It took me a long time to find my purpose in life, and I’ve distilled it down to five steps.

I’m going to tell you my story first, not because I have an ego need to put it out there, but because it could help you figure out where you’re going.

If you’re like me, you spent years feeling lost, unsure of which direction to take, trying desperately to find what you love to do. It can be painful to see others doing work they love, wondering if you will ever have that for yourself. It’s hard to stay motivated doing work you don’t care much about, even if you have bills to pay. And since most people never do identify their purpose and live pretty uninspiring lives, the odds are certainly against you ever finding yours.

I am now 28 years old. Since leaving school (and skipping college) I’ve been involved in three major passions: aviation, hockey, and now skydiving. Along the way, I tried a lot of other activities, including things I never dreamed I would ever try. I kept learning anything that seemed interesting. I wrote a novel. I designed graphics. I learned to program in Objective-C. I also ran a few different businesses, each time trying to accomplish something great.

My goal has always been to combine my work and my love, so that I don’t have to do work that I don’t truly care 100% about in order to afford the activity that I’m completely devoted to. I realize that this is rare. Most people who skydive or play amateur hockey or do anything else have day jobs. I intend to be one of the rare people who loves his work.

My long path of growth really started in 2004 when my brother committed suicide. I’ll spare you the sad details; suffice it to say, I was suddenly confronted with death, and also the realization that I would die someday. Maybe someday soon.

I had no real direction in life yet, but the image of my brother laying in a coffin compelled me to find one, even if it meant risking my own death.

I already knew what I wanted. I wanted to fly.

Flying was never an obsession of mine. I never drew pictures of airplanes or messed around with flight simulators. I knew little about aviation. Somehow, I knew all along that it was my kind of thing, but there was a brick wall keeping me from ever trying it. It’s too dangerous. The engine could fail. The wings could fall off the airplane. That kind of garbage.

This wall kept me from exploring my latent interest in aviation, right up until my brother died. Then the wall seemed worth climbing over.

I’ll tell the whole story of my foray into aviation later. The summary is, I fell in love with planes and flying and the entire world of aviation immediately. I set out to make a career in aviation. I spent the next two years earning my private license and instrument rating and logged about 275 hours. I was getting ready to go for my commercial training and checkride when I stopped.

The truth was, deep down, I knew I didn’t want to be a pilot. It hurt a lot to admit that, because I loved aviation so much. To this day, most of my friends are pilots or aviators of some kind. Aviation is something I identify with, not in the sense of being able to call myself a pilot or hold up my licenses as some trophy I earned. I mean, I love that world and the stuff that goes on in it. I love to be up there. It has nothing to do with prestige. I just love to fly.

And yet a career as a pilot, which seemed so right at first, gradually revealed itself to be wrong. The more I learned about airline jobs, the less I liked. Flying in a straight line for hours. Sharing motel rooms. Having my health and life scrutinized by management. Flying by the numbers, rather than by the seat of your pants. Being on the radio constantly. (I have no problem talking to anyone on the radio, but when I fly, I like to enjoy the flight, not radio chatter. I once flew to Chicago and back with the radio off, except for takeoff and landing.)

Being a pilot was so close to who I was, yet it wasn’t perfect. It really hurt to admit that. I moped around for awhile, continuing to run a graphic and web design business that I was never really passionate about.

Working just to keep the lights on was never good enough for me. Eventually, I started looking for something else to drive me forward.

My method was to try anything that seemed interesting, but especially to try things that were outside of my comfort zone. I knew that growth only occurs when you try to do what seems impossible, or what you think you can’t or shouldn’t do. I tried a lot of little things, like hunting, scuba diving, and other businesses. Nothing stuck.

My mind was open and receptive to change however, and change certainly happened. I did something that, based on who I was in the past, was a complete 180. I took up ice hockey.

As a kid I was never athletic, except for my long bike rides, and I didn’t care for sports. I spent a lot of time in front of computers. If you had told me at 7 or 12 or 18 that I would become passionate about hockey, I would have looked up from my computer screen and told you that you were nuts.

