A couple of months ago, I spoke to an audience of college students and recent graduates and shared a simple, free exercise I did many years ago that helped me to make better career and life decisions that still align to who I am and what I want nearly 10 years later. I'm sharing it for those of you who might be at a place where you're trying to clarify what you really, really want in a job and a path forward.

My 22-year-old self was trapped in a foggy cloud of self-doubt and indecision about her future, terrified at the abyss of life after college without the predictable milestones and consistent feedback that she was doing it right. She was insecure, anxious, and unremarkable for years, until she did this one simple three-step method to structure her thinking, and everything changed.

That girl would be shocked at what she went on to do thanks to taking the time to do that simple exercise: she become a senior manager at an elite management consulting firm, quadrupled her income without any special degrees or qualifications, developed the confidence to speak to rooms of hundreds of people, and created the kind of self-belief needed to put her ideas on paper and share them with the world in a book.

The story of my 22-year-old self might sound familiar to you, because it does to most students approaching the end of college: everything about your life is suddenly up to you, and defining what your purpose is and how to apply it in the world is not easy.

The tough thing about purpose is that there's not a black-and-white answer, a specific career or entrepreneurial venture or particular path that wraps it up for you in a nice little bow. It's the whole of your existence, of how you become a net positive in the lives of the people whose paths you cross.

The purpose of your life, and my life, and every single person's life on Earth is to add value to other people, period. Let me say that a different way: the purpose of your life has nothing to do with you, and everything to do with how your life helps to make someone else's better, simpler, or happier. If you’re focused on fame or money or glory or pleasure, you will die unhappy, guaranteed. According to pretty much every philosopher, religious framework, and capitalism. The facts say so! The smartest scientist of the last century says so!

“Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile," according to Albert Einstein himself.

If you're feeling uncertain about your purpose, not sure what path to take or struggling with how to move forward in your career, it might help you to do the same simple method for figuring out your purpose. I cover this topic in a full chapter of my book, but this blog post has a summary of the steps you can take, right now, to clarify what you want.

If you complete the steps in that post, you will have what I call “your life filter” — the facts that you’ll use to evaluate any step in your life that you’re not quite sure about. It’s a structured way to understand yourself, your needs and wants, and eliminate some of the noise that tends to distract us into decisions that might not be quite right.

I still have the three sheets of paper from when I did this exercise almost a decade ago, and it is strangely comforting to see how little has changed. If you find time to do this, or have done something similar, I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments!

P.S. Please feel free to share this article with a college student or recent graduate who might relate to my quarter-life crisis, because it might help them as much as it did for me.