Stop Chasing Ghosts: Why Finding Your Purpose is a Strategic Choice, Not a Treasure Hunt
By Noor — Your career isn't happening to you. You're happening to it. ·
It’s October 2026, the air in Austin is finally losing that aggressive summer heat, and my DMs are blowing up with the same existential crisis I see every autumn.
“Noor, I feel stuck. I don’t think I’m in my purpose.”
I’m going to be real with you: stop looking for it. Your purpose isn’t buried under a rock in the desert or hiding in the fine print of your job description. It’s not a golden ticket that falls out of the sky when you hit senior manager status.
When I was at Google, I interviewed thousands of candidates. I saw people with “purpose-driven” resumes who were absolutely miserable because they thought their job was supposed to be their soulmate. It’s not. Your career isn’t happening to you; you’re happening to it. If you’re waiting for a lightning bolt of inspiration to tell you what to do with your life, you’re just wasting time that could be spent building something you actually care about.
The “Purpose” Myth is Killing Your Career
We’ve been sold this romanticized lie that if you just find your “true calling,” the 9-to-5 grind will turn into a frictionless flow state. Spoiler alert: even if you’re doing work that matters, you’re still going to have bad Mondays. You’re still going to deal with buggy code, annoying stakeholders, and the inevitable boredom of administrative bloat.
Purpose isn’t a feeling. It’s a decision. It’s the intersection of what you’re good at, what the market will pay for, and what keeps you curious enough to show up when things get messy. When I left Google to start this coaching business, I didn’t have a “calling.” I had a realization: I was tired of watching brilliant people get underpaid and overlooked because they didn't know how the system worked. My “purpose” became fixing that information asymmetry.
Step 1: Audit Your Curiosity, Not Your Passion
“Follow your passion” is the worst advice ever given to a professional. Passion is fleeting. Curiosity? That’s a fuel source.
Look at your browser history. Look at the books you actually finish. Look at the Slack channels you gravitate toward in your current org. What problems do you find yourself obsessively trying to solve, even when nobody asked you to?
Stop trying to align your career with a nebulous passion for ‘art’ or ‘travel.’ Instead, identify the technical or interpersonal problems you find interesting. If you love deep-diving into data to find efficiencies, that’s not ‘just’ a skill—that’s a potential purpose. Build around the puzzles you enjoy solving, not the feelings you hope to conjure.
Step 2: Stop Looking for a Destination
I’m a girl from Detroit living in Austin. I miss the grit of the Motor City, but I love the speed of the Texas tech scene. If I had waited for the “perfect” city to align with my “destiny,” I’d still be sitting in my childhood bedroom.
Your career is a series of pivots. You don’t need to know where you’ll be in ten years; you just need to know what you’re willing to trade your time for right now. If you want to find purpose, stop looking for a destination and start looking for a trajectory. Does this role give you more leverage? Does it give you more access to rooms you want to be in? Does it teach you a skill that makes you harder to replace? That’s not just a job—that’s a strategic investment in your future self.
Step 3: The “Hard-Truth” Test
If you want to know if you’re on the right track, ask yourself this: “Am I willing to do the boring, tedious, frustrating parts of this work?”
If you want to be a product leader but you hate user testing and documentation, you don’t want the purpose; you want the status. Real purpose is the willingness to do the unglamorous work because you believe in the output. If you’re not willing to endure the friction of the work, it’s not your purpose—it’s just a fantasy.
Make a Choice, Then Execute
Quit waiting for the stars to align. You are the one who decides what matters. Pick a direction that challenges you, solves a genuine problem for someone else, and pays you for your expertise. If it stops working, pivot. That’s not failure; that’s iteration.
Stop waiting for someone else to hand you a narrative. Write it yourself. You’re the architect of this thing, not the passenger.
What’s one thing you’ve been doing lately that actually keeps you up at night in a good way? Slide into my DMs or shoot me an email and let’s break down if that’s a hobby or a career pivot waiting to happen. Let’s get to work.