Knowing your purpose

Giant expectation or building on your beautiful little niche?

The search for life purpose has exploded into a giant proportions in popular nonfiction and social media. Just try a quick Google. Or ask your favorite AI app.

I’ll take here the example of Blue Zone research (about geographic regions where more people tend to live vigorously to age 100). Studies and journalistic observation suggest that having a sense of purpose, known as ikigai or plan de vida, can add an extra seven years of life. ¹

With Blue Zones, I find another reason to challenge our common assumptions about how we retire now that demographics suggest longer, healthier lives.

Yet let’s move on in this post to the practical matters of having a purpose. It can prove quite important and healthy to expect one’s purpose to evolve over a whole life. To practice evolving it as early as possible.

To develop own tricks, tips and basis skills for guiding our sense of meaning though life stages and transitions.

One counter-intuitive skill to practice: focus on the niches

In our connected world where it seems that the big ideas are rewarded, it pays greatly to remember that even the most famous, purposeful endeavors actually began small.

A niche is a place where our exact way of doing things fits and differentiates us. Niches start in one’s soul and reflect the beauty of a unique, human perspective. Our niche thrives when our purpose recognizes and values what we bring to the table.

In my business, for about 10 years, we hosted an evening seminar series titled Modern Careers: What’s your strategy? It structures a “career check” into six topics: Creating meaning, Life’s big decisions, Your vision, Get moving from vision to action. How do people keep moving, really? Staying energized.

In those small group discussions, we defined Creating meaning as the intersection of talent and passion, informed by experience. In other words, as niches that evolved from one’s own, individual journey.

We demonstrated a practice in support of staying relevant: to explore and regularly update our view about our niche. Then find just one someone else who gets it. Expand to two, three, maybe five other people who see it – and thereby see you.

If your niche never gets bigger than a few people, Blue Zone research suggests that’s already valuable for a long healthy life. If your niche does grow, well then how super rewarding!

Do you know your niche?

I’m not a niche guru, although over time I’ve learned to notice certain kinds of thoughts that speed through my head to which I might pay more attention:

• That ‘crazy idea” that keeps coming back even when I do my best to submerge it.
• Also the things about myself which are most eccentric, that I make fun of myself for doing or (yipes!) self-criticize. Just for starters, I tend to align everything on a cabinet shelf or in a drawer in a clean pattern – sometimes I stand there and do it while something else is going on. Turns out, I appreciate, even love, minimalist design in well-functioning spaces. I “see” the pattern and try to create it.

Seth Godin, in his popular books about tribes and marketing says “No niche is too small if it’s yours.” ²

I think his perspective applies equally to people, as to business.

The trick being, of course, that life and the world change. People around us change. We, ourselves change. Then our niche needs to be updated. And here, we stumble into that question of relevance.

The ever-evolving story of mattering right now, in this moment.

That someone appreciates us for who we really are in our little niche. 😊

Footnotes

¹ Plan de Vida – Spanish, related to the soul’s purpose, reason for waking up in the morning.

Searched via Perplexity.ai, 2025.07.28. The concept of Blue Zones originated from demographic research led by Gianni Pes and Michel Poulain, who were studying longevity in Sardinia, Italy in the early 2000s. They literally used a blue pen to circle villages with unusually high numbers of centenarians on their map, coining the term “blue zone.” Their work was published in scientific journals and highlighted specific areas with extreme longevity. Dan Buettner, an American explorer, author, and National Geographic Fellow, later helped popularize the topic.

² This is Marketing: You Can’t be Seen Until You Learn to See. Seth Godin. Penguin Random House. 2018. Two related books from Seth worth noting: Tribes and Purple Cow. See more on his impressively consistent Seth’s Blog.