What Every Person Struggling with Purpose Should Know About Finding It

You're sitting in your accounting lecture, and somewhere around the fifteen-minute mark, you realize you've lost the thread. The professor is explaining something about debits and credits, but your mind checked out three slides ago when you didn't understand a key concept. The familiar thought arrives: I've missed it now. I'm already lost, so what's the point? Your hand drifts toward your phone. Your attention drifts further away.

Meanwhile, the guilt accumulates. You spent yesterday evening with friends instead of studying. You took a walk in nature this morning instead of reviewing notes. These activities brought you joy-genuine, uncomplicated joy-but they also brought something else: the nagging sense that you're wasting time. That you should be doing something productive. That everyone else has found their purpose and passion while you're just... floating.

You switched from cyber security to accounting and finance, hoping clarity would follow. Instead, doubt arrived. Three years suddenly feels like an enormous commitment to something you're not even sure about. And now there's the ADHD assessment in process, which feels like confirmation: your attention is broken and needs fixing.

What if I told you that almost everything about how you're framing this problem is backwards?

The Honest Truth About 'Fixing' Your Focus

For years, people struggling with focus have believed the same fundamental story: attention is a discipline problem. If you can't focus during lectures, if you check your phone constantly during revision, if your mind wanders when you try to concentrate-the diagnosis seems obvious. You lack willpower. Your attention system is broken. You need to force yourself to focus harder.

This belief has an entire industry built around it. Focus apps. Pomodoro timers. Digital detoxes. Motivational content about grinding and discipline. The underlying assumption never changes: your inability to sustain attention on important tasks is a personal failing that requires more effort, more control, more forcing.

And if you're pursuing an ADHD assessment, the story shifts slightly but the core assumption remains: your attention is malfunctioning. The problem is neurological, yes, but the solution is still fundamentally about fixing broken focus so you can make yourself pay attention to things that matter.

You've probably tried everything the conventional wisdom suggests. Put your phone in another room. Break study sessions into smaller chunks. Tell yourself the course was a good choice and you just need to commit. Remind yourself that nature walks and evenings with friends are distractions from your real responsibilities.

So why hasn't it worked? Why can you scroll social media for an hour without effort but can't focus on lecture material for fifteen minutes? Why does your mind feel scattered and unfocused-except at the gym, where you can push through difficult sets without your attention wavering once?

If attention were simply a discipline problem, these patterns wouldn't make sense.

A Practical Framework for Understanding Your Attention

Here's what research on goal-directed behavior actually shows: your attention system isn't broken. It's functioning exactly as designed.

Attention operates as a value-detection mechanism. When your brain can compute why maintaining focus serves a goal you actually value, attention engages naturally. When it can't make that connection, it rationally allocates resources elsewhere. This isn't failure-it's your attention system working precisely as it should.

Consider what happens at the gym during personal training. You're working toward a weight gain goal you genuinely care about. When a set feels difficult or you lose form halfway through, you don't think I've missed it now and walk away. You reset. You adjust the weight. You ask your trainer for help. Your attention re-engages after difficulty because your brain has computed a clear connection between this action and something you value: capability, visible progress, physical growth.

Now consider the accounting lecture. You've switched courses once already. You're not sure this is the right path. You can't see how this material connects to anything that matters to you. When difficulty arrives-when you miss a key concept-your attention system performs a rapid calculation: Why am I maintaining focus on something I'm uncertain about, that doesn't connect to any goal I value? And it does exactly what it should do: it redirects resources to something that might be more valuable.

This is the paradigm shift: the question isn't "How do I force myself to focus?" The question is "What makes something worth focusing on?"

Research on sustained attention and goal value representation demonstrates this again and again. Our ability to maintain focus is fundamentally tied to whether our brain can represent the activity as serving a valued goal. When that representation is unclear or absent, what looks like attention deficit is actually your attention system accurately signaling: I don't know why this matters.

Even with ADHD-a real neurobiological condition with genuine attention regulation challenges-this principle holds. People with ADHD can hyperfocus for hours on activities that engage their values while struggling to sustain attention for minutes on devalued tasks. Attention is never value-neutral, even when executive function is genuinely impaired.

Your attention isn't broken. It's telling you something.

