When it comes to figuring out your purpose you don’t want to be too haste about it, as it’s certainly an important decision.

However, you also don’t want to dwell on it for too long too.

Firstly, because you don’t want to over complicate things in your head too much.

But secondly, and most importantly, is that you kind of just want to get things moving, and start exploring your idea. 

Once you have an idea that you feel passionate about you want to be able to get curious about the idea as soon as possible, because at the beginning it will just be an idea. A hunch, a gut feeling, an interest.

You want to begin by following and exploring it. And see where it takes you.

Your purpose at first is hidden from you. It lingers in the darkness out of sight. 

It’s unrealistic to expect that you’ll figure everything out straight away.

Rather you need to begin with a calculated starting point. And then trust your gut, keep thinking, reading and writing, and your purpose should begin to slowly reveal itself.

A good place to start when it comes to helping you evolve your idea is to write down the vision, mission, and values associated with the idea.

The first step is to outline your vision.

This basically involves you highlighting what the problem is, and a brief insight as to what your niche is, and what your solution is.

A good way of framing your vision 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.

The second step is to outline your mission.

What career route do you plan to take in order to solve your problem?

Will you create a B2C product? Or a B2B service? Or could it be a job role within a specific industry?

(Or perhaps you could even do all three). 

We’ll be covering these different options in more detail as we go on throughout the course.

At this stage you can also begin thinking about what are the relevant core values associated with your idea.

Identifying your values is really important, as later on what you’ll find is that these will become core to your product, marketing, and brand.

A good way to think about establishing your core values is to look at the structure of your product.

For example, here at Rocket, our mission is to create a B2C online course giving ordinary people clear and affordable career advice.

The online course has been structured into four key parts: Purpose, wellbeing, professional development, and solopreneurship.

So essentially, we would class these as our 4 core values.

These values are not only completely core to how we choose to structure the narrative of the product, but also (as we’ll be discussing in more detail later) the brand, and the industries and stakeholders we wish to be affiliated with.

Don’t worry too much if you’re not nailing your core values immediately. As mentioned this should become more clear once you begin developing your product or service.

At this stage you can now use Exercise File 3 to begin thinking about answering the following questions:

• What’s the problem that you want to solve?
• What’s your vision for solving that problem?
• What’s your mission? (i.e. what career route do you plan to take in order to solve the problem)
• What would you say makes your product unique to what’s already out there?
• And finally what are your values?

There’s no need to go into any great amount of detail here, at this very early stage we’re just sketching out a potential idea. So feel free to just go with your gut instincts for now. 

There will be plenty of time to research, evolve, and tweak your idea later on!