Instead of Searching for What You Want to Do, Look at What You Should Do
This article was machine-translated from Japanese by AI (Claude). It may contain errors. Read the original Japanese article.
Students sometimes come to me with what is almost a question: "I don't have anything I want to do," or "There's nothing I'm interested in enough to take action."
When that happens, lately I've been telling them things like, "Instead of what you want to do, why not think about what you should do?", "Why not start with something you can do?", and "Rather than searching inside yourself, why not look outward?"
Let me briefly explain the background to this.
The Answers Are Mostly Outside
One of the maxims given to startups is the phrase "Get out of the building". It means: don't sit inside the building agonizing over it, but go outside and meet your customers.
Most business hypotheses conceived purely in your head are armchair theories, and they are usually wrong. That is why it matters to go outside the building, talk to customers to validate them, and gain better insights from the field.
In the same way, I think when you are thinking about what you want to do, you should also Get out of the building.
Asking yourself "What do I want to do?" means searching within your inner self and your past. But what exists within you and your past is limited. If you search without enough candidates or stock to draw on, it is only natural that you won't find anything.
Considering that the younger you are, the more there is that you haven't yet experienced, it seems to me that taking action to have a variety of experiences, going outside the building, so to speak, makes it easier to find something (if you are someone who has the leeway to do so).
Of course, the bluebird of happiness isn't necessarily outside, and if you keep searching without any hypothesis, you will probably have a hard time finding it. At some point you have to stop exploring and choose something. Even so, I think that if you are in your twenties or so, it is better to prioritize searching outside rather than inside yourself.
Don't Overemphasize "What You Want to Do"
Personally, I also feel that "your own interests" and "what you want to do" are overemphasized when people try to decide what to do.
If you use your interests or what you want to do as the basis for choices and actions, you end up choosing from what is within you and in your past. But that also means choosing from a limited set of options.
Moreover, a climate that emphasizes these things produces people who are lost, thinking, "I can't start anything because I have no interests or things I want to do." Even though sometimes you can search inside yourself for a reason and still not find one.
If so, it is fine to have only some degree of interest. I think you would get all sorts of hints by trying what you can do now, or what you could do with a little effort, or by thinking about "what you can contribute to someone" or "among the things someone should be doing, what you might be able to do yourself."
In other words, to find your own reasons, too, you try to Get out of the building; put another way, you try to Get out of myself.
If you turn your attention to such outside opportunities, you may find possibilities you never imagined. Indeed, if you don't, your possibilities and options will remain only within the range of your own imagination.
From my own experience as well, it seems to me that many of the interesting jobs I've had came from unexpected things I encountered as a result of being allowed to ride on that kind of pull from the outside. For example, when I was a student I had no interest in policy at all, but now I research all sorts of things about it.
"What You Should Do" Over "What You Want to Do"
I think that directing your attention outward instead of searching for answers within yourself, that is, considering that "the answers are mostly outside," may help some people.
Of course, I don't think everyone should prioritize "what you can contribute" or "what you should do" over "what you want to do," and there may be few people who find that convincing. But there must be a certain number of people who can start moving after hearing this kind of talk.
Looking back, I also have the impression that, among the entrepreneurs around me, the number of people who choose their ideas or decide on their fields by prioritizing "what should be done" over "what they want to do" has been increasing recently. For example, people who tackle social issues such as climate change and transportation.
For such people, I'm sure a personal desire to do it is also part of their motivation, but I think the reason "this should be done" is rather the bigger one.
Seeing that trend, I hope you will consider as one option the approach of not emphasizing "what you want to do" so much, placing more weight on the outside, and "doing what should be done."