For the first eighteen years of your life, somebody else draws the map.
Elementary school. Middle school. High school. Your parents, your teachers, your counselors — they hand you the path and you follow it. You don’t really question it because you don’t know there’s anything to question. This is just what you do. This is how life works.
And then one day it stops.
You graduate. You’re handed a diploma and a handshake and suddenly — for the first time in your entire life — nobody is telling you what comes next. The map runs out. And most of us, without even realizing it, just keep walking in the same direction.
We do the next logical thing.
College, because that’s what you do after high school. A job, because that’s what you do after college. A career, because that’s what you build after your first job. One thing leads to another and before you know it you have a title, a salary, a LinkedIn profile — and a life that looks exactly like it’s supposed to.
I know because that’s exactly what I did.
I joined the Army to pay for college. I studied accounting because it made sense. I got my MBA at night because that’s what you do when you want to move up. I built a career in corporate finance and I’m genuinely good at it and I genuinely love parts of it. But if I’m honest with myself — I never really stopped to ask why. I just kept taking the next logical step.
And then I had children.
Watching them stand at the beginning of their own lives — thinking about what they wanted to do, who they wanted to become — something cracked open in me. Because I could see it happening in real time. The world was already starting to hand them a map. And I wanted to ask them something nobody had ever really asked me:
Is this the easy way — or is this your way?
Those are two very different questions. The easy way is the path of least resistance — the one that’s already been cleared, the one everyone expects, the one that requires the least explanation at Thanksgiving dinner. Your way is harder to find. It requires you to stop. To look up. To ask what you actually want and why you actually want it.
Most of us never ask. Not because we’re lazy or unambitious — but because nobody ever taught us to. We were too busy following the map.
Here’s what I’ve come to believe: the goal isn’t to blow up the path you’re on. You don’t have to quit your job or reinvent your life to find purpose in your work. But you do have to ask the question. Regularly. Honestly.
Why do I work?
Not how. Not how much. Why.
And maybe more importantly — does the answer still fit who I am today, or am I still following a map someone else drew for me a long time ago?
That’s the question this site exists to explore. I don’t have all the answers. But I’ve learned that asking the question is the most important thing.
I’m glad you’re here.
— Mark
Work with purpose. Live with intention. 