The single most common question I get, whether in advisory sessions, in my communities, or from friends over a beer, isn't about money or business tactics. It's some version of: "What should I actually be doing with my life?"
It usually comes wrapped in other words. "I think I want to quit my job, but I don't know what's next." "I've got three ideas and I can't pick one." "I'm doing fine on paper, but something feels off." Underneath all of them is the same quiet panic: I don't know where I'm going, and everyone else seems to.
I've been there. More than once. So let me give you the framework I actually use. Not a motivational pep talk, not a vision board, just a practical way to think about it.
Why "Follow Your Passion" Is Terrible Advice
Let's kill the worst piece of advice first.
"Follow your passion" assumes you have one clear, pre-installed passion waiting to be discovered, and that chasing it will automatically lead to a good life. Both assumptions are usually wrong.
Most people don't have a single burning passion. They have curiosities, talents, and interests that shift over time. And plenty of passions make terrible careers. I'm passionate about sailing, but I also know exactly how little a commercial skipper earns and how brutal that lifestyle is on a family. Passion is an input, not a plan.
The people I know with the most meaningful working lives didn't "find their passion." They built something at the intersection of what they're good at, what the world will pay for, and what they actually care about. The passion grew out of competence and traction, not the other way around.
The Four Questions
Here's the framework. It borrows from the Japanese concept of Ikigai, but stripped of the spiritual packaging and grounded in something more useful: behavioral psychology and basic market economics. (This is, incidentally, the backbone of The Clarity Map, the mapping report I build for people, but you can do a rough version yourself right now, for free.)
Four questions:
1. What are you actually good at? Not what you wish you were good at. What do people consistently come to you for? What feels easy to you that others find hard? Your real skills are often invisible to you precisely because they're effortless. Ask three honest friends what they'd hire you for. The answers usually surprise people.
2. What will the world pay for? This is the question idealists skip, and it's the one that keeps you fed. A direction nobody will pay for is a hobby, and hobbies are wonderful, but don't confuse them with your livelihood. Look at where money already moves. Who's spending it, on what, and is that market growing or shrinking?
3. What do you actually enjoy doing? Not the outcome. The work itself. The day-to-day. I love the act of building a website: solving a client's problem, seeing it go live. The Tuesday-afternoon reality of a path matters far more than the fantasy of the destination. If you hate the daily work, no amount of prestige will save you.
4. What actually matters to you? Your values. Freedom, security, status, impact, family, adventure. Be honest about which ones genuinely drive you, not which ones sound good out loud. I optimize hard for autonomy and time with my kids. That single value has shaped every business decision I've made since I left the corporate world.
Where these four overlap is your zone. Not one perfect dot. A zone, with room to move.
My Own Path Was a Mess
I want to be honest about something, because clarity frameworks can make it sound like life is linear. Mine wasn't.
I studied IT in Switzerland. Then I worked at Nespresso and LEGO, good jobs that I walked away from. Then I spent four years as a commercial skipper on 40-meter tall ships in the North Sea, which on paper was career suicide. Then crypto. Then four years building one of the biggest communities in the space. Then I moved to Friesland and started a web studio. Now I run a handful of projects at once.
None of that was planned at 22. If you'd shown me the map back then, I wouldn't have believed it. But every step was a reasonable bet given what I knew at the time, and every step taught me something the next one needed. The skippering taught me decision-making under pressure. The community work taught me how to build trust at scale. Both are the actual foundation of everything I do now.
The lesson: you don't need to see the whole staircase. You need to see the next step clearly enough to take it.
Clarity Comes From Action, Not Thinking
Here's the part nobody wants to hear. You will not think your way to clarity.
I watch people spend months, sometimes years, "trying to figure out what they want" while doing nothing differently. They journal, they read, they take personality tests, they wait for a lightning bolt. The lightning bolt doesn't come, because clarity isn't a thought. It's feedback.
You get clarity by making small, cheap bets and watching what happens. Want to know if you'd like running a business? Sell something this month, anything at all, and notice how it feels. Curious about a field? Talk to five people who already work in it. Wondering if you'd enjoy writing? Publish ten posts and see whether you still want to write the eleventh.
Action generates information. Information generates clarity. Sitting still generates anxiety dressed up as "thinking it through."
A Simple Exercise You Can Do Today
Take a piece of paper. Not a screen. Paper. Draw four columns and answer the four questions above as honestly and specifically as you can. Don't write "I'm good with people." Write "people trust me with bad news, and I stay calm when things break."
Then look for overlaps. Where does something you're good at meet something the market pays for? Where does something you enjoy meet something you value? Circle two or three candidate directions.
For each candidate, design the smallest possible experiment to test it in the next 30 days. Not a five-year plan. A 30-day bet. Cheap, fast, real. Then run it, and pay attention to the data your own reaction gives you. Energized or drained? Pulled forward, or pushing uphill?
That's it. Repeat. Most people overestimate the leap they need to take and badly underestimate how much a single honest experiment will teach them.
When You Want a Second Brain on It
You can absolutely do this alone. But sometimes you're too close to your own situation to see it clearly, the same way I can't proofread my own writing without missing obvious typos.
That's the gap two of my projects are built to fill. The Clarity Map is the entry point: you answer a set of deep questions, and within 24 hours I hand-build you a 15 to 20 page report mapping your skills, values, market opportunities, and a few concrete directions to test. It's nineteen euros, and every single one is personally reviewed by me. No algorithm spitting out a generic horoscope.
And if you want to actually talk it through, your real situation, your numbers, your fears, the thing you haven't told anyone, that's what Unfiltered Advice sessions are for. Sixty to ninety minutes, one on one, no scripts. The smartest friend you never had on speed dial. I'll connect dots across your money, your work, your health, and your direction, and tell you what I actually think, not what's comfortable to hear.
The Bottom Line
You don't have a passion problem. You have an information problem, and the cure is action, not more thinking.
Figure out what you're genuinely good at. Be honest about what the world will pay for. Notice what you actually enjoy doing day to day, and what you truly value. Find the overlap, design a cheap experiment, run it, and let reality talk back.
You won't get the whole map at once. Nobody does. But you can always see the next step, and that's the only part you need to take right now.
Fab