The most damaging piece of advice handed to young people is also one of the most common: find your purpose. The framing implies that purpose is a fixed object waiting somewhere to be discovered — that there is a right answer to who you should be and what you should do, and the task is to locate it.
This is wrong in a way that causes real harm, because it sends people into a search that has no end. They try things, find that they are not suffused with meaning, conclude that this was not their purpose, and move on to the next thing. The search continues indefinitely. The building never begins.
Purpose is not found. It is built. It is constructed through sustained engagement with something you have chosen to care about, through the accumulation of capability in a domain, through the relationships formed with people who share the work, through the results that confirm that what you are doing matters.
I did not have a sense of purpose when I started building companies at twenty-one. I had energy and ambition and a conviction that there was opportunity available to me. Purpose came later — as the specific problems I was drawn to became clearer, as the domains where my thinking produced results became more defined, as the impact I wanted to have on the world became more concrete.
The profound insight is that the question is not what is my purpose but what will I commit to fully enough and long enough that purpose might emerge from it? Choose something. Commit. Do the work. The meaning is not at the beginning. It is in the work, accumulating, becoming visible over time to anyone willing to stay in long enough to see it.