John Blakey said it plainly: "If you're not actively feeding your purpose, you're probably feeding someone else's."
I've sat with this line for months. It hits differently depending on where you are in your career. At 25 and ambitious, it reads like a motivational poster. At 45, staring at a calendar packed with meetings you didn't request and projects you didn't choose, it reads like a diagnosis.
It Doesn't Happen All at Once
Nobody decides to spend a decade building someone else's dream. It happens in steps. Each looks reasonable at the time.
You take the job because the money is good. The company looks stable. Your boss seems decent. They offer a promotion. You take it... because you're supposed to want one, right? Then another. Then another.
At some point the days start looking the same. You're not unhappy exactly. You're not sure what you're doing it for, either.
I've seen this pattern everywhere. I've lived parts of it. The US Army gave me incredible things... discipline, perspective, camaraderie. It also taught me to subordinate my agenda to the mission. Valuable skill. Dangerous habit to carry indefinitely into civilian life, aimed at different bosses with different missions.
You don't notice the drift. You're busy. You're productive. You're succeeding by every visible metric. Then one day someone asks why you do what you do, and you reach for an answer... and there's nothing there.
The Signs You're Off Course
Here are some things I've noticed in myself and in people I've worked with:
You measure yourself by their metrics. Headcount. Revenue. Utilization rates. Quarterly targets. Fine as business metrics. Terrible as life metrics. If your sense of worth rises and falls with numbers you didn't choose, someone else is holding your steering wheel.
You struggle to say what you genuinely want. Not what your company wants. Not what your industry expects. What YOU want. Try answering in two sentences. If you're struggling, the gap is worth examining.
You keep saying "after this phase." After this project. After this promotion. After this busy quarter. The phase never ends, and the work you want to do keeps getting deferred. Not circumstance. A repeated choice.
You feel productive but empty. Full calendar. Inbox chaos. Lots of movement. Nothing meaningful. Activity without direction is noise.
The viral posts on Reddit about salary stagnation hit something real. People spending five, seven, ten years at a company out of loyalty... watching their pay stagnate or drop relative to what job-hopping would have paid. They weren't losing money alone. They were donating years of their working lives to build something they didn't own and didn't deeply believe in.
This Isn't About Quitting Your Job
Feeding your purpose doesn't mean burning everything down, going freelance, and starting a podcast. For some people, purpose lives inside their current work... they've never looked for it there.
The question isn't "should I leave?" The question is: what am I trying to build, and does my current situation help me build it?
This requires honesty. Not the kind where you tell yourself a story about potential and opportunity. The kind where you sit with a piece of paper and write down what you're spending your time on versus what you say you care about. The gap between those two lists is where purpose goes to die.
Harvard Business Review has covered this pattern for years... the pattern of people arriving at midcareer success to find the life they'd built wasn't theirs. Not a crisis. Information.
What Feeding Your Purpose Looks Like
No grand revelation required. No quitting to sail around the world.
For me it looked like writing. I spent years as a tech leader... good at it, well paid for it. All along, the work I kept returning to was telling stories. Explaining ideas. Making complexity clear. When I started writing publicly, speaking at events, building content about leadership and technology and the messy reality of human work... something clicked. Not because the earlier work was bad. Because this was mine.
Feeding your purpose means doing a regular audit. Not annually at a performance review. Weekly. Ten minutes. Three questions:
- What did I do this week I'd do for free?
- What did I do this week leaving me empty despite being competent at it?
- Am I making decisions based on what I want, or what I think I should want?
The answers won't always be comfortable.
The Uncomfortable Part
Other people's purposes are often more immediately rewarding. Your company's purpose comes with a salary. Your boss's agenda comes with approval and visibility. Following the expected path comes with social comfort.
Your own purpose... often doesn't pay right away. It asks you to invest in something before you know whether it'll work. It asks you to say no to things looking good on paper but feeling wrong in your gut.
This is why most people don't do it. Not because they lack a purpose. Because they never make space to hear what it's telling them.
Blakey's line isn't designed to make you feel guilty. It's designed to make you look. If your week is full of other people's priorities... fine, bills are real. But if your YEARS are full of other people's priorities, and you've stopped asking whether this is what you want... the problem is clear.
Start With One Question
You don't need to redesign your life this week. One question:
What do I want the next five years to be FOR?
Not for your company. Not for your kids' college fund (real concern, not dismissing it). Not for the LinkedIn version of your career. For you. What are you building?
If you answer clearly, you're feeding your purpose. If you struggle to answer... someone else probably is.
The clock runs either way.