Forget Finding Your Purpose. Find Your Interest.

“Find your purpose” might be the most paralysing advice ever handed to a person who just wants to get started. It sounds wise. It feels important. And it stops people cold, because it asks you to know the meaning of your whole life before you’re allowed to take the first step. Nobody knows their purpose really but what you know is what you’re curious about. That’s the thing worth chasing, and it’s the thing that actually goes somewhere. So forget finding your purpose. Find your interest.

Purpose is a destination. Interest is a direction.

Purpose asks a question you can’t answer yet: what is the one grand thing you were put here to do? Stare at that long enough and you’ll do nothing, because no honest answer arrives on demand. It’s too big, too final, too loaded. So people wait for clarity that never comes and call it “still figuring things out.” Interest asks a question you can answer right now: what do you keep coming back to? What do you read about when nobody’s making you? What do you end up talking about too long at a party? You already know. You don’t have to find it, you just have to admit it. That’s the whole shift right there. Purpose is a destination you can’t see. Interest is a direction you can walk in today. And direction is all you need to start moving, because the path clarifies as you walk it, never before.

Your interest is the seed, not the hobby

Here’s where most people undersell their own curiosity. They treat an interest as a pastime, something you do on the side, nice but not serious. That’s a mistake. Your interest is the seed of everything you could build.

Think about how anything worth following actually got made. Someone was interested in growing food without chemicals, so they filmed themselves doing it, and now hundreds of thousands of people follow along and buy what they grow. Someone was interested in how money really works, so they explained it plainly, and built an audience that trusts them. None of them started with a purpose statement. They started with a thing they couldn’t stop thinking about, and they followed it in public until it became something.

The interest comes first. The brand, the business, the audience, all of it grows out of that seed. Skip the seed and there’s nothing to grow. But if you plant it and tend to it then you’d be surprised what comes up.

Interest is what interest media rewards

This is where it connects to something bigger. We’re living through a shift where attention no longer belongs to whoever has the biggest budget. It belongs to whoever people actually want to hear from. That’s interest media: content people seek out because it speaks to what they care about.

And interest media runs on exactly the thing you already have. When you make something out of genuine curiosity, it reads as real, because it is. People can smell the difference between someone performing interest and someone who actually has it. The person who’s truly into their subject makes better content, sticks with it longer, and builds the kind of trust you can’t fake. Your interest isn’t just where you start. It’s your unfair advantage in the one arena that matters now.

The reach is open. What fills it is people showing up around the things they care about. If you’ve got a real interest, you’ve already got the raw material that this whole new landscape is built to reward.

Start with the small yes

So forget the big question. Stop waiting to discover your purpose like it’s buried treasure with your name on it. Ask the small, honest one instead: what am I interested in? Then take one step toward it in public. Make the thing. Share the thing. See who shows up.

Purpose, if it ever arrives, arrives later, and it arrives by walking, not by waiting. It’s assembled from a hundred small yeses to the things that pulled you in, not downloaded in a single flash of clarity. You find it on the road, not before you leave.

You don’t need to know where the road ends. You just need to know which way your curiosity is pointing, and take the first step. The rest reveals itself to people who start.

Caoimhe Duggan is the founder of Ten Mentors and spent nearly 20 years leading operations across companies in Europe, Asia, and beyond. She served as Head of Operations Asia at Spencer Ogden, where she helped scale the business internationally and it was inside fast-growing companies like this that she watched the same pattern emerge everywhere: mentorship and guidance flowed to the most visible people, while the majority were left to figure things out alone.
Her career began early in workflow automation for law firms and eventually RDJ, where she was already building systems that helped people work better. She later became certified in Learning and Development through Stada in Singapore bringing a formal grounding in how people actually grow, learn, and change to everything she builds at Ten Mentors. That combination of operational scale, systems thinking, and human development became the foundation for Ten Mentors. A practical starting point for the people the traditional mentorship system leaves behind.
Beyond the box, Caoimhe hosts the Ten Mentors Podcast — short, honest conversations designed to close the guidance gap one lesson at a time. She is also the founder of mentoring music — a new category of music she created through Ten Mentors Music. The first platform of its kind, mentoring music uses human-written lyrics built around real mentoring themes, produced through modern AI tools — something Ten Mentors is open about. Music designed to help people think clearer, stay steady, and keep moving when things get hard.
Caoimhe writes about personal growth, mentoring, leadership, and what it actually takes to move forward without a map. She has travelled to over 120 countries, lost two brothers at a young age, and brings the kind of honesty to her writing that only comes from having actually lived through difficult things.
She is based between Ireland and Sweden. Connect with her on LinkedIn.

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