How To Uncover What To Do With Your Life When You Don't Have A Clue

Discover the 5 tips in this contributed post that could help you right now.

We live in a strange universe. We’re only given one life, and yet we’re supposed to decide exactly what to do with it among literally millions of possible options. Some people are able to home in on one or two things and really focus on them. But others are mesmerized by the number of opportunities open to them and get stuck. They wind up asking themselves all sorts of questions, like “what am I really good at?” and “will I ever succeed at anything?”


What you need is a bit of guidance and direction. There isn’t just one path you should take through life. Millions could result in the happiness and bliss that you’re looking for. Here are some things you could do to explore what to do with your life.

Start Widening Your Horizons

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It might sound counter intuitive to try to widen your horizons when you’re already overwhelmed by choice, but it sometimes helps. The reason for this is that exploring the world actually helps you find out more about yourself. Ultimately, you’re able to whittle down the options available to you by being more discerning. The advice from experts is to travel as much as possible, read widely and find out the stuff that makes you tick. You’ll soon discover the type of person you are. And by reading about the world, you’ll quickly find problems that you want to solve. There’s no better way to spend your life than to dedicate it to solving a problem that really bothers you.


Focus On Problem-Solving

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Some people put off doing something with their life by learning every possible skill they think that they need. You see these people all the time. They’re the lifelong student: the person who never leaves university but keeps going back, year after year, to do different courses, just in case they need them in the future. The problem with this kind of person is that they’re not learning in order to solve problems: they’re learning to avoid making a decision about what to do.


Problem-solving is a much better way to approach life than academic learning. Academic learning can only ever give you foundational tools. Real-world problem-solving requires an all-encompassing approach. You have to dedicate yourself to solving problems in a way that you simply don’t when you just take a course.


Lots of people start solving problems that they are not experts in. Take Scott Harrison for instance, the man who started Charity: Water. He didn’t know much about providing poor communities in the developing world with clean water, but he knew that that was what he wanted to do. By solving the problem, he learned about his passion more than he ever could reading about it in a book.


Find Out More About Who You Are

Socrates said, “know thyself.” In other words, people should have an understanding of who they are, what motivates them and where their various impulses and behaviors come from. The phrase “self-knowledge,” however, is barely used in the modern world. In truth, people know very little about themselves and why it is that they do the things that they do. Sometimes, there’s no reason, but often it has a lot to do with their history.

There are many ways to find out about yourself, according to readingswithmatt.com. You can look for spiritual answers, psychological answers and even take personality tests. Myers-Briggs has spent decades developing a test that helps people to understand who they are and where they’re likely to fit in in society.


Everything In Life In A Compromise

Another reason why people don’t know what they want to do is because they don’t want to make a compromise according to https://fizzle.co/. They don’t want to give up some options in life to pursue others. For instance, if you want to be a doctor, you have to give up your ambition to be a lawyer and vice versa. Nobody can be both.

Recognizing that you can’t have it all is one of those growth moments in life. Accept compromises and keep moving forward.


Everything's A Gamble

People have an innate mammalian desire to play it safe. They play it safe in all areas of their life, but especially when it comes to work. They stick it out in a job that they hate or a course that they loathe, all because it pays the bills or leads to a grander future. But the truth is that there are no risk-free paths in life. Even the most secure jobs can come tumbling down eventually.