Finding Your Why?

My experience and how you can find yours

Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash

Recently in my Capstone Seminar class, we were asked to find our why. We watched a book summary of Simon Sinek’s ‘Finding Your Why’ and were given the questions:

• What is your why? What inspires you or motivates you?
• How are you going to do it? What action are you going to take?
• What are you going to do? What is the thing you want?

These questions were helpful in finding my why, but I had trouble defining the scope. My why for school? My why for work? My why for eating, breathing, sitting? My why for WHAT?? because in each one they were slightly different and I don’t think I had a single why for them.

So, with those variables and frustrations, I stepped back.

Shouldn’t my derived why be the same across the board?

It was an interesting question to ponder, I mean in chemistry you have the periodic table from where everything can be derived from, in quantum fields theory you have the New periodic table as David Tong calls it with quarks and strange quarks (this is the actual name), so when it comes to the question: Why do I do the things that I do, wouldn’t they too be derived from the same why?

I was confused and I gave up trying to find a specific what and instead focused on the bigger why.

Now you might think I was able to find it after that, but unironically no.

If I couldn’t find why because there were too many variables, I’m not really sure why I thought making it bigger would be the solution.

I was about to go on a “break” to get my thoughts together, but I decided to try a simpler approach before leaving the room. In class, we were discussing how we feel when we come to school, if we are excited, what we do when we wake up, our mindset towards life, etc. And one question that stuck out to me was: Why do you wake up in the morning every day?

For me, I knew had struggled with feeling excited whenever I woke up, and I knew I had taken steps so that waking up felt like a want rather than a must. So, I took that as an inspiration, and I wrote down what kind of changes I made:

• I reached out to more people to friends where I felt supported
• I explored different skills in my daily life
• I reframed my life from just revolving around high school and into a broader community.
• And more.

I took these steps because I find inspiration in people and change. My why is the comfort that family, friends, communities, and people can bring coupled with the calming and exciting nature of change. It’s one of the reasons I enjoy mediation that emphasizes impermanence and quantum physics that studies the dynamic nature of what we are made of.

That is my current why.

I struggled to find it, and it might change but for now, that’s what it is.

So, my advice, to find your why is to ask yourself questions. You can use the questions I mentioned in this post, you can use the questions listed below, you can make your own questions, and you can even reference Simon Sinek’s video that tells you to ask your friends — why they are friends with you.

Asking questions, sitting with your life experiences, and being conscious of your actions helps you understand yourself more and that insight lets you make decisions that you feel proud of, that you are happy about, and care for.

Remember, your why doesn’t have to be grand, it doesn’t have to be small, it doesn’t have to be revolutionary, and it doesn’t have to be the same for the rest of your life. The way that you decide on is for your present self with your present experiences, living in the present world to help guide your future and understand your past.

List of starter questions to ponder:

• What is the least exciting thing you did yesterday? Over the last month? Over the last year?
• What puts a smile on your face?
• If you could leave a time capsule for your future self to find, what would you put in it?
• When are you the most productive? When are you the least? What emotion do you feel during that time?
• Are you present in your life?
• Do you actively engage in everything that you do? If not, when are the times that you do engage and what makes them different from the times you don’t?
• What would you regret not doing?
• What inspires you?
• What makes you excited?