I was attracted to the speed and elegance and incredible challenge of hockey. I found a semi-retired coach, a Canadian, who has played and coached hockey all his life. He teaches a class for adults (and sometimes kids) early in the morning. It’s hard enough to learn hockey as an adult, because most of the programs are oriented to children. But to find a regular class taught by someone who is teaching beginner adults the same things he’s teaching triple-A high school students bound for college and professional hockey, is like winning the lottery.

I completely changed my life for hockey. A night owl all my life, I started waking up at 5 am to make the 6:30 class three days a week. I also got into coaching little kids, and I found other ways to be on the ice. I kept up this pace for nearly four years.

I was driven. I met other people who seemed to love hockey just as much as I did, but they didn’t come to the classes that often. Their jobs interfered. They didn’t like waking up that early. I never understood that attitude. Hockey was the reason I got up in the morning, the reason I earned money. If my job interfered with hockey, I would change my job. Simple as that.

Hockey taught me how to fail. I never understood, at a deep level, how important failure is. When you learn hockey, you fail constantly. In fact, you try to fail. Going faster, taking more risks, pushing yourself to the point of falling down or screwing up is the only way to progress beyond your current level. I came to love the process of learning and failing and growing in a complex activity like hockey. There was always something new to learn. If you get pretty good a simple drill like doing crossovers around a circle, you can do them faster, then with the puck, then backwards, then backwards with the puck, then flipping from forwards to backwards with the puck while shooting it to and receiving it from another player. There is always something more to do.

But I gradually had to admit to myself that, as close as hockey was to my true passion in life, it wasn’t perfect. I cared more for the athletic side of it than the sports side, if that makes any sense. The guys in the locker room talked about their favorite teams (usually the Red Wings) and last night’s game and the personalities and the statistics. Or other sports, like football. I just never connected with the spectator side of sports. I would rather do it poorly than watch it being done expertly. I have no team loyalties. I never watch hockey on TV. I don’t care who wins the Stanley Cup.

And I knew all along that hockey could never be a career for me. Even if I had started when I was four years old, the chances of becoming a pro player are very small. I held out hope that I could contribute something to the field, in some tangential way, but not only are the prospects dim, I don’t have total love for the world of hockey like some people do.

I kept hockey first place in my life for nearly four years, because it was the best thing I found so far. I was growing dissatisfied with the need to do work I didn’t care too much about in order to learn and play a sport I care mostly, but not totally, about.

I remember when the next big change in my life came. I had been anxious and upset for weeks, with a strong feeling that my life was about to change again. It happened right after Steve Jobs resigned from Apple. I had admired the man for years, even before he came back to the company in the 90s. For him to resign, I knew he must be dying. And the papparazi photos that were published the next day clearly showed a man who was not long for this world.

I laid on my bed, once again confronting death (theoretically, anyway). I thought of Jobs’ advice at his famous Stanford commencement speech. Your life is limited. If you wake up too many days in a row regretting how you are about to spend your day, something needs to change. And since you’re going to die anyway, what do you have to fear? Why be afraid of failure or embarrassment? Why not do what you really want to do?

After a few days of thinking, I came up with an idea: skydiving.

I didn’t know anything about it. It was one of those things, like flying airplanes, that I had a latent interest in, but didn’t take seriously. Because, who would actually jump out of an airplane?

I actually thought about skydiving a lot over the years. I would ride in an airplane and wonder what it would be like to fly free of the contraption for once. I would be on a rollercoaster or one of those tower drop rides and stare at the ground with fascination while my seatmates screamed and warned each other not to look at the ground.

One time I even thought about taking aerobatic lessons in a Cessna 150 Aerobat. But, I thought, I would be required to wear a parachute — and if I needed to use it, how would I know that I would be able to use it properly? The only way to have that confidence would be to practice jumping. But, again, you’d have to be crazy to actually jump out of an airplane, right? So I never took the lessons.

