How to figure out what you actually want

The wrong life can look right for years. You can understand every tradeoff, ask everyone for advice, and still have no idea which life you’d actually want when you’re the one living it.

Wanting part of a life is easy to mistake for wanting the whole thing.

You spend Sunday convinced you should start a business.

By Wednesday, a good job with evenings to yourself sounds better.

You haven't stopped wanting the business. You've just spent more time thinking about everything the other life could give you.

What you can't know from the outside

Someone who's run a business for years can tell you what the work demands and which parts they love or hate.

But they can't tell you how you'll respond when you're the one doing it.

You might enjoy work they hate. You might find something they've spent years doing surprisingly dull.

And if you have no idea what you want to pursue, you don't need to figure out your whole future first.

You can begin with a smaller question: what have you enjoyed enough to want another go at, or been curious enough to try for the first time?

You won't get a life plan from that. But you might find something worth exploring.

And even then, trying something doesn't always tell you what you need to know.

What if you enjoy it?

Say you spend a weekend building a website for a small service business.

You pick a name, design the pages, and work out what you'd offer. You enjoy the whole thing. For once, you're actually doing something about the future you've been imagining.

It feels like a good sign.

And it is, about one part of the idea.

You know you enjoy building and shaping the idea. You still don't know much about finding customers, working with them, or delivering work when someone else is relying on you.

You could spend another weekend improving the site and enjoy that too. It just wouldn't tell you much about those other parts.

So try finding someone who'll pay for one small service. See what happens when the work involves another person and an actual promise to deliver.

And before you try something, think about what you're hoping to find out. Otherwise, you can stay busy experimenting without getting much closer to a decision.

What a difficult week can tell you

You contact people. Most don't respond. Eventually someone pays you for a job. The work takes far longer than you expected.

Then the customer asks for changes. You're annoyed. You thought you were done. But as they explain what isn't working, you start seeing ways to make it better.

You make the changes and send the finished work over. Later that evening, you're still thinking about how you'd approach the next job.

You didn't enjoy the whole week. But you discovered a part of the work you want to do again.

So you take another job. Then a third.

You get better at estimating the work and handling changes. You still enjoy figuring out how to make the result better.

Finding new customers, though, is something you keep putting off. You don't yet know whether that's because it feels unfamiliar or because you wouldn't want to do it regularly.

Before you commit to running a business, that's worth finding out.

At first, you were going back and forth between two futures you could only imagine.

Now you know you like doing the work. What you still need to discover is whether you want to be responsible for finding it, too.