How to get where you need to be when you don’t know where you’re going

We obsess over finding the meaning and purpose of our lives. But how do we go about finding it?

We picture life as a ladder we climb. The next rung the next logical step. My experience says this is not the way. We discover what we're meant to do in more subtle ways. Loops of learning that combine new experiences with an unshakeable inner core of who we’ve always been. We always know who we're meant to be. It just takes time to hear it.

I grew up in a house in the country where I knew I didn’t belong. I escaped through music, books, and movies. I spent hours reading and discovering universes to get lost in. That interest became making worlds of my own: stories, zines, music, writing online, and my first career as a music critic. Those experiences led to starting a tiny record label to put out music by others. There was no money. It just felt like the thing to do.

Kickstarter was the same. For me, joining Perry and Charles in cofounding the project wasn't about disruption, wealth, or fame. It was a private conspiracy among friends that let me be curious about the exact things I cared about.

Kickstarter felt like the peak — a personal “end of history” that would define my life from that point forward. But in the years since there's been an explosion of output: more in the past eight years than the first decades of my life put together. A strange mix of hard-to-define projects that, over time, have come to feel increasingly cohesive and in conversation with each other.

When I look at these projects on a timeline, I can remember how spontaneous each was as it happened. There was no grand plan. No five-year vision. The next project kept feeling like the right thing to do.

What I also now see are the connections between them. Some are clear: growing up in the middle of nowhere pushed me to books and music, which made me start writing, which led to me starting a label, which made me care more about what artists need, which led to cofounding Kickstarter.

Another set of connections: Kickstarter led to me learning about economics and the law, which led to a greater appreciation of the nuances of corporate structure, which led to the creation of A-Corps.

The timeline revealed even deeper connections hidden until that moment. I suddenly realized I grew up in a dark forest — both literally and figuratively — where I was isolated and longed for the outside world. The dark forest metaphor, so prevalent in my work the past five years and maybe my most widely shared idea, is a direct mirror of my early life.

This timeline isn’t a steady progression up a ladder. It‘s a series of jumps and recursive loops where experiences in one context carry forward into another. Each project took me by surprise as it happened. Yet together they build a narrative so coherent it feels premeditated.

This is why I believe the inner voice inside us knows all along who we're meant to be. It nudges us forward with curiosity, aptitude, and will. By guiding us with what feels right — nothing more strategic than that — it catalyzes larger subconscious patterns. Ones that we are, in theory, the authors of, but in reality we feel more like passengers guided by forces we can't see but deeply feel.

We feel alone on our quest for self-discovery, but we aren't. We have the best help of all: ourselves. Life is an invitation to become who you are. By accepting it, you'll wake up one day in a place you didn’t know you were going, but exactly where you need to be.