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Answers by Tony Stubblebine, behavior designer, startup founder, CEO of Coach.me, on Quora.
A: This should be the #1 question, because once you answer it for yourself everything else in your life gets easier. Recently, I was having lunch with a friend who is a top chef and Food network host. She told me she knew she wanted to be a chef from the time she was 12. So all of her life choices were headed in that direction.
She compared that to young people in her life who were struggling to pick a college major. They didn't know what they wanted to do with their life so all the college majors looked equally good and equally bad at the same time.
The problem with not having a purpose is that even if you make a choice to go in one direction, for example picking a college major, you won't have any way to know if it was the right choice. So you end up doubting yourself.
I like to frame doubt in terms of decision fatigue. There's good research that shows people don't have the capacity to make an unlimited number of decisions each day. This is true even for small decisions.
When you're experiencing doubt you're creating a large number of small decisions for yourself. Do you do something about the doubt or swallow it? That's a decision. And it's literally exhausting your ability to do other work.
My friend, the chef, understood how lucky she was. Because her purpose literally fell into her lap. She didn't have to work for it--she just knew.
So, how do you find your purpose if you don't already know it?
My process was experience.
The one lucky part is that I've known since high school that I wanted to work in tech. I just fell in love with programming. But I didn't know any more than that.
So, when I graduated college with a computer science degree I took the highest paying job I could find.
That job was to do trivial web work for a large corporation (MasterCard). All I did was help launch websites that nobody ever looked at. It was easy to see that this wasn't my life purpose because the work wasn't challenging. I knew I loved programming, so I couldn't stomach staying there.
Then I moved to the most interesting place that would hire me. That was a media company focused on tech called O'Reilly. During this time (which was before Stack Overflow), all programmers kept a small bookshelf of O'Reilly books on their desk.
The boon of working for O'Reilly is that they connected me to the most interesting people in technology. Practically everyone who mattered in tech came through the community as either a writer or a speaker.
The O'Reilly community opened my eyes to what was possible. More importantly, they showed me how to get there. I'd constantly see people who started with trivial technical contributions (like commenting on a blog post) end up keynoting a conference a couple years later.
But O'Reilly was at core a book company and everyone interesting seemed to be working for elite software companies.
So I left to work for a startup, Odeo. This was finally what I'd consider hard work. We were early adopters of Rails and it felt like we were on the cutting edge of new software development practices. Everyone who worked there was super high quality (I was Jack Dorsey's boss, for example).
But aside from one side project, Odeo didn't really work. And that was frustrating for me because I started to look back on all my other work. A lot of it never launched or launched and then was abandoned or launched and nobody used it.
Odeo started to clue me in that impact needed to be a part of my purpose.
So I left to start my own company. I was completely unprepared. All I knew how to do was write code and manage other people who could write code. I had zero exposure to product design, marketing, sales or support.
But I started a company anyway (CrowdVine). It started as a platform for creating your own social network. Then I found customers who wanted to use it for conferences. So I focused on that. Essentially we were selling super-charged attendee directories to conferences.
I worked on that company for four years. The first three years were really grim. It's hard to bootstrap a company and you don't ever have enough money or resources. I'd say my purpose during that phase was, "Don't fail."
In year four we finally got healthy and profitable. I'd built up a small team who did most of the work to the point where I only needed to work one day per week. The company was profitable enough that I could start splitting my time between San Francisco (where I'm from and where most of my family lives) and New York City (where my partner is from and where we prefer to live).
A lot of people would have been really happy with that outcome. I hated it. I learned two things:
- I don't actually like leisure. That's the flip side of the earlier lesson about impact. I'm just wired to need to be working on something with a purpose.
- Conferences were not my purpose. I couldn't see investing more time in the company because it just wasn't a topic that I truly cared about.
That led to reflection and eventually to Coach.me. I was 32 years old when I started working on projects in the human performance space.
I could look back and say that I've always been interested in human performance. That's why I watched sports. That's why I followed tech and business news. That's even why I watched shows like Project Runway. I love learning the secrets of elite performers. I'd call myself an elitist that way.
So, the parts of my purpose were almost entirely learned through experience. I think these are pretty common components. So if you can figure these out for yourself then you'll be ready to go:
- What interests you? For me, it's human performance.
- What impact can you make? For me, it's in the way that performance maps to satisfaction with your life.
- What type of work do you like? For me, it's technology.
Is there a better and faster way? Well, it's too late for me. But I think most people can accelerate their search for a purpose by filtering for opportunities that fit those three criteria. The ideal is to love all three.
The one thing I'd really highlight though is that purpose is so innate that you really do need to experiment. You won't know for sure unless you experience it.
So, just to be clear, I say all the time that Coach.me is my life's work. I'd describe the purpose behind it as:
Use technology to push the boundaries of human potential.
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- Once a Runner--The fictional account of a college miler training to compete in the Olympics. This is about the emotional toll and the sacrifices required to achieve something great.
- Dune--This book has many deep themes including environmentalism and religion. But I was most attracted to the attention to human performance as demonstrated by the Bene Gesserit.
- The Foundation Trilogy--This is about predicting the future by getting really, really smart.
- The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up--More and more, I'm looking for books that reach my emotional core. The more I learn about psychology the more I believe in including emotionally focused steps like saying thank you to the things you're throwing away.
- Super System 2--It's about poker, but also about the competitive advantage of defaulting to aggression.
- The Cyclists Training Bible--reframes strengths vs. weaknesses as simply limiters. Your strength can also be your limiter.
- The Four Hour Body--minimum effective doses and also the value of behavior design for your diet. I often build a cheat into my diets.
- Thinking Fast and Slow--I quote this book all the time when I'm explaining coaching. A lot of what's happening is that the coach is raising some subconscious pattern up to your conscious. This is why clients end up providing a lot of their own solutions--it's obvious once you are faced with the problem.
- Crossing the Chasm--especially the tech adoption life cycle and the characteristics of early customers.
- Four Steps to the Epiphany--especially the customer development pieces.
- Good to Great--especially the difference between Foxes (looking for tricks) and Hedgehogs (looking for fundamental advantages).
- The Hard Thing About Hard Things--the title just summarizes life as a founder. Every problem you solve generates a new problem. So stop feeling like you need to get to some mystical "done state." You're never done.
- Rapid Development--every founder should know how to run a rational development team. This is the book I learned that from. For example, you don't ask how long something will take, instead you measure how fast people are working and then calculate how long things will take. That was eye opening for me.
- Zen and the Art of Standup Comedy--I'm a big believer that genius comes from practice. This book is a case study about how that's true in comedy. Comedians aren't funny, they're obsessive. You could also learn this lesson by reading Talent is Overrated.
- How to Win Friends and Influence People--this is the best book on relationship building. It comes into play for partnerships, recruiting, sales and fundraising.
- Influence--People are irrational and you need to meet them where they are. This is the best book I've found on that.
- Programming Pearls--true stories about how major computer science problems were solved. Almost all the stories are along the lines of this: "I did a terrible job brute forcing the problem. Then I had an insight. Then I wrote a simple and easy solution."
- Code Complete--I love this book for the idea of being truly excellent at your craft. How much thought have you put into your whitespace strategy?
- Mastering Regular Expressions--I wrote a pocket reference for regular expressions based on this book. It's a very well written book about a complex topic.
- Lawrence in Arabia--about human folly (the leadership of WWI was terrible) and about how the current countries of the middle east were formed.
- The Prize--the complete history of the oil industry through the Gulf War.
- Book of Basketball--I'm a basketball nut. This is great writing about the history of basketball greats.
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