Early in life, many people are focused on developing self-knowledge. They are reading books, journalling, and trying to figure out who they are and what they value.
But a trap many fall into is in attempting to gain insight into themselves purely through introspection.
A much more effective way to understand who you are and what matters to you is to go about living your life and noticing what you are most attracted to. Write about what you’re interested in, make the friends you connect best with, take trips you are most excited for, quit jobs that bore you, then as time goes on, look back at the things that are common connections.
What to you tend to write about? What are the things that are similar in jobs you liked and disliked? What similarities exist in your best friends?
Through living, we can’t help but create a pattern of who we are. Through living the themes you care most about will naturally emerge. Then you can notice them. Before you’ve really gone out on your own and dictated your own decisions about life, you don’t have the material to understand what you care about. The way to learn who you are is to live and then look back.
Leave a Reply