Purpose That Doesn't Feel Like Waiting

Once you understand attention as value-responsive rather than discipline-dependent, the conventional approach to finding direction reveals itself as backwards.

The standard method goes like this: First, discover your purpose and passion through introspection. Figure out what you're meant to do. Find that burning sense of direction. Then, once you've found it, commit to action. Then, focus will naturally follow because you'll be doing something meaningful.

This is the story you've been living: waiting to feel certain about accounting before fully committing. Believing you should have found your purpose by now. Thinking everyone else has this figured out while you're still searching. The method says purpose comes first, then action, then focus.

But research on purpose development shows the opposite.

Purpose doesn't precede action-it emerges from it. You don't find your passion through introspection and then act; you act, and through acting, you discover what matters. Purpose is a signal that develops when your actions repeatedly align with your values, not a destination you locate before you start moving.

You already have proof of this in your own life. You didn't start personal training with a burning passion for weightlifting. You just wanted to gain weight. But through the committed action of actually training-through showing up, experiencing progress, feeling capable-the purpose emerged. Now you don't just do it because you should; you do it because it genuinely matters to you.

The reversed method works like this: Take committed action → discover what engages you through doing → notice what your attention naturally gravitates toward → let purpose emerge from accumulated evidence.

This is why the three-year accounting commitment feels paralyzing when you approach it as "I must be certain this is right before I fully engage." That's trying to achieve certainty before action. The reversed approach asks: "What small action can I take this week to gather evidence about whether this path aligns with what I value?"

One conversation with a working accountant about real-world impact. One attempt to connect practical accounting skills to helping people or businesses. One experiment to see if any aspect of this work touches your values of capability, growth, or making a difference.

You're not committing to three years in that moment. You're committing to one small test. The three-year question resolves itself through accumulated evidence from these experiments, not through achieving certainty first.

Purpose isn't something you discover sitting still, thinking hard. It's something that emerges when you move.

What Every Guilty Pleasure Is Actually Telling You

Here's what almost no one mentions when they talk about finding purpose and fixing focus: the activities you're dismissing as "wasting time" are actually the most valuable data you have.

You feel guilty when you spend time in nature. You feel guilty relaxing with friends in the evening. You feel guilty training at the gym instead of studying. The internal narrative says these are distractions from what you should be doing-something productive, something that builds toward a future, something that demonstrates you're not falling behind.

But what if that guilt isn't wisdom guiding you toward productivity? What if it's actually interference preventing you from learning what you value?

Consider what you described about these "time-wasting" activities. In nature, you feel calm and present. With friends, you feel connected and like you matter to people. At the gym, you feel capable and like you're building something. These are the only times you're not anxious about the future.

Those aren't distractions. Those are values.

Presence. Connection. Capability. Growth. These aren't frivolous pleasures to feel guilty about-they're the core signals your attention system uses to determine what matters. When you engage in activities that touch these values, your attention doesn't wander. You don't check your phone. You don't zone out. You're present.

The forgotten factor is this: your pleasurable experiences are data about what a meaningful life looks like for you. They're not obstacles to finding purpose-they're the evidence from which purpose emerges.

Here's the neuroscience detail that makes this even more critical: research on memory consolidation and learning shows that your brain actually processes and integrates complex information during rest periods and novel experiences. When you walk in nature, your brain is consolidating what you learned in lectures. The learning literally happens when you're not studying.

So the activities you're labeling "wasting time" serve two functions simultaneously: they're neurologically productive for learning, and they're data collection about your values. Dismissing them doesn't make you more focused or more purposeful. It deprives you of the exact information you need to discover what's worth focusing on.

The guilt is the problem, not the pleasure.

The Lazy Person's Guide to Staying Stuck

If you continue treating attention as a discipline problem to be fixed, here's what the path looks like:

You keep forcing yourself to focus on accounting material while your brain keeps signaling that it can't compute why this matters. The lectures continue feeling like a struggle. You keep "losing the thread" and concluding you've missed it, so what's the point. The cycle repeats.

You continue feeling guilty about the activities that actually bring you joy-nature, friends, training-because they don't look like productivity. So you do them less, or you do them while mentally elsewhere, thinking about what you should be doing instead. The guilt prevents you from fully experiencing them, which means you never collect clear data about what you value.

