The picture above is a depiction of me in my early twenties, frantically asking the world’s most famous life coach for advice on how to solve my existential quarter life crisis.

My interests and values changed drastically when I left college, and I spent several years trying to find a solution. I was determined to become successful, so I needed to be absolutely sure that the projects and careers I chose to embark on were right.

After six years I finally got that eureka moment that put everything in place. Those six years were intense. It seemed like an impossible task to solve, and yet I did it.

In this guide, I am going to share how I managed to find a solution to a problem that seemed impossible to solve. These are the frameworks I wish I knew about back then. They are so effective that by applying them you can save years from your life by making sure you are pursuing the right things.

We know that pursuing less is the key to achieving more. This idea has been advocated by countless high achievers of our time. Pursuing too many projects, interests or careers at once will usually get you nowhere. But cutting down your interests can be seriously hard. That’s why it took me six years of intense thinking and research to figure it out myself. Now that I know exactly what I want to do with my life, I feel incredibly empowered and motivated.

Puzzle pieces

Having the confidence and clarity of what to pursue is like completing a puzzle. To see the full picture you need to put all the pieces together in the right place. But unlike real puzzles, the puzzle of knowing what to pursue in life has no lid where you can see what the picture is supposed to look like before you’ve started. And to make it even harder, this life puzzle also has a lot of missing pieces that you need to find.

When a wise person gives you advice to find out what to do with your life, they will often present a single exercise or a “hack” you can use. The problem with this is that this single exercise will solve only one aspect of a problem that is pretty complex. One powerful exercise will give you a vague idea of what you could pursue and help you a bit on the way. But it won’t confirm anything to you or give you that deep confidence that you will get when completing the whole puzzle. You can’t see the full picture with only one corner of the puzzle done. The more pieces you put together, the clearer the final image will become to you until you complete the whole image. And when you get to that stage there’s not even a question about what you should pursue.

Since this is a puzzle with many hidden pieces, you have to identify the components that together make up the complete puzzle. Over the six years where I have wrestled with my own puzzle, I think I have identified all the key pieces you need to complete the puzzle.

There are only four components that matter:

• Find your unique strengths and personality. Identifying what you tend to be naturally good at is an obvious but important piece. You also need to be insightful about your own personality. You can’t find out what you should pursue without having a strong understanding of who you are.
• Clarify your interests. You think you might know this already, but I will give you some thinking tools that might produce some interesting results.
• Answer key questions honestly to get to know yourself. Taking the time to answer some incredibly revealing questions is something most people don’t do. I suspect it’s because they don't know what questions to ask. I have made a list of questions that reveal. I thought I knew everything about myself, but answering these questions have revealed some pretty unexpected things I didn't know about myself. 
• Discover your values. This is the most important piece where things will really start coming together. If you already have a strong idea of your own interests, jump straight to this section about values.

For most puzzles in the world (even those with 10 000 pieces) these are the 4 main components that the rest of the pieces are made up of.

I’ve done exercises where I do these 4 things separately. It was helpful, but it didn’t confirm anything. It wasn't until I put these 4 components together that I finally saw the full picture and understood what I should pursue.

Let's find these 4 pieces one by one. And then finally at the end - I'll explain how to put them together.

Finding Your Ikigai

The best way to get some clarity here is with the classic “Find Your True Calling” exercise. This is commonly used as a standalone exercise to find your calling in life. It’s also commonly referred to as finding your “Ikigai”.

All you do in this exercise is to make three lists: 

List 1: This is a list of all your interests.

List 2: A list of skills you are good at. 

List 3: A list of things you know which people are willing to pay for or that there is a need for in the world.

Then you draw a venn diagram with three circles. One circle for each list. If the same item appear in all three lists, this is your calling or your “Ikigai”. Doing this will give you an idea of which of your skills and interests make sense to pursue.

The downside with relying only on this exercise is that it lacks everything about values, and values often determine what your interests are. You can’t figure out what to spend your life on solely by knowing your strengths and interests. But it’s an important step of the journey.