What Are You Really Doing?

Have you ever asked yourself, what am I doing? Not just on bad days when you’re drowning in emails or pushing through a brutal commute, but on the normal ones when everything is “fine” but also feels strangely hollow. You work. Clock in. Clock out. You hit the goals. Maybe you even succeed by the standards society sets. But deep down, there’s this quiet question: is this it?

It’s a question that keeps coming up—not just for me but for my friends, coworkers, and the founders I am blessed to get to meet and work with. What is meaningful work? What is fulfilling work? What is purpose? And, for those who want to go deeper: What is legacy? These aren’t questions you solve in one sitting. They’re evolving, personal, and often uncomfortable.

But they’re worth asking. Here’s my take.

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What Is Meaningful Work?

Meaningful work is about reducing suffering or increasing joy for another person. That’s basically it. It’s not about fancy titles, big paychecks, or how impressive your job looks to others. It’s about making things a little better for someone else.

This could mean mentoring a younger coworker, helping a friend through a hard time, or building a product that solves a real problem and makes someone smile. Even small actions can feel meaningful—like fixing a bug that makes someone’s day easier, inspiring confidence in someone else by telling them (or better yet, showing them) you believe in them, or helping a customer figure out what they actually need.

The catch? If your work doesn’t reduce suffering or add joy in some way, it will probably feel empty eventually. You can hit all the traditional success markers and still feel like something’s missing.

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What Is Fulfilling Work?

If meaningful work matters to others, fulfilling work matters to you. It’s the work that leaves you energized, not drained. It’s the kind of work where, even if it’s hard or frustrating in the moment, you look back and think, that was worth it. It’s work where you typically always have to give maximum effort.

Fulfilling work isn’t always glamorous, and it’s rarely about instant gratification. Maybe it’s finishing a tough project that stretches—or builds—your skills, writing something you’re proud of, or even just making a difficult decision that aligns with your values.

It’s not about external rewards—validation, promotions, or applause. It’s about the internal sense of growth, progress, mastery, or simply doing something you care about.

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What Is Purpose?

Purpose is where meaning and fulfillment overlap. It’s the bigger story you tell yourself about why your work matters—not just to others, but to you. Purpose makes you say, this is why I get out of bed in the morning.

Purpose isn’t something you “find” one day in a flash of inspiration. It’s something you build, slowly, brick by brick, through trial and error. And here’s the thing: your purpose will change. The things that drive you now might feel shallow or irrelevant in 10 years. That’s not failure—it’s growth.

Purpose is less about having it all figured out and more about staying curious and open to change. It’s the result of doing the work and reflecting along the way.

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What Is Legacy?

Here’s where I might lose some people: legacy doesn’t really matter. Not in the way we think it does. Most of us won’t be remembered 50 or 100 years from now. Even for those who leave a mark—think Steve Jobs or Da Vinci—their entire lives get boiled down to a sentence. And they are like 0.00000000000001% of the world’s population.

So why do we care about legacy?

Part of it is ego. We want to believe we’re more important than we are.

Part of it is fear—the idea that if we’re not remembered, our lives didn’t matter. The truth is we all will most likely fade into irrelevance, and that’s ok. I think that should be a freeing feeling.

But maybe legacy isn’t the point.

Maybe the real question is: did I make life better for the people around me while I was here? Not in some grand, world-changing way, but in the little things: how did I make people feel (not just what did I say)? Did I make someone laugh? Did I show up for the people I care about? Did I leave my corner of the world a little brighter than I found it?

That might not sound like much, but in the end, it’s probably all that matters.

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Well, Why Does It Matter?

I don’t have the answers. I’m 28.

I’ve spent some time thinking about these questions, but I wouldn’t pretend to be someone you should take advice from on this stuff. What I do know is that these questions come up all the time—not just with me, but with friends, coworkers, and the founders I work with. They’re questions that reveal what we care about and how we want to spend our lives, but there’s no universal playbook for answering them.

Here’s one thing I’ve learned, though: you won’t figure it out by sitting around waiting for inspiration. Life doesn’t work like that. I love this quote from Chuck Close:

“The advice I like to give anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to do an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case."

This applies to finding meaning, purpose, fulfillment—whatever you want to call it. You can think and reflect all day, but at some point, you just have to do something. Try new work. Take on a challenge that scares you. Move. Quit the job you hate. Help someone, even if you’re not sure it’ll make a difference. Purpose doesn’t strike like lightning—it’s built piece by piece as you show up and engage with the world.

And here’s the other thing: all of this will change. Your values will shift. What fulfills you today might not fulfill you next year. That’s normal. It’s growth. Life evolves, and so will you.

The real key isn’t to “figure it out” once and for all. It’s to stay curious, keep experimenting, and reflect along the way. If you keep showing up and doing the work—whatever that work is for you—you’ll probably get closer to the answers than if you spend your life waiting for inspiration to hit.

So, if you’re feeling stuck or lost, I can’t tell you what to do.

But I do think these questions are worth asking, even if you don’t have the answers yet. And I think they’re best answered by doing—not waiting. Just start. See what happens. The answers, if they come, will be found in the process.