You keep waiting to feel certain about your course choice before you fully commit. But certainty never arrives, because you're trying to think your way to it rather than gathering evidence through action. So you stay in the liminal space of "maybe this isn't right," which means your attention system never gets a clear signal about why sustained focus serves a valued goal.

The ADHD assessment comes back-positive or negative, it doesn't resolve the core pattern. Because even if you get medication or strategies for executive function, you're still operating under the assumption that you need to force yourself to focus on things you're uncertain about. The attention system is still receiving mixed signals.

Meanwhile, everyone else seems to have found their direction. They're committing fully to paths that make sense to them. And you're still floating, still feeling behind, still wondering why you can't just make yourself care enough to focus.

The pressure builds. The anxiety about the future intensifies. And the question that haunts you-"What am I doing with my life?"-remains unanswered, because you're looking for the answer in introspection rather than action.

This path doesn't lead to clarity. It leads to more uncertainty, more second-guessing, more cycles of trying and checking out and feeling broken.

A Practical Framework for Building Purpose Through Action

Here's what changes when you understand attention as value-responsive and purpose as action-emergent:

You stop treating focus as something to force and start treating it as a signal to interpret. When your attention wanders during accounting lectures, instead of concluding "I'm broken," you ask: "Is this telling me something about value alignment?" Not as a reason to quit immediately, but as data to investigate.

You take small actions to test the connection. You have that conversation with a working accountant. You identify one practical skill that might serve capability or helping others. You experiment with finding the thread between this material and something you actually care about. And you notice what happens to your attention during these experiments.

You stop feeling guilty about nature walks, evenings with friends, and gym sessions. Instead, you treat themas value-data collection. During your next walk in nature, you notice the specific moment you feel present. You write one sentence about what you valued in that experience. You start building a clear picture of what presence, connection, and capability actually look like for you.

The accumulated evidence starts answering questions that introspection couldn't. Maybe you discover that accounting does connect to your values when you see its real-world application in helping businesses grow or making financial systems work for people. Maybe you discover it doesn't, and the evidence points you toward something that touches capability and impact more directly.

Either way, you're gathering actual data instead of cycling in uncertainty.

Your attention starts engaging more naturally, not because you've developed superhuman discipline, but because your brain can increasingly compute connections between actions and values. The focus problem starts resolving itself as a side effect of value clarity.

If the ADHD assessment confirms executive function challenges, you address them-but you're working with your attention system's value-detection, not against it. You're not trying to force focus on devalued tasks. You're either connecting tasks to values or recognizing misalignment and adjusting course.

The three-year commitment stops feeling paralyzing because you're not trying to decide it all at once. You're deciding the next small experiment. Then the next one. The commitment builds from accumulated evidence, and if the evidence points elsewhere, you adjust without shame-because you understand that course correction isn't failure, it's responsive action.

You stop feeling behind. Not because you've suddenly found your grand purpose, but because you understand that purpose emerges from this exact process: trying things, noticing what engages you, collecting evidence about what matters, adjusting course based on data.

You're not floating anymore. You're experimenting. There's a fundamental difference.

The Honest Truth About Starting Before You're Ready

Here's what separates the two paths: one small practice this week.

Pick one activity you currently feel guilty about-a nature walk, an evening with friends, a gym session. During that activity, pay attention differently. Instead of thinking about what you should be doing, notice specific moments that feel meaningful. When do you feel present? When do you feel connected? When do you feel capable?

Afterward, write one sentence about what you valued in that experience. Not what you accomplished. Not how it was productive. What you actually valued.

Then identify one small action to test whether your current path connects to those values. If presence, connection, and capability matter to you, does accounting offer any pathway to those experiences? Interview someone in the field. Identify one practical application that serves people. Find one concrete example of how this work creates capability or makes a difference.

The goal isn't to force focus. It isn't to eliminate uncertainty. It isn't to commit to three years right now.

The goal is to gather one piece of evidence.

Then another. Then another.

Purpose doesn't arrive as a lightning bolt. It emerges as a pattern you notice in the accumulated evidence of what naturally engages your attention when you stop forcing and start experimenting.

Your attention system has been trying to tell you something this whole time. It's not broken.

It's been waiting for you to listen.