A Practical Guide to Figuring Out What You Really Want in Life

Published in

Journey Within

5 min readMar 27, 2020

“Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom”
- Aristotle

In a world where we maximize every minute of our days to chase a successful and fulfilling life, how often do we pause and get to know ourselves first? What do we want in life, what would make us truly happy?

I am a firm believer that to live a rewarding life and navigate the world successfully, we have to first get to know ourselves deeply. The journey to finding our true selves and what we really want is a continuous process throughout our lives that will not only help us make decisions but also find true happiness and peace.

However, it’s not as straightforward as sitting at home and suddenly coming to enlightenment after a few hours.

Self-discovery and understanding take repeat investments of time and energy.

This is a practical guide with tools and things you can do to start the most rewarding process of getting to know yourself.

Broadly speaking, there are two venues:

External: feedback from friends and family, life experiences, personality & psychology tests.
Internal: journal journal journal! Continuous journaling about different questions has helped me tremendously in breaking apart and organizing my thoughts. Reflecting on real-life events allow me to not let any precious experiences go to waste.

Tests to Get to Know Yourself

I know that there are tons of criticisms about personality tests and I fully acknowledge that they do not represent a full picture of who we are. However, they are still great tools to get started with, often providing us with frameworks to think about our personalities, strengths, and weaknesses.

The ones I find the most helpful are:

Myers Briggs (helpful in understanding how we view and interact with the world and others)
Gallup Clifton Strength Finders (the most effective people are those who understand their strengths and behaviors — an awareness of your natural talents will help you find consistent success)
5 Love Languages (to help you interact with your friends, family, and SOs)
Enneagram (how we are driven by our core set of emotions, fears, and beliefs)
Sparktypes (help find your natural meaning and purpose in work)

Questions to Start Journaling About

Career-Related:

What’s a list of things you are pretty good at? (Combine 2–3 things you are pretty good at to become exceptional at what you do, e.g. pretty good at drawing + pretty decent humor = amazing cartoon artist. Idea from Scott Adams)
What are your non-negotiables and your top-shelf priorities? (This is a long but amazing post by Tim Urban about how to find a fulfilling career)
Visualize your ideal life in 5 years, in 10 years, what does it look like? What does your personal life look at? What would you be doing? (Don’t hold yourself back with too many realistic constraints. I journal about what I want long-term in every important decision making entry — it’s an important reminder even if you come to the same conclusion)
Things you like about your current job vs. things you do not (people too often only focus on the negatives, and don’t realize what they do enjoy about their current jobs until they don’t have them anymore)
When do you feel the most alive? What work do you gravitate towards in your current job? What are the characteristics of an ideal job?
WHY do you want XYZ (be a CEO, have job X, be admired by people, etc.)
When you were younger, how did you answer the question “what do you want to be growing up?”
Work: Flow, Mastery, Purpose, and Autonomy — What are you missing in your current job?

Personal:

Who do you envy? (What about this person’s life do you want?)
What kind of lifestyle do you want?
What do you look for in your relationships? What are the most important qualities?
Who are the friends I want to prioritize (I know it seems weird to rank your friends, but if you are not prioritizing you are probably not giving the close relationships the attention they deserve)
Strengths and weaknesses?

Perhaps the most helpful thing to journal about is reflecting on real-life experiences:

How did you feel about what happened?
Why did something bother you or make you really happy?
What did you learn about yourself from this relationship, experience, or situation?
Is there anything that you could’ve done better?
Highs and lows of the past week, month, year

I also love to journal about gratitude, inspiring quotes, make pros and cons lists, decisions trees, and free form ideas to get creative.

The journey to find my life’s purpose is always evolving.

The key to making it a habit is to not care too much about form, and just start jotting down anything and everything on your mind. Always be fully honest and transparent with yourself, assuming no one else will EVER read your journals.

Feedback Survey

How do we see the blind spots in our lives? I was inspired to ask a few close friends of mine to give me direct feedback on how I can improve as a person. The themes in their responses are extremely illuminating and interesting. It was a little scary to make myself vulnerable, but also incredibly rewarding.

Questions I asked in a feedback survey to my close friends:

When would you say that I am at my best? (e.g. actions, occasions, environment, etc.)
What do I do that might be interpreted negatively and might bother you or someone else who might not know me as well?
What’s something I can improve on to help me be a better friend or person in general? (e.g. can be little things like how I communicate, to what my friend said about being overly agreeable)
What type of people am I least compatible with?
How would you describe me in 3 adjectives to someone else?

Tips:

Make it short
Be careful about phrasing it in such a way that the friend doesn’t feel like he has to be uncomfortably direct or provocative
Start by roasting yourself first. (I gave this example: “A close friend of mine thought I was uninteresting and lacking opinions when he first met me because I have a natural tendency to be very agreeable in a group setting and seem to want to please.” He obviously no longer thinks so but it’s helpful to know first impressions for many purposes)