Stage 3: Vision & Direction | Purpose

You've probably already seen the diagram with four overlapping circles: what you love, what you're good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for. The sweet spot in the middle is labeled "ikigai," and it's supposed to be your purpose. The diagram is everywhere, but it's built on a misattribution, which we'll get to. But the core question it asks is real: "Where does your life actually come together?"

Purpose sounds like a big word, and it gets treated like one. People talk about finding their purpose as if it's a single revelation, a lightning bolt that arrives and settles everything. In practice, purpose is closer to a through-line. It's the thing you keep coming back to, the thread that connects your best work, your strongest feelings, and the contributions you care about most. It doesn't have to be a career, and it doesn't have to be grand - but it has to be yours.

Here we give you several frameworks for thinking about purpose. The ikigai model (with its real history),Viktor Frankl's three paths to meaning, William Damon's research on stable intention, and Patrick Hill's findings on what purpose does for your actual health and longevity. You'll work through each one, then pull your thinking together into a purpose statement you can test, revise, and live with.

The goal here is a working draft, NOT a final answer. You get your purpose clarified over time, and what you write today will probably shift in 6 months. That's totally fine - the point is to have something concrete to test against your real life, so you can notice when you're drifting from it and when you're living inside it.

One more thing worth mentioning - a good purpose gives you peace of mind. If your purpose statement makes you feel anxious, pressured, or exhausted just reading it, know that something's off. The purpose that grinds you down is simply a performance, and we'll test for that too.

The research behind the purpose

The ikigai concept: what it actually means

The four-circle Venn diagram labeled "ikigai" went viral sometime around 2014. It's clean, satisfying, and intuitive. It's also not Japanese.

The word ikigai has been part of Japanese language and culture for centuries. It roughly translates to "that which makes life worth living" or "a reason for being." The most rigorous study of it came from Mieko Kamiya, a psychiatrist and researcher who published Ikigai-ni-tsuite (On the Meaning of Life) in 1966. Kamiya studied what gave people a sense that their life had value, and she found it was often small, personal, and quiet: tending a garden, caring for a grandchild, the daily rituals that made someone feel present and alive. Ikigai in Kamiya's work has nothing to do with career optimisation or market fit.

So where did the diagram come from? In 2014, a blogger named Marc Winn published a post that merged two separate ideas. One was a purpose Venn diagram created by the Spanish astrologer Andres Zuzunaga (originally called "Proposito"), which mapped the four circles of passion, mission, vocation, and profession. The other was the word "ikigai." Winn stuck the Japanese word in the center of Zuzunaga's diagram, and the combination took off. It spread so widely that most people now believe the diagram is a traditional Japanese concept.

Does that make it useless? No. The four-circle model is a still a useful thinking tool for mapping how different parts of your life intersect. But it's worth knowing what you're actually using. It's a Western career-design framework with a borrowed label, not some ancient philosophy. And the original concept of ikigai, the quiet sense that your life has meaning, is worth sitting with on its own terms.

Viktor Frankl: meaning through three paths

Viktor Frankl was an Austrian psychiatrist who survived Auschwitz and three other concentration camps. In 1946 he published Man's Search for Meaning, drawing on both his clinical work and his experience in the camps. His central argument: the primary human drive is not pleasure (Freud) or power (Adler) but meaning. He called his therapeutic approach logotherapy, from the Greek logos (meaning).

Frankl identified three paths through which people find meaning:

• Creative values: what you give to the world. Making something, building something, contributing work that matters to you. This is the path most people think of first when they hear "purpose."

• Experiential values: what you receive from the world. Love, beauty, truth, nature, art, connection. Meaning found through witnessing and experiencing, not producing.

• Attitudinal values: the stance you take toward unavoidable suffering. When you can't change a situation, you can still choose how you meet it. Frankl saw this as the deepest source of meaning, because it remains available even when everything else is taken away.

Frankl's framework matters here because it expands purpose beyond productivity. You don't have to make something to have meaning. And sometimes meaning comes from the hardest seasons of your life, not despite them.

William Damon: purpose as stable intention

William Damon is a developmental psychologist at Stanford who spent years studying how young people and adults develop a sense of purpose. In The Path to Purpose (2008), he defined purpose as "a stable and generalised intention to accomplish something that is at once meaningful to the self and consequential to the world beyond the self."

Three things stand out in that definition. First, stable: purpose isn't a mood or a passing interest. It's something that persists. Second, meaningful to the self: it has to matter to you personally, not just look good on paper. Third, consequential beyond the self: real purpose involves some kind of contribution that reaches past your own life.

Damon's research found that only about 20% of young people had a clear sense of purpose. Most were either drifting, dabbling, or going through the motions. The ones who had purpose weren't necessarily happier in the simple sense. But they were more resilient, more directed, and better at navigating setbacks. Purpose gave them a reason to keep going when things got hard.

Patrick Hill: purpose and health outcomes

Patrick Hill, a psychologist at Washington University in St. Louis, has studied the connection between sense of purpose and physical health. In a 2014 study published in Psychological Science (co-authored with Nicholas Turiano), Hill and Turiano analysed data from over 6,000 participants in the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) study across a 14-year follow-up period.

Their finding: people with a greater sense of purpose in life had lower mortality risk, across all ages. The effect held after controlling for other psychological factors like positive emotions and social relationships. Purpose wasn't just correlated with feeling better - it predicted living longer.

