15 Questions to Discover Your Life Purpose
To have a purpose is a deep human need, and the quest to find one is so profound that it can transform every aspect of our lives.
Most people set out to discover their purpose with a mixture of excitement, uncertainty, and apprehension because they have no idea what to expect. The problem is, when they quickly realize the journey is difficult and rife with obstacles and setbacks, they quit, feeling like they just must not have one after all.
But this is not remotely true. While the path to discovering our purpose is not—and probably should not—be straightforward, asking yourself the right questions in an ongoing inquiry process is crucial in finding your way.
So here are 15 questions to start you off and help guide you on your journey.
Get comfy with your favorite writing tools—pad & pencil, laptop, iPad, whatever works best for you—and a mug of something warm, and let’s go!
1. What Are My Core Values?
The first step in discovering your purpose is to consider the principles and beliefs that are most important to you. Your purpose is aligned with your deepest values, so you need to understand what matters most to you—what you would fight for—in life.
If you aren’t sure how to name your core values, trust that all the information you need to figure them out is already inside you. Think about significant events in your life, and how you responded—this will tell you about what matters to you. You react the way you do in certain situations because of what you value most.
Get as specific as possible in the words you choose. For example, courage is similar to but different from bravery. Your core values are key in figuring out your purpose because your purpose must align with them.
2. What Are the Great Themes of My Life?
Identify some of the ideas, decisions, directions, and patterns that have consistently shown up throughout your life. What is something you’ve always been drawn to, or guided by? What moves you? What have been the most consistent elements in your life? What experiences or feelings have you sought out—maybe in different forms—at different points in your life?
If you take a deeper look at most coincidences in your life, underneath you’ll usually be able to find some rational stepping stones leading to their occurrence. The people you connect with, the situations you find yourself in, the obstacles you come up against—these are all a result of what I call the “great themes” of your life. Understanding what these themes are for you will reveal a lot about your life purpose.
3. What Is My Existential Question?
Some people see the human journey through a spiritual lens, believing we come to earth with karma to resolve.
However, even from a purely biological perspective, it is clear that a combination of DNA, early childhood development, trauma, and life experiences leaves an imprint on our psychology, creating challenges we need to address and overcome. Central to this journey is what I call your existential question.
If you distill down deep enough, you can get at one or two core questions you’ve been unconsciously asking, seeking, and being driven by your whole life. Everyone has their own existential question. Some examples include: Why am I here? What is truth? Why do we suffer? What is my significance?
Bringing this question to light empowers you to find agency in your evolution, helping you lead a more intentional, meaningful, and fulfilling life, and helps guide you towards your authentic self.
4. What Are My Strengths and Talents?
Identify your unique gifts and talents. Some strengths are more surface-level: Are you good at art? Can you speak multiple languages? Are you good at research? Do you have computer skills? Do your education or qualifications give you stronger insight into a specific niche?
Others are less obvious: Do people tend to come to you with problems because they know you’re helpful to talk to? Are you highly emotionally intelligent? Do you tend to have a calming presence? Are you naturally inquisitive and able to draw out deeper information from people just by talking to them? Are you a clear and direct communicator? Can you intuit people’s feelings easily?
Now, think about leveraging these strengths to impact the world positively.
Your purpose should capitalize on your strengths. A lot of the time, you have to learn new skills to master something, but our existing skills are the ones we should be focusing on. Your life’s purpose should include your strengths. Starting with something you already possess.
5. What Inspires Me?
Explore all the sources of inspiration in your life, whether people, places, or ideas. Maybe you find inspiration from engaging with nature, reading new books, talking to new people, or exploring your city. Maybe your family inspires you—your siblings, parents, kids.
What qualities or values do these sources embody that resonate with your own sense of purpose? What about them is inspirational? And what do you do with that inspiration?
Inspiration can be tricky because it often throws us in different directions. But if you pay close enough attention to what is constant and eternal in your inspiration, that is an indication in some way of what your life’s work is.
6. What Are My Intuitive Feelings?
Trust your intuition to guide you towards your purpose. What choices or paths feel most aligned with your most profound sense of knowing or with your truth?
Sometimes, it is easier to consider which paths feel most unaligned, instead, and allow this knowledge to steer you away from what is wrong for you rather than trying to find, understand, and steer yourself toward the right path.
Your life’s work must align with your intuition. If it feels unaligned, then it’s not your life’s work. Life’s work and your intuition are so naturally aligned—but it’s difficult to pin down intuition. Finding out your life’s work can be a process of elimination for many.
7. What Are My Dreams and Aspirations?
Explore your dreams for the future. What vision do you have for yourself and the world around you? How does this vision compare to how you felt as a kid? What was your dream job then, and how does it relate to your current situation?
Chances are, you don’t currently do what your 8-year-old self thought you would. But there may still be elements of that dream in your life. Try to find connections—if you wanted to be a doctor, how does your work today help people? If you wanted to be an astronaut, where in your work are you exploring and discovering new things?
Your life’s work takes many different forms, and comes through the vision of many different forms. Trust the essence of your dreams and inspirations, and play around with them.
8. What Challenges Have I Overcome?
Reflect on past challenges and obstacles you've faced at work and in your personal life. How have these experiences shaped you, and what lessons have they taught you about your own resilience and strength?
Choose one of the larger challenges and consider where you think your life would have gone differently if that challenge had had an alternate outcome. What factors brought the challenge in the first place, and what strengths did you use to overcome it?
