Introduce yourself without mentioning what you do. No job title. No degree. Try it mid-sentence, out loud, and notice how fast you run out of things to say. That's the exercise, and it's harder than it sounds, because most people have never once had to answer the question without reaching for their job title to answer it for them.
Here's why it's hard. Depending on who you ask, a human being is a spirit that has a soul and lives in a body. Some people flip the order: a soul that has a spirit and lives in a body. Either way, the body is the part everyone agrees on, because it is the part you can see.
Your spirit is what connects you to something higher, the eternal part of you, the part that reaches for a power beyond itself. Your soul sits between the spirit and the body: your intelligence, your consciousness, your emotions, your personality, your sense of identity. It is the soul that makes you different from a goat. And it is the soul, more than the spirit, that most people spend a lifetime trying to understand, because it is where your perspective actually lives — and a job title was never going to answer for it.
Purpose gets discussed as if it were one sentence you could hand somebody at a party. My purpose is to lead people to Christ. That is too basic for a species this complicated. We are layered, and the layers do not always agree with each other.
Your purpose, your career and your passion are not guaranteed to live in the same place. Somebody can teach because teaching is a spiritual gift, a way of helping people become better, and never have teaching as a career. Somebody else gets the passion and the career in the exact same seat, and that is luck, not the default.
So if not a job title, what? The honest way to find an answer is to look for indicators, not declarations. What activity makes you lose track of time, that you would do all day without watching the clock? Be careful here. The first answer people reach for is money, and money is not an indicator of anything except that you need to survive.
Set that one aside. List everything you currently do, all of it, then start cutting: of all of these, which do I actually enjoy, practically, effortlessly? That list does not get built in a weekend. It takes self-assessment, honest feedback from people willing to give it, and years of reflecting and iterating before it says anything true.
Mine started around 2009. I was trying to work out something simpler first: how does God actually speak? The answer, for me, came as illustrations rather than a voice. One was Jesus teaching the children. That told me I had a teaching gift, and it explained something I had already noticed about myself: whatever the topic, I break it down as if I am teaching a nine year old. The habit did not start as a technique. It started as an answer.
Along the way I read the books everyone reads, including Purpose Driven Life, the way most people read them, cover to cover, hoping the book does the work for them. It does not. Once you know what question you are actually asking, you read the same book looking for a different thing, and it hands you different answers than it hands everyone else.
The second illustration was David in the cave, the men in debt and the men in trouble gathering around him before anyone called him king. I recognised the pattern, because I had already watched it happen to me: people are drawn to bring me their confusion. It is not accidental.
At some point I asked God directly why I came from the family I came from, why things happened the way they happened. The answer I settled on was that none of it was a mistake, not even the parts that looked like one. It was custom made for the journey. I grew up poor, we hustled for everything, and if I am inclined toward business and entrepreneurship today, that did not start the day I decided it. Something had been informing it for years before I was deliberate about it.
Out of that came the clearest picture I have of what I am for.
I am a wall. Throw a ball at a wall, and it bounces back in a specific direction.
Anyone who comes into contact with me should leave with a clearer sense of direction than they arrived with. I cannot always hand somebody their finished values, their passions, their five year plan. But by the time they are leaving, the idea should be clearer than it was. That is the assignment.
Which is why I think most people make the same mistake: they call their career their purpose. A musician can have music as a career and still not have music as a purpose. If the music exists to drive political awareness, the purpose was the awareness, and music was only the instrument.
Bill Gates funding toilets and boreholes is the same shape. The passion was never toilets. The passion was a world with less malaria, less preventable disease, and toilets and clean water turned out to be the vehicle for getting there. Whatever you have built your career on, ask what it is actually a platform for. Most people never separate the two.
None of this happens ahead of your basic needs. Maslow had this right. If you are broke and hungry, let's discuss purpose is not the answer to the question actually in front of you. A job is.
I needed to build a career, and build it well, before I had the standing, or the resources, to sit across from somebody and help them think through a business idea, or put real money behind it. The career had to fund the assignment. That is not a contradiction of purpose. It is a precondition for it.
What keeps the whole thing honest is a question I ask myself every day, not once a year:
Am I still doing that? Am I still on the right track?
That question is what makes you go and build the skill you are missing, the communication, the administration, the counselling, instead of shrugging and telling the next confused graduate to go and figure it out on their own, because that was never going to be enough for them either.
I want traffic in the airport when I die, not on the road. To get there, I need to raise people who can carry something forward, wherever the venue happens to be: a boardroom, a business, a marriage, a church basement.
If your soul is right, your intelligence, your consciousness, it will shape your body naturally. If your spirit is right, it will shape your soul and drive the rest. Whatever platform you have chosen, the actual work is asking what it is a vehicle for, finding the indicators, and having the patience to tie them together over years rather than a weekend. Try the exercise again now — introduce yourself without your job title — and see if you've got anything more to say than you did at the start.