Who Am I? What Am I Meant to Do?
The following is adapted from The Being Equation by Erik Hardy.
I believe that most of our struggles in life result from a lack of clarity on the answers to two fundamental questions:
- Who am I?
- What am I meant to do?
I spent the first forty-two years of my life struggling with the second question: “what am I meant to do?” I hadn’t realized that I could never answer that question until I could answer the first: “who am I?”
To be honest, I should say I struggled with that second question from about year fifteen through year forty-two. I do not remember worrying about what I was meant to do before I was fifteen. Before the age of fifteen, I was meant to play outside and go to school. It began getting complicated in my junior year of high school when I started applying to colleges. This process implied that I knew what I wanted to do for a career. I had no clue. I think most people are that way. How can you know what you are meant to do for a career when you are fifteen years old? It’s insane, really, to believe that a fifteen-year-old person from a small, rural town in Virginia, with little knowledge of other countries, cultures, and people would have any real inkling of what they were meant to do for the rest of their life. Up to that point, the education system had exposed me to the basic subjects of reading, writing, and arithmetic, with a little art and music thrown in here and there. My world was small.
I look back at that time now and realize how little I knew and how little many of the people I relied on for advice and mentorship knew. Not out of negligence but due to a lack of their own knowledge. Having spent the past twenty years thinking about this subject — after seeing the struggles that my friends, family, and acquaintances around me had to face — I have come to realize that most people are never given any guidance as to how to answer these two fundamental questions: who am I and what am I meant to do?
I want to share what I have learned through years of reading, listening, studying, writing, and struggling with my own feelings of darkness and being lost. If what I have learned helps you and saves you some of the difficulties I faced, it will mean I am living in my greatness.
What follows is the answer to: who am I? which will lead you to what you are meant to do. To be fair, it is not necessarily an easy journey or a fast one, but it can be the adventure of a lifetime if you are willing to take the first step.
Start with Why
“I never really knew what I was meant to do with my life, so I just tried to make other people happy.” I can vividly remember hearing my mom casually say these words to me as we sat on her deck a few days after her seventy-fifth birthday. On paper, my mother has led an accomplished life. She was a standout in her high school class, active in extracurricular organizations, and voted homecoming queen. My mom attended a small college, Lenoir-Rhyne College, in North Carolina, where, once again, she shined. She was involved in college clubs and her sorority, and she was named Miss Lenoir-Rhyne her junior year. She graduated with a degree in education and became a high school teacher and coach. Her success as a coach earned her an induction into the Stonewall Jackson High School Hall of Fame.
My mom and dad got divorced when I was very young, and because of the divorce, she needed to support both of us. She went back to college and worked towards a master’s in education to go into school administration and make more money. She graduated and became the first female assistant principal in Shenandoah County, Virginia. She got paid less than her male counterparts, as it was the 1980s and sexual discrimination was still rampant in small-town Virginia, but she did it and provided well for the two of us. She later became a high school principal (my principal) and handed me my high school diploma at graduation. I am proud of her for all that she has accomplished and endured.
So, to hear my mom say, “I never really knew what I was meant to do with my life, so I just tried to make other people happy,” made the years of darkness and struggle I had endured with this same problem come flooding back. It also gave me a strange sense of solace and comfort, knowing that I needed to share what I have learned with others.
I have spent many years struggling to answer that elusive question: what am I meant to do? I felt like a failure because I could not answer it, especially when I saw others around me who seemed to know from day one what they were meant to do.
What Am I Meant to Do?
I struggled with this question for so many years, and it is only recently that I finally understood why I could never find the answer. It’s the wrong question, at least to start with. To know what you are meant to do, you must first answer this question: who am I?
Who Am I?
If you do not know who you are — I mean, deep down, right at the raw core know the wake-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night-and-it’s-only-you you — then there is no way you can know what you’re meant to do in this world. As this book will show, everything in your world shapes who you are, and most of us are not even aware of it.
If you’re like me, you’re probably asking yourself, Why should I take the time to listen to anything this guy has to say on this topic?
Great question. I don’t have a degree in psychology, I have no formal training related to helping people find their life purpose, I haven’t spent years attending silent retreats, and I am not a world-famous speaker or life coach. By all normal measures, I am pretty ordinary.
Except, I have lived it.
Everything I am sharing with you is something I have lived through and learned through personal experience, struggle, and falling flat on my face. Moving forward, you will see that I have trolled my own personal pits of despair, I have explored my past for the clues as to who I am, I have cried and felt overwhelmed, ashamed, and embarrassed of things I didn’t do and things I should not have done. I have reached milestones that I thought would be mountaintops, only to realize they didn’t make me happy at all. When I didn’t want to get back up or didn’t know where to go next, some beautiful people supported and guided me. The truth is, discovering who you are is not a journey you can walk completely on your own. This is what I learned along the way, and I hope that it will help you discover exactly who you are and what you are meant to do.
To learn more about how you can discover who you are, The Being Equation is available on Amazon.
Erik Hardy lives in a horse barn with his wife, five horses, a border collie, and a pot-bellied pig named Miss Piggy Sue. He writes and works from his Airstream, ACE Gratitude.
Erik worked as a gardener, a medical IT consultant, a bank teller, an ecologist, and a real estate broker, moving from one career to another without any sense of purpose or direction before he finally started asking the right question.
By discovering who he really is and living in alignment with his true self, he has found authentic joy as an entrepreneur, writer, and creator, living his life on purpose and turning his dreams into his reality. He wrote this book to help you do the same.
Learn more at erikhardy.com.
