Every journey must start with self-discovery.

Your career purpose is your Polaris star that you’re navigating towards. 

It is the main source of your motivation and focus within your career.

The truth is, working just for money won’t sustain you in the long run. You need to have, what we say, a higher calling. Something that’s going to get you out of bed in the morning.

Your career purpose should be an idea bigger than yourself. It should be something big enough to not only inspire and excite you, but inspire and excite others too.

Discovering your purpose is not necessarily easy.

However, at the same time, we’d encourage you not to be too daunted about this exercise.

Hopefully what you should find is that by following the advice in this course, is that you'll most likely begin generating loads of fun and exciting ideas for what your career purpose could be.

The process of discovering your purpose can be broken down into three stages:

1. Stage 1 is coming up with an idea.
2. Stage 2 is evolving your idea.
3. Stage 3 is evaluating your idea.

Over the next few weeks, you want to be constantly tuning your mind into figuring out what your career purpose could be.

How could things that you think about or activities that you enjoy participating in relate to the world of work?

Whenever you do have a lightbulb moment (for example in the shower) quickly make a note of it by either adding it to your Google Keep or to Exercise File 2.

Exercise File 2 can be the place where you save all of your initial ideas onto.

It’s important to mention that most of your best ideas won’t come to you when you’re staring at your laptop. They will come to you during activities in the real world, when you’re out socialising with friends, watching TV, or meditating.

Importantly whenever you do have a light bulb moment make sure to quickly make a note of it before you forget it.

Hopefully, by keeping your mind tuned in over the next few weeks with all of the tips in this lesson, you’ll begin to generate lots of great ideas.

At this stage don’t worry too much about quality. If you have an idea, quickly add it to Exercise File 2. You’ll be evaluating if it’s a good idea or not later on.

Now here’s the important bit.

The key to coming up with your big idea is to think like an entrepreneur.

Business is a dignified and creative field, which is essentially all about solving each other’s problems. 

What problems do people have (which you may also have) that you’d love to solve? 

You should be aiming to solve a problem that genuinely excites you, regardless of how obscure it may seem at first.

Here are a few tips to help you get started in your journey to start thinking like an entrepreneur.

TIP 1: Follow your passion

As already mentioned you want to be choosing something that genuinely excites you, and that you’d imagine will also genuinely excite others too.

Begin by shortlisting ideas that you’d happily do if money wasn’t even an issue.

You can assess if it’s a genuine career or business opportunity later, but for now let your imagination run free, and focus on ideas that genuinely excite you.

Gandhi said, “Be the change that you want to see in the world”. 

So don’t be afraid to follow your dream. Life’s much better on this side.

TIP 2: Think introspectively

Typically the first step towards entrepreneurship is to learn to study your own problems.

Short-list problems in your own life (or maybe problems of people that you know

well) which create unhappiness.

For example, if you have a specific health condition, it would be reasonable to assume that for your own sake you’d be passionate and dedicated to solving that problem.

Once you’re able to figure out a solution that works effectively for you, you can then begin to scale that solution into a product or service that would help others. 

Or alternatively, apply for a job that fits within that niche.

TIP 3: Keep trends in mind

Another tip to identifying problems is to keep current trends in mind. 

What’s currently trending on social media? For example, a big trend at the moment is Climate Change and sustainability.

So by keeping sustainability in mind could be the very thing to help transform an existing idea into something unique.

An example of this would be to look at Elon Musk. He identified that the electric car industry (a vastly more environmentally friendly solution to petrol and diesel cars) was not gathering any real momentum in the automobile industry at that time, so he took it upon himself to set out his vision to make electric cars the new mainstream norm within the industry when he took over Tesla.

Keeping your finger on the pulse of trends can be useful in terms of helping you come up with your big idea, but it will also be important when creating your content marketing strategy later on too. So it’s a useful skill to learn early.

TIP 4: Look for problems in your industry

If you’re already working in a specific industry, then you can look for problems there too. 

This typically works as a B2B approach to entrepreneurship, in which you may set yourself up as a freelance consultant or service provider by solving a common problem for other companies who operate in your industry.

An example of this could be to focus on improving workplace cultures. Most workplaces cultures suck, which can lead to operational inefficiency and therefore have a big impact on businesses bottom line. So, if this is something that you’re passionate about, then your career purpose could be to set-up a consultancy solution to fix that business problem, preferably within an industry that you’re already familiar with.

Understanding the difference between B2B and B2C business models is quite important. Don’t worry if this is something you’re not too sure about, it should start to become much more clear as we continue on through the course.

A good example here is to look at Steve Jobs. He identified a problem within the computer industry in the 80s, in which he found computers to be complex, expensive, and only used by scientists at large corporations. 

