No doubt there are lots of ways to tackle this question. If you are twenty you are probably asking it a lot. But you don’t have to know everything you are going to do. You just need something reasonable and purposeful to move towards. The joy, money, flow mix used by Chris Buillebeau may be useful to you as described in his new book, Born for This. Here’s an animated core message capturing Chris’ message.
And here’s the audio of a good interview of Chris with Brian Johnson.
I keep finding that you don’t have to be twenty to explore these issues again. I’ll never be twenty again but the intersection of “again” shows up for lots of reasons and if you pause there to thoughtfully explore and experiment, a new and fruitful enterprise may be just around the corner. I love the idea here that we all need to treat ourselves as “self-employed.” We each of the personal responsibility for developing our work (or some side-work) and keeping it meaningful. Its too easy to turn work or career into a life-sucking venture in greed. The benefit of this mix developed by Chris is that it acknowledges money in the mix but keeps joy — which relates to purpose large in our considerations.
Give it a try and connect with me to talk about it some more.