your fretting and set your foundations.

Here’s how to start taking steps forward in the face of ambiguity, ignorance and the lack of a defining purpose:

• Figure out what tools you have at your disposal.
• Define your decision-making criteria.
• Build relationships.
• Seek feedback.
• Repeat.

#1 Find a Tool

Are you good at anything? How about just OK? Are you a good thinker? Reader? Writer? Do you love to exercise? Are numbers fun for you? Do you paint? Really, absolutely anything will do.

Find something you can double down on and make it your first tool.

How I started:

When I was at the lowest point in my life, when I felt the most lost and directionless I had ever felt, I started my toolbox with writing. I was a political science major in college and the most tangible “skill” I could identify was writing. So, I doubled down on writing and made it my first tool.

I started transforming my essays that were written for class into articles I could submit to student journals. Later, as I grew more confident I started submitting work to online magazines.

Then I came across Medium and experimented with pushing the publish button. My very first pieces were just 200-word write-ups on books I was reading.

Eventually, writing would bring me to my first job after college which was at Facebook.

It was a long road from writing college essays to working at Facebook (and it still continues) but it started by thinking about what I was doing in my life and sifting out a useful skill to be my first tool.

Find your first tool, double down on it and strengthen and refine it. Investing incrementally today will dramatically change your tomorrow.

#2 Define Your Decision-Making Criteria

In order to move forward, you have to make good decisions.

In order to make good decisions, you have to understand why you would choose option A over option B.

For example, I decided that writing was my first tool. But why did I choose to eventually write on Medium? Why would I choose to publish my writing as opposed to keeping it private? How did I decide what to write about?

If you establish criteria for making better decisions you can move forward even if you don’t know what the big-picture goal is that you are pursuing.

You don’t have to have a life-defining goal to make good decisions.

First steps towards defining my own criteria:

I was in a real crisis. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. Each day I lived without a direction made me feel hopeless and useless; a waste of the most important thing in life, my finite time.

The biggest obstacle to finding a purpose in life was that I did not know what I wanted that purpose to be. I knew there was a world of things in front of me and that the answer could be found I just had to go out and find it. I had to learn more and explore my options.

So, the first criteria to consider when making a decision became, “does it further my learning?”

I also knew that whatever it was that I needed to learn and experience, it probably existed outside of my comfort zone. So, the second criteria became, “is this scary and does it push me outside my comfort zone?”

As I began to read and listen to people talk about how they make decisions in their own lives, I began to realize how important building strong relationships in my life would be. So, the third criteria became, “does this contribute to my desire to learn how to and actually create better relationships?”

First set of criteria for making decisions:

1. Does it further my learning?
2. Is this scary and does it push me outside my comfort zone?
3. Does this contribute to my desire to learn how to and actually create better relationships?

The criteria in action:

Now, even without an overarching life-goal such as the desire to become an architect or a doctor, I could make decisions in my everyday life and know that I was doing my best.

Instead of meandering without cause, I began to make decisions in which I was confident.

Question: Should I spend my weekend reading articles and books and finding people on the internet who have done things I think I would like to do myself?

Decision: Yes. This furthers my learning and enriches my ability to form relationships by expanding my knowledge base.

Question: Should I spend painful hours writing (even though I had no idea what I was doing) publically on Medium.com? 

Decision: Yes. This furthers my learning (by forcing deep thinking), pushes me way outside my comfort zone, and furthers my ability to create relationships by granting me a valuable depth of thought on certain topics.

Question: Should I send a random email to this person in my university’s alumni network about the work they do even though I have nothing to offer them and I don’t know what I am doing? 

Decision: Hell yes. This furthers my learning, tears me out of my comfort zone, and teaches me more about creating relationships.

With my first set of decision-making criteria, I could invest my spare time in a structured and valuable way.

I had fought for and won my first grain of confidence in the long battle to find direction in life.

#3 Build Relationships

You will never regret the time you invest in learning how to build wonderful relationships.

For one year of my life, my main “hobby” was to create meaningful relationships.

Instead of partying, I was writing cold emails.

Instead of heading to San Diego for the weekend, I was riding busses around Los Angeles to coffee meetings and lunches (the only time I ever spent money).

Instead of heading home to take a nap between classes, I was meeting someone for coffee on campus or having a phone call with someone I had emailed.

