A letter to my younger self about purpose discovery

Hey Hing,

Or you’ll come to address yourself as Chin in 15 years. It’s currently 2005 in your time, you’ve graduated from high school and you’re wondering what’s next?

What do you want to do in life? What major should you specialize in? What career path do you want to pursue?

You don’t have any of these answers now, so I hope this advice from an older me will help guide you towards a faster answer.

Stop chasing opportunities, focus on discovering your purpose.

Money is important, but it shouldn’t be your purpose. Money is a measure of value, if you are valuable to others, if you create something that adds value, money will come.

Instead of chasing shiny objects, focus on personal development to better understand yourself and discover your mission in life.

Start with the WHY.

Just watch this video, it’s worth it:

In life, and in work, there will be a lot of things that you will have to do, some of which you don’t enjoy.

e.g. You may find data analysis boring if you’re doing it for a company/task that you’re not excited about. But if you’re analyzing data that will help you make an informed decision for your personal mission, you’ll find that the same thing is a lot more fulfilling.

Purpose makes all the difference.

Values as a foundation

Now that we know the importance of purpose, we need to go on that journey to find our purpose. That said, this journey is different for everyone and there’s no easy one-size-fits-all way to know what your personal purpose is.

A good place to start is by understanding your core values.

If you’re a teenager, you’ve probably already developed an unconscious sense of personal core values through your upbringing and experiences. These values can change over time but they tend to be relatively stable.

It’s important to understand values because they greatly influence decision making. We are taught to make decisions based on logic – pros vs. cons. What we don’t realize is that one person’s pros may be another person’s con. The difference lies in values.

e.g. If you’re deciding between working for a startup vs. taking a job at a large corporation. There are different pros and cons for each.

Startup

High risk
High reward
Big opportunity for learning and rapidly growing your role.
Likely to be very intensive & time consuming (no regular schedule, poor work-life balance).

Corporate

Big reputable company.
Stable secure income.
Slow growth, may take 2-4 years to get promoted.
Regular Mon-Fri, 9-5 schedule with weekends off.

If you know someone – i.e. John, and his personal values are health, family, and security, you can more readily imagine that he will be more fulfilled working in a corporate role.

By understanding your core values, you can more readily align yourself in situations that help you more easily discover your purpose. You can also begin to build a network of people who share similar values with you and are likely able to support you with whatever purpose you decide to pursue.

So how do you uncover your core values?

A lot of books tell you what’s important, but they don’t really tell you how to do it.

The challenge with core values is that it’s often challenging for anyone to immediately condense everything about themselves into 1-3 things. Tony Robbins has a great exercise in his book Awaken The Giant Within, it goes like this:

Start by meditating and reflecting to create a list of your top-10 values.
- It’s easier to start with 10 because you’re not limiting yourself too much.
Next, challenge if those values are truly values or means for accomplishing an underlying value.
- e.g. Money is not a value, money is a means for accomplishing a sense of freedom for some, or a sense of security for others.
- If you’ve listed a means instead of a value, reflect on what the underlying value might be.
Rank your list from 1 to 10. If you’re struggling to prioritize them, start by comparing 2 values against each other and repeating this process until you have a prioritization of most important to least important.
Look at your top-3. It doesn’t mean that the rest of your values are not important, but it helps you focus.
- These top-3 are what we will refer to as our core values, they will influence a majority of our decisions and help us get closer to discovering our purpose.

There are a few other exercises out there that you can try, most of them speak to a similar approach. Find what’s best for you, there is no 1-size-fits-all.

Build self-awareness/mindfulness.

You can’t improve on something if you’re not aware that you are weak in it or in other words, you don’t know what you don’t know.

Meditation is a good place to start. But beyond that, the goal is to be attentive on a daily basis.

