Most of us will reach the end of our careers — and our lives — without ever discovering where we could have made our greatest contribution. You have hidden superpowers, and you need to uncover them now. But that means doing the hard work of questioning what you do and why you do it.
For some perspective: I’m writing to you on borrowed time. At 15, doctors told me a genetic cancer syndrome was likely to kill me by 40. That diagnosis should have cut me down. Instead, it gave me something most people never get: clarity about what matters. Not in some abstract, philosophical way, but in the urgent, practical sense of someone whose clock is visibly ticking.
I did what anyone would do with a death sentence: I got busy living. I poured everything into my twenties and thirties, building a family, creating, working like hell. I achieved success by traditional measures, checking all the boxes society told me mattered.
Then I turned 40 — the age I wasn’t supposed to reach. And standing in that moment, I had a brutal realization: I’d spent decades living someone else’s definition of success. Every milestone, every achievement, was based on what I was supposed to do. What others expected. Not what mattered.
That’s when the question hit me: What’s the point?
Not as philosophy. Not as some existential crisis. But as a daily compass.
What’s the point of this meeting? This project? This career path I’m sleepwalking through? The truth I discovered cut deep. Most of what I’d learned, assumed, and even taught others was bullshit.
Polite lies we tell ourselves to avoid the harder questions. Not the kind of tough questions I’d ask a struggling friend over drinks. And not the kind of life I’d choose if social expectations vanished.
My previous books and research have been safe, research-heavy, buttoned up, and academic. But life is too short to keep doing that with whatever time I have left. So for this next book, and moving forward, I’m taking an “unfiltered” approach. This is me, sharing what I wish someone had told me at 22, or 32, or yesterday.
Because here’s what I know with absolute certainty: you are wasting most of your day.
Not because you’re lazy, but because you’ve never asked the right question. You’re so busy being busy that you’ve forgotten to ask why. You’re optimizing your schedule while your life leaks away, hour by hour, in meetings that don’t matter and tasks that won’t be remembered next week, let alone next year.
When people hear the word purpose, they panic. They imagine some grand quest, a lifetime mission statement, pressure to find their One True Calling. That’s exactly backward, and it’s why so many people feel lost. Purpose isn’t some mountain to climb or treasure to find. It’s fuel for today, right now, at this moment.
The word has been hijacked by influencers and life coaches selling you anxiety, but the reality is much simpler: purpose is just knowing why you’re doing what you’re doing today, and being willing to change course when the answer is “I don’t know” or worse, “because I’m supposed to.”
Each day, you wake up to roughly 16 hours of consciousness: 960 minutes, 57,600 seconds. Yet most of us spend exactly zero of those seconds asking, “What’s the point?” We just react, respond, follow the schedule, check the boxes, and then wonder why Monday morning feels like a funeral. We’re dying in installments, one meaningless day at a time, and we don’t even realize it because everyone around us is doing the same thing.
I don’t know when my borrowed time will run out. Could be tomorrow, could be a few decades — but that uncertainty has become my greatest teacher. I’m done pretending that someday I’ll get around to what matters, done waiting for the perfect moment, done following rules written by people who are already dead.
Life isn’t about finding your passion. That’s a luxury most can’t afford. It’s not about quitting your job to follow your dreams. That’s Instagram fantasy. It’s about something far more radical: paying attention to your actual life, the one you’re living right now, and having the courage to ask why.
Here’s my challenge: stop waiting for your wake-up call.
Most people need a heart attack, a divorce, or a terminal diagnosis to start asking the right questions. But you don’t have to wait for tragedy to strike. You can start today, right now, with whatever you’re doing next. Ask yourself: What’s the point?
If you can’t answer, or if the answer makes you sick, it’s time to change. Not someday, but today. Because while you’re reading this, debating whether to take this seriously, your life is happening. The clock is running, and unlike me, you don’t know when your overtime starts.
The question isn’t whether you have enough time. It’s whether you’re done wasting it. And that’s a decision you can make right now, in this moment.
This article is adapted from my new book, What’s the Point: Turning Purpose Into Your Daily Superpower — out April 28.