Somewhere along the way, a very reasonable thing happens.
You get good at something. People notice. They reward you. You do more of it.
Congratulations.
You may have just built a life one perfectly sensible choice at a time.
Most big life decisions do not arrive looking like doors. They arrive looking like the next sensible step.
Take the promotion. Build the thing. Stay because you are good at it. Keep going because everyone agrees it is working.
And then, every once in a while, you notice the threshold.
Is this working because it is mine—or because I became good at making it work?
That is the question I have been testing lately.
You can test it on your side of the door.
The Competence Loop
It is possible to become very good at building a life you do not actually want. That sounds obvious when stated plainly. It is harder to notice while you are inside it.
Work rewards competence. Markets reward usefulness. Families, schools, companies, and communities all give us signals about what is valuable. Those signals are not bad; many are necessary. But over time they can quietly become answers to questions we never consciously asked.
What am I good at?
What should I do?
What will make money?
What will make people respect me?
What will make the people I love worry less?
All useful questions.
Still not quite the same as:
What do I want?
I have been learning the difference the expensive way.
A Lot of Evidence
For much of the last year, I was trying to do two things at once: finish a book and figure out how I wanted to make a living. I approached both the way I approach most difficult problems. I started building.
A lot.
Coaching concepts. AI tools. Communities. Offers. Experiments for founders, career changers, and people trying to figure out what to do next. At some point, the list started to look like a small portfolio, which was either encouraging or evidence that I was getting very efficient at avoiding a different question.
The irony is that I had learned this lesson before. Years ago, I built my first startup too far before I had done enough to understand whether the problem was real, important, and worth solving. The lesson I took from that experience was simple: do not confuse building with learning.
Then AI made building dramatically cheaper. That should have made me a better experimenter, and in many ways it did. It also made avoidance cheaper.
I could test positioning, audiences, offers, landing pages, whether someone would click, sign up, reply, or pay. Useful questions. But underneath them was another one:
If this worked, would I actually want the life it created?
That question changed the experiment.
Capability vs. Desire
This was uncomfortable because I know how to become useful. I know how to work hard, learn a market, and become competent in a room. Those capacities have served me well.
They have also made it possible for me to become very good at things I am not sure I want to keep doing.
Being capable of something is not the same as wanting it. Being rewarded for something is not the same as choosing it. Being good at something is not proof that it belongs at the center of your life.
You may have a different relationship with work, duty, ambition, family, or money. Desire does not need to make every decision. The question is whether it gets an honest seat at the table before the other voices decide for us.
Money Gets a Vote
Money matters. It pays for housing, food, care, time, tools, safety, and the ability to keep doing useful work. Responsibility matters too. So do consequences, commitments, and other people.
All of those things matter. What changed for me was the order of the questions.
I had often started with: What can I build that makes money? Then, if I was not careful, the answer quietly became the answer to a larger question: What should I spend my life doing?
I am trying a different order now:
What feels worth doing?
Where can that become genuinely useful to another person?
What kind of economic structure could help sustain it?
Making Meaning → Creating Value → Making Money.
That sequence does not guarantee success. It simply keeps money from silently choosing the meaning.
Money still gets a vote. I just do not want it to hold the pen.
The Noise Around Wanting
A question can be simple without being easy. “What do you want?” sounds almost embarrassingly basic. But if you have spent years getting rewarded for being useful, responsible, accomplished, agreeable, needed, or correct, the answer can feel surprisingly noisy.
That was true for me. For a long time, I was very capable of turning growth into another form of performance. If I could understand enough, heal enough, achieve enough, help enough, or get enough things right, some part of me believed I would finally arrive at a version of myself that was safe from being judged, left, or found lacking.
I understood that pattern intellectually before I stopped living inside it.
The body took longer.
That matters because “What do you want?” is not a freeing question if every answer feels like a test. If choosing badly makes me a bad person, choice becomes pressure. If a failed experiment makes me a failure, experimentation stops being playful. If changing my mind means I wasted my life, I will defend old choices long after they stop fitting.
So here is another distinction you can test for yourself: a choice can be wrong without making you wrong. A direction can stop fitting without making the years before it meaningless. An experiment can fail and still teach you something worth knowing.
That little bit of room changes how much information life is allowed to give you.
The Dojo
Once I stopped asking only what business I should build and started asking what kind of practice I wanted to spend time inside, one image kept returning: a dojo.
Part of the image comes from martial arts dreams of training with Mr. Miyagi. Part of it comes from Charles Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters, which I loved growing up. What stays with me is not the superhero part. It is the idea of a place where people arrive carrying something they do not fully understand yet.
Not because they are defective. Because they are still learning what they have, how to use it, what it asks of them, and where it might be useful.
That is increasingly how I think about a life. A person’s fit with a system is not the same thing as the value of what they carry.
Good Soul Dojo is for people who want to discover what is genuinely theirs and learn how to build a life around it. Some arrive during a transition, after realizing the life they built no longer fits. Others arrive earlier, before career, identity, and expectation have fully hardened around them.
Different starting points. Same practice: learning to author their lives more consciously.
The practice underneath both is similar:
What is actually yours?
What do you want?
What keeps giving energy back?
What feels alive enough that you want another turn?
What did you learn to believe about yourself because of the systems in which you were measured?
I do not want to answer those questions for anyone. I want to get better at helping people practice answering them for themselves.
One Small Experiment
You do not need to redesign your life today. You do not need a five-year plan. You do not need to discover your one true purpose before dinner.
Try something smaller.
Ask:
What do I want another turn at?
Not forever. Not as a new identity. Not as proof that you have finally figured yourself out. Just another turn.
Then ask:
What is one small, responsible way I could test that in real life?
Make the experiment cheap enough that you can survive being wrong, but real enough that life can answer back. Then pay attention.
Did it give energy back?
Did you want to keep going after the novelty wore off?
Did the difficulty feel meaningful or merely draining?
Did reality make the idea more interesting—or less?
That is information. You do not have to obey it. But you may want to listen.
That is the practice I am trying to build Good Soul Dojo around: not finding the right answer once, but getting better at noticing what is yours, testing it against reality, and choosing again.
If this question is alive for you, reply with the thing you want another turn at. Or keep it private and test it. Both count.
If you want company while you practice, you’re welcome to join us for practice in the dojo.
I love your writing and what it speaks to Adrian!!