It wasn’t all smooth sailing.

I screwed up so many times.

I remember the times I would lose sight of my goal and back out of meetings at the last minute at the expense of the person who had made time for me in their busy life.

I remember the times I showed up unprepared and cocky, thinking that I could wing the meeting and still make good use of the person’s time. I was wrong almost every time at the expense of the person who had made time for me in their busy life.

I remember the phone calls where I was told to stop wasting the person’s time with my general and directionless questions.

I remember countless moments of stupidity, of showing up sweaty and late, of saying things I didn’t mean, forgetting important things the other person shared; there were so many mistakes.

Thank you to everyone who gave me their time, especially if the time you gave me was only to tell me how lost I was. I needed every bit of your rejection. Every time someone slapped me in the face, I was forced to pivot. I was forced to reconsider my intent and ways of executing on that intent. Thank you.

The point of making relationships:

The point is to grow more than you can imagine.

That’s it.

It’s as simple as that. When you create relationships centered around authenticity, vulnerability, courage, and respect your life will change.

It is extra difficult to build these relationships when you do not have a defining direction in your life. But if you can make these relationships in spite of your lack of an overarching goal in life, you will be even better for it.

Apart from creating good peer relationships, mentor relationships are a huge part of learning how to move forward in the face of crushing ambiguity.

I built my own “board of directors” by seeking out mentors who inspired and challenged me.

By having a group of mentors, rather than just one, you can bring specific questions and problems to each one individually. You also begin to realize how different everyone’s opinions are going to be in life.

You may bring the same question or problem to seven different mentors and leave with seven different answers and suggestions.

The power is in the melding of those ideas with your own thoughts and decision-making criteria to form a synergistic method of moving forward; harnessing the powerful insight and decades of experience that your board of directors offers you.

#4 Seek Feedback

Seek feedback in real-time.

Seek it passively.

Seek it actively.

It is critical that you do not plateau and feedback is the guarantor of that.

You either need to be plummeting or rising, not stagnating.

Real-time feedback:

When you are speaking with someone you respect, adopt a certain level of vulnerability and take the chance of being wrong in front of them. Their correction and guidance (which you are going to meld with that of your other mentors) will often prove painful in the moment but revelatory in the long-run.

With your peers, voice ideas you otherwise would hold back. Broach topics that interest you but about which you know less than you’d like. Let them respond in-kind or question your thinking in order for you to learn from them.

Openly ask people for feedback on things you are thinking about; plans, decisions, relationships, things that excite you.

Find moments where you can push outside your comfort zone and risk encountering less-than-flowery feedback.

Passively:

It is important that you start to fix certain ideas in your head to form them as habits or core ideas in your life.

One of them should be that feedback is your ally; the secret ally that most people shun yet the ally that can launch you forward in learning and growing.

Adopt the belief that you want feedback in your life. This takes conscious effort in order to separate ourselves from the idea that anything that is painful is bad and to be avoided.

Feedback will be painful but it is essential to holding better ideas, building stronger relationships, and moving forward with strength and confidence rather than rickety foundations.

Plateaus:

Once in awhile, check-in with yourself. When was the last time you encountered difficulty or were proven wrong? If it is hard to recall the last time, then it has been too long and you are possibly gravitating towards the comfort of a plateau.

Plateaus let you catch your breath. That isn’t bad. But if your goal is to continue to climb and see what lies higher up the mountain, then you need to regularly check whether you are merely catching your breath…or whether you have started to build a log cabin with the obvious intention of halting the difficult but rewarding climb.

Stagnation is the enemy. It represents where you were when this journey started; stuck.

Don’t stay stuck, press forward. You can get unstuck. Don’t listen to any voice that says otherwise.

#5 Repeat

Add more tools to your toolbox.

Refine and strengthen your criteria for making decisions.

Grow your relationships and build new ones.

Always, always seek out feedback.

You don’t have to have a life-defining goal to make good decisions.

You don’t have to be born with a “passion” to make progress in your life and move forward with growing confidence.

I may not have known the ultimate end goal, but I knew that I was making progress on the journey forward due to the good decisions I was able to make.

I hope this helps someone who is as lost as I was not too long ago.

This article was originally published on Medium.com.