No. #01: How do you figure out what you want when you genuinely don’t know?

I've asked myself this question a lot lately (at inconvenient hours, usually when I'm trying to sleep).

What do you actually want?

It sounds simple. It REALLY isn't. Especially when you've spent years inside a life that was largely decided for you and you're only now realising that the answer was always provided before you thought to ask the question.

When my path shifted I found myself facing that blank for the first time. And my first instinct was to think my way through it. You know: sit with the question, journal about it, make lists, research options, talk to people. My default strategy: to logic my way to an answer.

Guess what? It didn't work.

Every time I asked myself directly what do I want, I hit a wall. Either nothing came, or what came felt borrowed. Things I thought I should want, things that made sense on paper, or things that would look good explained to someone else.

None of it felt truly true.

So I stopped asking the question directly. And I started paying attention to something different instead: energy doesn't lie.

Here's what I noticed:

A few months ago I started building something on the side. A brand, website, newsletter; and systems and automations that go with it. Nothing anyone asked me to do. Nothing that was part of any plan. Just something I started because I felt pulled toward it.

And somewhere on a Sunday morning with coffee going cold beside me, hours disappearing without notice, I looked up and realized something… This didn't feel like work!

At least not in the way I'd been taught work feels. Not effortful or dutiful or something to push through. It felt like the opposite of that - like the hours were going somewhere rather than being spent.

I hadn't felt that way about professional work in a long time. Maybe ever.

That was a data point.

Not an answer and I really want to be clear about that. I still don't know exactly what career I'm building toward. The big decisions are still unresolved. The path ahead is still genuinely uncertain. But I had found something real. Something that came from inside rather than from expectation or obligation or what made sense to someone else.

And I'd found it not by thinking, but by doing.

The thing nobody tells you about figuring out what you want

Most advice I found about finding your direction tells you to look inward. Sit with yourself, journal, reflect… Ask yourself the deep questions. And I'm not saying that doesn't work. But I think there's something missing from that advice.

You don't only figure out what you want by thinking about it, especially if you are fundamentally lost. Sometimes you figure it out by starting something and paying attention to how it feels.

The doing is data. The energy is data. The Sunday morning when you look up and three hours have passed, that's data.

You see, your mind can talk you into or out of almost anything. Your energy is harder to fake.

So where do you start?

Not with the big question. Not with "what do I want from my life" or "what is my purpose" or "what career should I pursue." Those questions are way too large and too loaded to answer from a standing start.

So start smaller: start with this week.

Pay attention to where your energy goes naturally. Not where you think it should go, but rather where it actually goes. What do you do without being asked? What makes time disappear? What would you keep doing even if nobody was watching and nobody was paying you?

Don't analyze it yet. Just collect it and treat yourself like a research subject for one week. Observe without judgment. You're not looking for your whole answer. You're looking for a data point. One real thing that came from inside rather than outside.

That's enough to start with.

What you can do:

For the next seven days keep a simple note on your phone called "good moments." Every time you notice yourself absorbed in something (however small, however seemingly irrelevant) write it down. Just a few words about what you were doing and how it felt.

At the end of the week look at what's there. Don't force a conclusion. Just notice if there's a thread.

If you want to go deeper, you can copy this into Claude or ChatGPT:

"I've been tracking my energy this week and noticing what absorbs me. Here's what I found: [paste your list]. Help me look for patterns and what they might be telling me about what I actually want. Ask me questions to help me go deeper."