The Uncontaminated Sample

There's a question that keeps coming back in career advice, therapy sessions, and late-night spirals: What am I meant to do?

I don't think I'm meant to do anything. I don't think anyone is. But I do think there are things I'd be happier and better at doing than others.

Most people try to answer it by looking forward. They take personality tests, read frameworks, ask mentors. They try to reverse-engineer purpose from the options sitting in front of them today.

I think the better move is to look backward. Way back. Before the influences got in.

When I was a kid, nobody had gotten to me yet. I hadn't been told what was realistic or what paid well. I wasn't performing for an audience. I was doing things because they pulled me.

That pull is signal. And it's one of the cleanest signals I'll ever get.

Naval Ravikant has this line: "What feels like play to you, but looks like work to others?" I think the kid version of me already answered that question. I just wasn't paying attention.

I drew blueprints of my bedroom and rearranged the furniture on paper before touching anything. I built bike trails in the woods, snow forts in the front yard, Lego cities on the living room floor. I walked into grocery stores and wondered who decided the layout and why it was different from the one across town. I watched Crocodile Hunter and Animal Planet obsessively, fascinated by why an animal behaves the way it does and how it evolved to do something no other species can.

I asked a lot of questions. The explanation was always more interesting to me than the thing itself.

For a while I thought I'd be an architect. Then an artist. Then an engineer. Then a designer. I kept circling these titles without realizing they were all pointing at the same two things: building stuff and understanding why things work the way they do.

It took me a long time to realize that's what product thinking is. Or systems thinking. Or first principles. I was already doing it. I just didn't know those words yet.

The kid version of me is the closest thing to an uncontaminated sample. Before I learned what was prestigious. Before money, status, and social proof started bending my compass. The things I did at eight years old weren't strategic. They were honest.

When I look at the work I find most energizing now, it maps almost perfectly to the kid drawing furniture layouts on his bedroom floor. That doesn't mean I should literally do what I did at eight. It means the type of thinking that pulled me in is worth paying attention to. The pattern underneath the activity.

Sometimes I lose the thread and start wondering if the path I'm on is the right one. When that happens, I go back to the kid. I ask whether the work connects to the same impulses I had before anyone told me what to want. If it does, something settles. If it doesn't, that's worth paying attention to.

I don't think the answer is ahead of me. I think it's behind me, waiting to be taken seriously.