Start to pay attention to the small things like:

Why did I react so strongly to that?
What did that make me feel uncomfortable?
Understand the Why behind the Why – Why did he/she ask me that question?
- Was I not clear in my explanation?
- Are they doubting something?
- Am I making assumptions? Or what might their assumptions be?
Why did that make me so happy?
Why do I feel so alive right this moment?
etc.

Some people don’t even realize their personal purpose because they’re not being mindful about what they like/dislike in life.

Educate yourself purposefully

Instead of studying a topic or learning a skill because of its potential for future job opportunities, only educate yourself so that you get closer/better at accomplishing your mission. Many people never end up doing work that’s related to their majors, they usually study because they had to, not because they wanted to.

If you don’t know what hard skills/topics to focus on, start by polishing your soft-skills (or essential skills). Things like:

Public speaking
How to negotiate
How to build your network
Creating influence and persuading others
Empathy
Patience
Discipline
etc.

These skills are highly transferable and will support you greatly regardless of what you choose to pursue.

Pivots: Business & Personal

A pivot is when you need to change your course and do something different. Pivots can be really big and difficult, or they can also be small and simple. Examples:

Shutting down your business.
Going after a different customer.
Adjusting your pricing.
Switching careers.
Trying a new activity.

Pivoting doesn’t mean that you’ve given up. You only truly give up when you stop.

Failure almost never happens, you only fail if you don’t learn anything from your mistakes.

Don’t be married to the current manifestation of your vision, or the HOW.

When you pivot, your WHY doesn’t change, your true north is still the same. You’re just changing HOW you get there, taking a detour so to speak.

So how do you pivot?

Ensure it’s grounded in your mission.
Ensure it’s grounded in what you’ve learned.

You’re not just throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks.

All said and done, it takes time. Purpose discovery is a journey, not an epiphany.

Enjoy the journey.
Be patient.
Sometimes it simply takes time for you to embrace your purpose and convince yourself that this is truly what you are meant for – there is a small element of self-brainwashing involved.

Other advice

Embrace being an introvert
- People aren’t judging you as much as you think they are.
- When you’re comfortable being yourself, you’ll make others more comfortable too.
Don’t be afraid to ask for anything, you won’t get it if you don’t at least try asking.
- Related to that, don’t be afraid of rejection. Watch:

Don’t wait to start anything.
- You don’t need experience/connections to begin, no one starts with experience, we only gain experience after we’ve done it.
- You WILL make mistakes, perfect is the enemy of done, make them sooner so that you’ll learn faster.
- That said, don’t be ignorant, you’re smart, but as mentioned, you don’t know what you don’t know. Seek out a mentor/advisor who can guide you and point out your blind spots.
Learn to manage expectations and not live an entitled life.
- The more you expect, the greater your chances of being dissapointed.
- Joy happens when things are better than expected. The less you expect, the more joy you will have in life. When you desire nothing, you truly have everything.
Surround yourself with people who will give you energy, push you to be a better person, and support you.
- Read Think & Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill.
- Join a mastermind. Details on what to look out for and how to find a good group here.
If there is one hard/soft skill that’s been the most valuable for me, it’s sales.
- Regardless if you choose to go into a career in sales, or to start a business, sales in essence is the art of persuasion.
- When you’re interviewing, you’re selling yourself.
- When you pitch to investors, you’re selling your vision.
- When you recruit team members, you’re selling your culture.
- When you sell to customers, you’re selling a solution.
- It’ll help you in more ways that you can imagine.
Other must-read books:
- The Slight Edge by Jeff Olson
- Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi
- Contagious by Jonah Berger
- 50 Email Scripts by Ramit Sethi

Obviously, I’ll never get the chance to send this to myself in the past. I hope that this will help you in your personal development journey, and if there’s one small wish, I hope that my son Toby will someday read this.

With love,

Chin from 2020

P.S. Not that I claiming to have the answer to everything in my own life, that my purpose will never change, or that I’m wildly successful. But I do feel a sense of clarity and fulfillment with my current direction and actions.