Y<\/span>ears ago, I closed a multi-million-dollar deal for my company in record time. I shared the news with friends and family. They celebrated. My own reaction? A shrug.<\/p>\n That shrug bothered me for a long time. I had done everything right. Finished university, landed serious jobs, climbed from a small city in Ukraine to a vice president role on Wall Street. Every box checked. And every achievement gave me a brief high, then dropped me back into the same flat feeling: this still isn’t it.<\/p>\n It took me years to name the problem. I wasn’t living my life. I was living a script someone else had written and executing it well. I call this Borrowed Success: chasing achievements that look like success to everyone around you but were never actually yours. It’s remarkably common.<\/p>\n And it often takes decades of accomplishment before you have enough evidence to notice the pattern.<\/p>\n If you’ve noticed it, here’s the good news: that recognition isn’t a crisis. It’s the start of the most interesting work you’ll ever do.<\/p>\n For the first half of life, purpose is usually handed to us. School gives us grades to earn. Careers give us ladders to climb. Raising children gives us people who need us daily. These structures answer the “why am I doing this?” question before we ever have to ask it.<\/p>\n Then the structures shift. A career winds down or changes shape. Children build lives of their own. A long chapter of caregiving ends. A move, a health change, or the loss of someone close redraws the map. These transitions don’t just change our routines. They remove the external scaffolding that quietly stood in for purpose.<\/p>\n That’s why purpose can feel hardest to define exactly when we have the most freedom to pursue it. The question is no longer “what does this role require of me?” It becomes “what do I actually want?” Many of us reach midlife having never practiced answering that question. We’ve practiced answering everyone else’s version of it.<\/p>\n There’s a hidden advantage here, though. By 45 or 55 or 70, you have something younger people don’t: data. You know which achievements left you cold and which moments made you feel alive. You’ve watched yourself react to milestones, setbacks, and changes for decades. That isn’t baggage. That’s the raw material for designing what comes next.<\/p>\n Purpose isn’t a luxury or a feel-good extra. It’s a health practice, as real as nutrition or exercise.<\/p>\n A University of Michigan study published in JAMA Network Open followed nearly 7,000 American adults over 50 and found that a stronger sense of purpose was significantly associated with lower mortality. The researchers concluded that life purpose should be treated as a modifiable risk factor, the same category as blood pressure or smoking. In other words, purpose is something you can work on, and working on it appears to pay off in years. Related research has connected a strong sense of purpose to healthier behaviors and better outcomes for sleep, stroke incidence, and diabetes.<\/p>\n The logic is intuitive. A reason to get up in the morning shapes a hundred small decisions: whether you take the walk, make the call, learn the new skill, keep the appointment. Purpose organizes behavior. Without it, even comfortable days can feel hollow, and hollow days are hard on both body and mind.<\/p>\n You don’t need to quit everything, hike a thousand miles, or move to a cabin. You need a method. Here are five places to start.<\/p>\n Take your current goals and ambitions and ask one question of each: where did this come from? Some will trace back to your own genuine desires. Others will trace back to parents, peers, employers, or advertising. You don’t have to drop the borrowed ones immediately. Just label them honestly. Awareness alone changes how you spend your energy.<\/p>\n Every day for 30 days, write down 15 things you want. Anything. Big, small, absurd. The first week is easy. Then it gets hard, and that’s when the interesting answers surface. When I did a version of this exercise, I eventually listed over 1,500 things I thought I wanted. Reviewing the list, I discovered most of them weren’t mine. I cut it to fewer than 100, and for the first time in my life, I knew exactly what I wanted. Everything else was noise.<\/p>\n Most goal setting fails because we require a complete, realistic plan before we allow ourselves to want something. Reverse the order. First name the big dream, even an unreachable one. A dream that excites you does something a to-do list never will: it pulls you forward instead of pushing you. The concrete steps come later, and they come easier.<\/p>\n Real change isn’t a dramatic leap. It’s a micro-step repeated. Want to start walking daily but find it daunting? Begin by setting out your shoes the night before. The next day, put them on. The day after, step outside for one minute. It sounds trivial. It works. Small changes snowball, and they bypass the resistance that kills grand resolutions.<\/p>\n We all operate in three zones: what we think we know about ourselves, what we think others see, and what people we trust actually see, including things we’re blind to. Growth often lives in that third zone. Ask two or three people you trust a simple question: “When have you seen me most energized?” Their answers will surprise you, and they’re often more accurate than your own.<\/p>\n Over the years, I’ve noticed that every meaningful change in my life arrived as a kind of reset: a moment when, almost in an instant, you become a different person and there’s no going back.\nResets can come from hard experiences or joyful ones. You can’t schedule them. But you can make yourself ready for them by knowing what you actually want, dreaming on your own terms, and taking one small step today.<\/p>\n The script you’ve been following got you this far. It also taught you everything you need to write your own. The second half of life isn’t about winding down. It’s about finally building something that’s yours.<\/p>\n Five practical ways to find a more meaningful path<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":17798,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[222,223],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17615","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fall-2026","category-fall-2026-features"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/healthyaging.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17615","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/healthyaging.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/healthyaging.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/healthyaging.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/healthyaging.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17615"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/healthyaging.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17615\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17904,"href":"https:\/\/healthyaging.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17615\/revisions\/17904"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/healthyaging.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17798"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/healthyaging.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17615"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/healthyaging.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17615"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/healthyaging.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17615"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Why purpose gets harder to define during life transitions<\/h3>\n
Why purpose matters to your health<\/h3>\n
Five practical ways to find a more meaningful path<\/h3>\n
1. Audit your borrowed goals.<\/h4>\n
2. Run the “15 desires” experiment.<\/h4>\n
3. Name the dream before you demand a plan.<\/h4>\n
4. Start embarrassingly small.<\/h4>\n
5. Borrow other people’s eyes.<\/h4>\n
The reset is real<\/h3>\n
Artem Gonchakov is an entrepreneur and business leader whose career has spanned technology, finance, and artificial intelligence. He writes about purpose, personal growth, and resilience, drawing on both professional experience and personal reflection. He is the author of Unrefined: Find Your Purpose.<\/em><\/a><\/h5>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"