His vision was to make computers accessible for everyone and to be simple and beautifully made consumer products.

What’s interesting with this example is that Steve Jobs identified a B2B industry problem, but flipped computers from being a business-to-business product into a business-to-consumer product.

TIP 5: Look out for social problems

This typically works as a B2C (i.e business to consumer) approach to entrepreneurship, in which you create a product or service in order to solve a social problem.

To help get your brain warmed up, here is a list of some social problems, which could have potential solutions attached to them:

• Elderly people don’t get the care they deserve at the end of their lives.
• Young people can be lazy and unproductive.
• Creating wedding vows can be tricky to do well.
• Takeaway food in my town is overly expensive and unhealthy.
• Relocating to a new area for work can be scary
• Online shopping can be confusing
• Public transport can be expensive and unreliable.

These are all common social problems, which may have potential solutions associated with them that people would happily pay for.

An example here is to look at Jeff Bezos and Amazon. He was the first person to identify that retail consumer behavior was increasingly becoming more digital and that the problem that people were having was being able to safely and easily discover, buy and receive products online. His vision was to help people find anything that they might want to buy online at the lowest possible price and at the utmost convenience.

Another example is Uber. The problem identified here is that traditional taxi’s are expensive and unreliable. Uber’s vision was to transform the taxi industry by making it easier, cheaper, and more reliable, while at the same time stimulating the economy by creating more accessible job opportunities.

TIP 6: Find a niche

Another useful thing to keep in mind during this exercise, and as we’ve already touched upon, and as we will continue to bring up throughout the course, is trying to ensure that your problem is focused on a specific type of consumer or industry. 

This is called having a niche. Typically your mission will be more effective when it is focused in this way. 

You can't talk to the entire world. Your message won’t connect. You've got to try and narrow your focus down to a specific type of individual in order for your message to be meaningful.

A good way of framing your niche is to say to yourself, I want to help x achieve y.

For example here at Rocket, we want to help young people think more clearly about their careers.

By clearly framing your idea in this way it will allow you to design your product and marketing far more effectively. 

Here are some examples of establishing a niche:

• “I help managers become leaders”
• “I help companies market complex products using video and animation”
• “I help introverts improve their social skills, so they can lead happier lives and communicate more effectively at work”.
• “I help SaaS companies attract their ideal buyer”.
• “I help e-commerce companies with Facebook Ads”
• “I help CEOs grow through personal branding and strategic storytelling”.
• “I help new investors understand the stock market'

It’s worth noting though that you don’t always have to have a super niche target audience. Many businesses target more than one type of audience. However, generally the more niche you can make it, the better.

Typically, having a very focused niche tends to work best if your business model is a B2B service. If your business model is a B2C product, it’s likely you’ll have a broader target audience.

TIP 7: Be unique

Last but not least, it’s also important that your idea is to some extent unique.

Why will your product be superior to the existing products on the market? How can you add value to your target audience that no one else is currently doing? The more original you are, the better your chance of success.

A good approach to coming up with a unique idea is to look at your own personal strengths and passions. 

A good example of this is to look at Apple. Their unique competitive advantage is that their products have a far easier to use interface compared to other similar tech products. Still to this day, they are known for being the easiest devices to use across their product range. 

This unique advantage stemmed from the founder himself, Steve Jobs, who was naturally talented at designing computers. It was largely due to his personal passion, vision, and talent that he was able to design the Apple product in a unique and more efficient way compared to the competition.

Another effective tactic is to of course conduct a competitor analysis in order to ensure your product or service stands out.

Which we’ll be discussing in Lesson 8.

Conclusion

You don’t need to create an idea from scratch. Essentially you can simply analyse one of your competitors and copy and improve on what they have done before you. 

If someone is already doing your business idea, don’t let that put you off. That’s actually a good thing, as that just means your idea has already been tested and works. And your idea fits within a proven market.

Competition is ok, there’s enough room for everyone. All you need is a good solid idea, it doesn’t necessarily have to be ground-breaking, and it’s then likely very possible to simply put a new spin on an existing idea in order to make it unique.

We’ll be discussing all of these points in more detail as we go on throughout the course, so don’t worry too much if ideas are not springing to mind immediately.

For some people, the process of identifying your purpose might be fairly straightforward. While for others it might require a bit more soul searching.

But by thinking about your career purpose little and often it will help you develop a sense of direction.

Keep persevering with the other lessons in the course, but keep all of the tips from this first lesson in mind as you do.

We’d say give it a few weeks, and whenever a good idea pops into your head, write it down in Exercise File 2.

Eventually, once you have a list of ideas written down you can then pick the one that you’re most passionate about, and then move onto the second stage of evolving that idea.