Later work by Hill and others has linked purpose to better sleep, lower rates of cardiovascular disease, and lower incidence of Alzheimer's disease. The mechanism isn't fully understood, but the hypothesis is that people with purpose make better health decisions, manage stress differently, and maintain stronger social ties.

The practical takeaway: figuring out your purpose isn't navel-gazing. There's a body of evidence suggesting it has measurable effects on how long and how well you live.

The exercises

Access your Notion workbook here.

Exercise 1: The ikigai map

Use the below prompts to map out the raw material of your purpose. Write whatever comes to mind without filtering. You'll look for patterns and intersections afterward.

What you love: Activities that make you lose track of time, topics you read about for fun, conversations that light you up, and things you'd do on a free Saturday with no obligations.

What you're good at: Skills, talents, things people ask you to help with. What friends say you're good at, and what comes easily to you that seems hard for others. Include things you've learned and things that feel natural

What the world needs: Problems you notice and can't ignore, communities you care about, causes that pull at you, and gaps you see that nobody seems to be filling. Think local and global.

What you could be sustained by: Ways you could make a living or be supported while doing meaningful work. Think broadly: salary, freelance income, grants, barter, community support, partnerships.

The intersections

Look across your four quadrants and check where do they overlap. Fill in each intersection below.

Passion (Love + Skill)
What two areas meet?
What does this look like in your life?

Mission (Love + Need)
What two areas meet?
What does this look like in your life?

Vocation (Need + Livelihood)
What two areas meet?
What does this look like in your life?

Profession (Skill + Livelihood)
What two areas meet?
What does this look like in your life?

Now look at all four intersections together. Is there anything that sits in the middle of all of them? Write it down, even if it's rough.

Exercise 2: Frankl's three paths to meaning

Frankl found that meaning comes through three channels. Most of us lean heavily on one and neglect the others. Use this exercise to see where your meaning actually lives right now.

Creative values:
What you give to the world: things you make, build, create, or contribute.
What do you create or contribute that feels meaningful?

Experiential values:
What you receive from the world: love, beauty, truth, nature, connection, art.
What experiences fill you up and make life feel worth living?

Attitudinal values:
The stance you take toward unavoidable suffering or difficulty.
What hard thing have you faced, and what did you learn about yourself from how you met it?

Which path carries the most meaning for you right now? Which one have you been neglecting?

Exercise 3: Purpose statement draft

A purpose statement is a single sentence that captures the through-line of your life. It doesn't have to be perfect, but it should be specific enough to be useful and honest enough to feel true.

Use this template as a starting point:

I exist to [verb] [who/what] by [how], because [why].

Examples

• "I exist to teach young people to think for themselves by creating spaces where questioning is safe, because independent thought is the foundation of a free life."

• "I exist to help small businesses run well by designing systems that fit real humans, because good work shouldn't cost you your health."

• "I exist to make people feel less alone by writing honestly about the messy parts of being alive, because loneliness shrinks when someone names what you're feeling."

• "I exist to build things that help people know themselves by combining research with practical tools, because self-knowledge is where intentional living starts."

Your draft

Write your first attempt and then write the second version right after. Change the verb, the audience, or the reason. See what shifts.

Exercise 4: The purpose filter

A purpose statement is only useful if it holds up under pressure. Use the filter below to test your draft. If something fails the test, revise and test again

• Does it use your strengths? Yes/No

• Does it connect to your values? Yes/No

• Does it serve something beyond yourself? Yes/No

• Could you do it for 20 years without burning out? Yes/No

• Does it give you peace of mind? Yes/No

The peace of mind test deserves a closer look. A purpose that sounds right but feels wrong is usually built on someone else's expectations. If your statement makes you feel calm, grounded, and clear when you read it aloud, it's probably close. If it makes you feel tired, anxious, or like you're performing, go back to Exercise 3 and try again. Purpose that's sustainable produces a feeling of settledness, not pressure.

After running the filter, write your revised purpose statement.

Reflection

Spend a few minutes with the questions below. You don't need to answer all of them, just pick the ones that pull at you.

• When you look back on the best periods of your life, what were you doing? What made them good?

• If money and status didn't exist, what would you spend your time on?

• What makes you angry about the world? (Anger often points to what you care about most.)

• What have people thanked you for, consistently, over the years?

• Is there a problem you keep trying to solve, even when nobody asks you to?

• What would you want written in your obituary? Not your achievements. Your contribution.

• When do you feel most like yourself? Where are you, and what are you doing?

• If your purpose statement from Exercise 3 were already true, what would your average day look like?

AI companion (optional)

How to use: Complete Exercises 1 through 3 first. Then paste your raw answers into the prompt below. The AI works best when it has your real, unfiltered writing to work with. Generic inputs produce generic outputs.

Copy and paste the prompt below into Claude, ChatGPT, or any AI assistant:

I'm working through a life-design exercise on purpose. I've mapped out what I love, what I'm good at, what the world needs, and what could sustain me financially. I've also reflected on Frankl's three paths to meaning (creative, experiential, attitudinal) and written a draft purpose statement.
Here is what I have so far: [Paste your answers from Exercises 1-3 here]
Help me find the through-line. What patterns do you see across my answers? Where do the strongest overlaps show up? Challenge me where my answers feel generic or borrowed. Then help me sharpen my purpose statement so it's specific, honest, and something I could actually live by for the next 5-10 years.
Ask me follow-up questions if anything is unclear or seems surface-level.