Now I finally accepted the irrefutable logic that I would die someday, no matter what I do or how I live. What did I really want to do, I wondered. Don’t hold back. Come to terms with what you really want. There’s nothing to fear.

And the answer was, skydiving.

I started reading about it online and within hours, I realized that this was not a crazy thing, but a doable thing. It’s something that people learn to do, and then they do it a lot and survive pretty consistently. When skydiving was a mystery to me, it was a death-defying stunt. After I learned more about it, it seemed like a nice way to spend the weekend. It’s true, education kills fear.

I knew I would be hooked before I made my first jump. I know my personality, and I know the things I like. For me, skydiving has all the best aspects of aviation and all the best aspects of hockey. They might seem like three separate fields, but they are all related to me. There’s the joy of flight, both body flight and canopy flight, developing instincts and flying with intuitive judgment rather than computers, and just being up there. There’s the speed and physicality and athletic performance of hockey. Granted, skydiving doesn’t look anything like hockey and doesn’t even require you to be in good shape. But I found that the athletic things that attracted me to hockey were also present in skydiving.

And skydiving is a big world. There’s a lot you can do besides relative work. There’s freeflying, base jumping, wingsuits, skysurfing, speed flying, canopy accuracy, tunnel flying, video, high altitude jumps, instruction, rigging… This is one field where I want to do everything in it. I like the environment. I love planes, I love airports, I love aviation, I love to be outside, I love clouds, I love to be in the sky. It’s perfect.

For many, skydiving is a once in a lifetime event, a single tandem jump that they can talk about for years afterward like it’s some trophy they won. Some people jump once so that they can say they jumped out of an airplane and therefore can do anything they set their mind to, like ask the boss for a raise or open that fondue restaurant. That’s fine. Since I jumped and have proven that I can do anything, what I really want to do is jump more. That’s just me. I’m not into trophies or bragging rights. I just want to get on the next load.

I only have 44 jumps at this point, but I have the confidence to say that I will stick with this for a long time to come. I know myself and I know this is who I am and where I want to be. I’m sure anyone will tell me it’s next to impossible to make any kind of career in skydiving, but I’m going to do it anyway.

All the time I was looking for my true purpose in life, even when I felt completely adrift, I was actually moving in the right direction. All the dots in my past connect up perfectly to where I am today. I wish it had all happened faster — I’m a little envious of the skydivers who started before they even graduated high school — but that doesn’t matter. I’m here now, and that’s all there is.

Here are those five steps to finding your life purpose that I promised. This is a summary of my learning over the years.

1. You have to overcome your fear of embarrassment, failure, and yes, death, even if you have no intention of pursuing a death-defying hobby. These fears will prevent you from accepting and admitting what you truly want.
2. Be honest about what interests you and who you think you really are, even though it might anger others, or it might seem unfeasible or just plain dumb. It might also seem like a radical 180 degree turn off the path you’ve been on since you were a child. Listen to your own inner voice.
3. Once you’ve identified what’s in your heart, follow that path.
4. And then be brutally honest with yourself again when the thing you love turns out to be not quite perfect. Don’t cling to a way of living and working that you are anything less than 100% enamored with. Hold out for the very best, and be prepared for the painful necessity of rejecting the almost perfect and the not quite.
5. Repeat until you’ve found your purpose. You’ll know when you get there.

One side note. I’ve heard the advice that when trying to identify your true purpose or career or whatever, you should consider who you were and what you did as a child. If I had followed that advice, I would still be programming computers. I could not be interested in anything less than programming computers. Just because you did it as a kid, doesn’t mean you’re destined to do it forever. Computers for me were more like the path of least resistance at the time — a way for me to be creative without taking any risks or leaving the house. Had I known then what I know now, I never would have bothered with computers. So don’t allow past performance to determine your future path. Make that radical 180 if you need to.

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1. Life is a Game