The Question Before the North Star
There is a particular kind of lost that arrives quietly. Not with a crisis. Not with a breakdown. Just a morning when you are doing everything right — and still you find yourself wondering: what exactly am I building toward?
I wanted to spend my 20s learning and exploring. I was going for the breadth of experiences. I wanted to be in every possible pair of shoes I could wear. And that is exactly what I have done.
And somewhere at the edge of my 20s, looking into the open field of my 30s — not stuck, not failing, just… undefined. I have all these materials and options. What do I do next?
I have come to believe that undefined is the hardest place to be.
The question I kept avoiding
For a long time, I thought my problem was strategy. I needed a better plan. A more disciplined routine. A cleaner morning. But the truth I kept circling back to — slowly, reluctantly — was simpler and harder than any of that:
I did not have a clear definition of what I wanted to be.
Not what I wanted to do. Not what I wanted to earn. What I wanted to be.
I think that distinction matters enormously. What we do can change a dozen times in a decade. What we are — the shape of the person we are becoming, the kind of work only we can do — that is the thing worth knowing. And I did not know it.
So I decided to stop searching inward alone, and start asking outward.
Different kind of questions
The obvious move would have been to research success. To study careers. To find someone accomplished and reverse-engineer their path. I had done all that.
But I was tired of asking how did you get there? Because that question gives you a map of someone else's territory.
Instead, I started asking two things:
How did you figure out what success even meant to you — your north star?
And:
How do you make sure that success stays defensible over time?
These two questions feel essential to me. Because without something that holds — without roots — the short term has nothing to stand on. You can be incredibly busy and still be building on sand.
What a filmmaker taught me about finding direction
I sat down recently with a new friend, someone from the film world I deeply look up to. We talked for longer than I expected. We went sideways and came back around. And at the end of it, I came away with something I already knew and - if I am honest -had quietly forgotten:
Start idealistic — and grow from there.
Begin with the most idealistic version of what you want to make — let yourself have the vision, the full one, the one that feels a little too big — and then make it better with every iteration. Bigger. Clearer. More true to what only you can offer. Be the child who builds things in their head with zero compromise on the vision.
And when the vision feels stuck?
Start with what you are doing right now.
Then ask: what would the ideal version of this look like?
Talk to people already living inside the world you want to enter. Listen for the gaps — the needs that exist but are not being met, the futures that have not been built yet. That is where you can live. That is where you become not just present in your field, but necessary.
The gap just outside your comfort zone
Here is what I realised I had been doing wrong — and I say this gently, to myself and to anyone else who recognises it:
I had been looking too narrowly inside my field, and too far outside it at the same time.
Too narrow meant: I was comparing myself to people doing exactly what I do, and measuring myself against benchmarks that weren't really mine.
Too far meant: I was looking at completely different industries for inspiration, missing the fact that the most interesting, most fillable gaps were right there — just outside my comfort zone, but still within the world I already understood.
The opportunity wasn't across the ocean. It was at the edge of the room I was already standing in. Develop your brain, not just your toolbox
One more thing stayed with me from that conversation, and I think it might be the most important piece for those of us entering this decade:
Develop your brain, not just your toolbox.
The tools will change. They already are. The executional skills we have built — some of them will be handed off, automated, absorbed. But the ideas? The way you see a problem, the angle only you bring, the vision that no one else would have had? That cannot be replaced.
And for those of us who have always been the weird, quirky one in the room - this is the time shine.
This is not a warning about technology. It is an invitation. An invitation to invest in your thinking, your perspective, the quality of the questions you are willing to ask.
The most defensible thing you can ever build is a mind that sees what others do not yet see.
For those if us entering the 30s
I am writing because I believe the questions matter as much as the answers. And I am still very much in the middle of mine.
But if I were to offer anything from where I stand today, it would be this.
You do not need to have arrived. You need to know what your destination looks like. And to know the that, you have to be honest about what the ideal looks like for you — not for the version of you that wants to impress, but for the version of you that is true to yourself.
Start with what you are doing now. Ask what the ideal looks like. Talk to people in the room next door to the one you're already in. Listen for the gap. And keep developing the one thing no one else has: the specific, irreplaceable way you think.
The 30s, I am learning, are not about having the answers. They are about finally asking better questions.
To the questions, and to this new era. More conversations to come :)
Artania