Play Builds Purpose

Purpose is not something you discover.
It is something you practice.

We tend to talk about purpose as if it were hidden somewhere inside us, waiting to be uncovered by the right career or a moment of clarity. But that framing gets things backwards. Purpose does not arrive fully formed. It emerges through use.

What matters is not what you care about so much as the fact that you care at all. Jensen Huang has described how his sense of purpose grew out of learning how to care deeply about whatever work he was doing, even when that work was washing dishes. The meaning did not come from the title. It came from practicing usefulness, from deciding that the work in front of him mattered.

School teaches many useful things. It teaches reading, math, writing, and science. What it rarely teaches is how to choose what deserves your attention. Most work is prescribed. The assignments are the same, the pacing is the same, and the goals are already decided. You learn how to do things correctly, but not how to decide what is worth doing.

When everyone is given the same work, it is hard to develop a point of view. You can become very good at meeting expectations without ever learning how to set them.

This helps explain the quarter-life crisis. We are inexperienced at directing ourselves. We have spent years succeeding inside other people's frameworks, and almost no time building our own. When the scaffolding disappears, we don't know how to choose. So we default to what is convenient, what is prestigious, or what pays well, and mistake that for direction.

How Purpose Actually Forms

As a teenager, Richard Feynman repaired radios for neighbors. He didn't just follow instructions. He broke working sets on purpose to see if he could fix them again. He learned how to sit with confusion, how to test ideas, and how satisfying it is to make something work through understanding. Physics came later. The habit of caring came first.

As a child, Jane Goodall spent hours alone observing animals, writing notes, and inventing stories about the natural world. She trained herself to watch patiently and record what she saw without rushing to conclusions. Long before formal science, she practiced attention and seriousness toward living systems. Her life's work grew out of that discipline.

In each case, purpose did not appear as a choice. It accumulated. They did real things, took them seriously, and returned to them day after day. Direction emerged as a consequence.

This pattern shows up in the research as well. In his work on developing talent in youth, Benjamin Bloom studied musicians, mathematicians, athletes, and scientists and found a consistent arc. Early excellence rarely began with pressure or optimization. It began with playful engagement. Kids explored an activity because it was interesting. Only later did that play harden into discipline, standards, and serious work. Purpose followed the same path. First interest. Then commitment. Then identity.

The subject barely matters. Radios, dishes, animals, music. What transfers are the underlying skills. How to learn. How to persist. How it feels to take responsibility for something outside yourself.

AI Changes the Equation

For a long time, school could not support this without collapsing under its own complexity. It could not personalize paths while maintaining structure. This is where AI changes the equation.

Imagine a student building something they care about. A game, a story, a tool. The AI notices what they return to, where they stall, what they avoid, and it weaves in the math they need, the writing they are missing, the concepts they are ready for next. The work adapts, the difficulty adjusts, and the student remains in control of what they are building.

In this model, purpose is not given to you by an authority. It is practiced by the kid daily. Students are not asked to decide who they will be forever. They are asked to take something seriously today, and then again tomorrow, until direction emerges.

Adults still matter. Their role shifts from prescribing paths to protecting space. Less optimization. More noticing. Helping kids take responsibility for the things they choose to care about.

So when you see a young person absorbed in something that looks trivial, pause before discouraging them. You may be watching them prepare for something larger than either of you can see.

But what about rigor? If we let students follow their interests, won't standards slip? That objection is worth taking seriously. I address it in The Obvious Objection: What About Rigor?

They are not just playing.
They are practicing.

Purpose is not found in a moment.
It is built over time, often in ways you could not have predicted.