9. What Impact Do I Want to Have?
Think about the legacy you want to leave for future generations. How do you want to be remembered, and what contributions do you want to make to the world? How do you see yourself making a meaningful difference in other people’s lives? What matters most to you about the world you leave for others once you’re no longer here to further your impact?
Starting small with the people you know and love may be easier. Then, branch out into how you can make a difference for those you don’t know and never will.
Your impact is a fundamental cue for what your life’s work is—the kinds of things that matter to you when your life is no longer affected by them is exactly what you should be striving to improve, and what your life’s work is buried within.
10. What Causes Am I Passionate About?
We are the protagonists of our life stories, and the injustices we see around us and feel passionate about solving provide clues to our “hero’s journey”—the quest we must pursue in search of purpose.
With this in mind, explore some of the social, environmental, or humanitarian causes that resonate with you deeply. Where do you feel compelled to contribute your time, energy, and resources? How do you make and keep those commitments regularly? Do you do enough to help those causes? In a perfect world, what would you like to be able to do?
The purpose of this prompt is not to get you to commit more time, energy, or money toward one of these causes. Instead, it is meant to show you how the things you care deeply about might influence your day-to-day life and push you in new directions if the restrictions of your current life were not in place.
11. What Activities Bring Me Joy?
Think about activities that bring you genuine joy and fulfillment. These could be activities where you are moving your body (dancing, swimming, surfing, running), trying new experiences (restaurants, travel), engaging in hobbies (writing, reading, making art), or working on relationships (spending time with family and friends).
How can you incorporate more of these activities into your daily life?
If listing the things you enjoy is too broad, try paying extra attention to activities that cause the time to fade away. What could you truly spend an hour or two of focused time on and not even realize it? These can offer more significant insights into your passions beyond just the things you like doing.
Your life’s work will include more than one activity, and noot all of them will bring you joy, but if you can find something that brings you joy and make it part of your life’s work, that’s an incredible step towards discovering it.
12. What Did I Love as a Child?
Everyone has things they loved as a child that they no longer do or engage with, often because they are seen as childish, or we just don’t have time for them. Did you have a favorite book or series? Did you love to draw or paint? Did you play a team sport and have fun doing it—even if you were bad at it? Re-engaging with these “lost” experiences and activities from childhood is another great way to help draw out your passions and bring you closer to your life purpose.
Now, when thinking about discovering and fulfilling your purpose through engaging with the things you love, it’s easy to become overwhelmed. We tend to think we need to put all of our eggs in a single basket—that we have to put all of ourselves towards achieving our life goals and finding our purpose. But in doing so, we cut out parts of who we are because our basket simply isn’t big enough to contain all of ourselves. We end up leaving huge aspects of our lives on the table. And the question becomes, which parts do I keep?
Remember that your business, career, or work life doesn’t have to include elements of every single piece of you. Keeping some things just for you, as a hobby, allows you to keep these parts of yourself in your life, even though they don’t specifically “fit in” to your purpose. Sometimes, the things you do alongside your work, and not necessarily as part of it, are what help keep us engaged on the path towards purpose. You need to have a meaningful side-interest, or two or three, to provide outlets for creativity, stress, and overwhelm. This is what allows you to fully engage in your purpose without experiencing burnout.
13. What Am I Willing to Sacrifice For?
Reflect on what you will sacrifice time, comfort, or resources for. What is worth pursuing? What are some things you have fought for in the past, even when it felt like the world didn’t want you to have them?
If you care about something enough to sacrifice something else crucial for it to happen, that can be a very clear signal showing you the direction in which your life's purpose lies.
14. What Do I Want to Learn or Experience?
Consider the knowledge, skills, or experiences you want to gain in this lifetime. How do you see yourself accomplishing them? Are they realistic goals? Is there a plan in place? How does your current situation set you up for success in achieving this? And where is it possibly holding you back?
Now, thinking about your life so far: in what ways have you already accomplished some of these new skills or experiences? How far have you already come towards those goals, maybe even without realizing it?
If you’re finding yourself drawn to wanting to learn more about something, it’s often an indicator of the direction of your purpose. Let’s face it: a lot of the time, learning is not fun. Education is not always engaging for people; it can be incredibly hard work that contributes heavily to burnout. So if you find something that interests you enough that you actually want to do that work to learn more and educate yourself on it, it’s likely highlighting something that really matters to you, some direction in which your life’s purpose lies.
15. What Does Success Mean to Me?
Define the word success on your own terms—not just commercially, but in every aspect of life: family, relationships, experiences, joy, laughter, fun. How does your vision of success align with your sense of life’s purpose and fulfillment? Are there elements of your envisioned success that necessitate taking a different direction in life? If so, how can you create that direction for yourself while staying within the bounds of everything else you’ve considered so far?
This is an important distinction because in many ways, your life's work is your definition of success. If you’re trying to find and fulfill a purpose based on someone else’s idea of what success looks like, you aren’t going to feel as fulfilled or authentic as you could. It’s not YOUR life’s work in that case—it’s an imitation of A life’s work.
Discovering Your Purpose is the Quest of a Lifetime
As you explore these questions, remember that discovering your life's purpose is not a destination but a continual journey of self-discovery and growth. You’re never really done with the process, but each question you answer for yourself brings you one step closer to living your most authentic and purposeful life.
So be patient with yourself. Stay open to new insights that might come up along the way, and trust that the answers will slowly but surely start to reveal themselves with continued work and dedicated exploration. Your purpose is a unique expression of who you are and the impact you are meant to have on the world, and the process of finding it means you are actively discovering who you are.