The Purpose Experiment
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 7
- Confidence
- —
Clarke's alternative to both "follow your passion" and waiting for clarity to arrive. Purpose, she argues, has to go through a process of creating, distilling and experimenting — you cannot decide what you are passionate about from the armchair, because passion is a spectrum and the interesting information lives in the nitty-gritty. The method is deliberately small: pick three curiosities, give each one a day sprint, and interview people who actually do the work to find out what the bulk of the job really consists of. You then distil which specific slice of the field you want, if any. The point is not to find one thing for the next twenty years — Clarke explicitly endorses being a serial specialist who does something for five years and then puts it to bed.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Name three curiosities
Pick three things you are drawn to rather than one grand calling. Photography, architecture, shoemaking — whatever you keep circling back to but have never tested.
- 2
Give yourself permission to experiment
Frame it explicitly as a scientific experiment, not a leap. This is what lets you engage without needing the outcome to justify a career change, and it removes the all-or-nothing pressure that stops people starting.
- 3
Run a day sprint on each
Timebox each curiosity to a day of real contact rather than an open-ended exploration. A day is small enough to actually happen and long enough to change your mind.
- 4
Interview people who do it
Find practitioners — an architect, an exhibition curator, a photographer who teaches under-14s to use vintage cameras — and ask what the work actually consists of day to day. Find out what the majority of the job is, not what the job title advertises.
Pro tip LinkedIn plus a coffee is enough; you are gathering data, not asking for a job.
- 5
Distil the specific slice
Break the field into its avenues and find which part you want. You might love photography but not want to photograph people; you might want to teach it rather than exhibit. Without this step you cannot make a critical decision about the thing you claim to be passionate about.
- 6
Let go of what fails the test
Accept the honest results: you hate the people it attracts, it costs more than you want to spend, or you are simply no good at it. Dropping it is a successful outcome of the experiment, not a wasted effort.
- 7
Drop the twenty-year requirement
Stop demanding that the thing carry you to sixty. You may be a serial specialist who spends five years on something, puts it to bed, then spends five years on something else. Return to the fundamentals — what you need to live off, what you actually care about — and springboard from there.
In the wild
One of Clarke's clients wanted to move into a particular role. Rather than applying, she found people already doing it on LinkedIn and set up coffees to interview them. One of them explained that around 80 percent of the job consisted of a specific task. The client's reaction was immediate: she did not want to do that at all, and the way the job had been sold to her bore no relation to how the time was actually spent. She ruled out the direction before making the move.
→ A career pivot correctly abandoned after a few coffees rather than after taking the job.
Clarke uses photography to show why the distillation step matters. Someone convinced they are passionate about photography may discover, once they break it down, that they do not want to photograph people at all. What they actually want might be the technical side — what makes a great photo — or teaching it, with no interest in running their own shows or mounting exhibitions. All three are 'photography', but only one of them is the job they would enjoy.
→ A vague passion resolves into a specific, workable role.
Common mistakes
Declaring the pivot before testing it
Announcing that tomorrow you are a podcaster, then discovering you do not want to interview people, wastes the momentum you could have spent on a cheap experiment first.
Intellectualising instead of feeling it
Clarke warns that journalling and analysis can substitute for contact with the real thing. You have to feel it, which means actually doing a day of it.
Demanding one answer for the next 20 years
Loading a single choice with the weight of the rest of your working life makes experimenting feel too risky, which is precisely why people never start.
From the transcript
“there's lots of things that we are tempted to try or that we're curious about but we don't actually again give ourselves permission to experiment…”
“and so it's about okay could i give myself a day sprint to really think about interviewing somebody who is an architect speaking to somebody…”
“and so i think part of the purpose journey is experimenting and distilling”
From the episode
How To Design Your Career For Happiness - Samantha Clarke
Samantha Clarke