Hey Little Pineapple,

A few years into my consultancy, I worked with a tattoo artist. Let's call her Alice.

She'd been doing it for years. Good at it. Busy enough.

But the market was getting crowded, the joy had left, and one day she just decided: no more ink on anyone's skin.

Done.

So we started working together. And very quickly one thing became obvious.

Alice had no idea what she actually wanted.

She just knew what she didn't.

That's more common than people admit. You're not lost because you're confused.

You're lost because staying vague feels safer than being wrong.

The itch you keep ignoring

There's a feeling. You probably know it.

It sits somewhere low. It's persistent, easy to dismiss on a busy day.

Like you're not quite showing up as yourself.

Like there's a version of you waiting for permission to exist.

And here's the brutal part: if you're good at your job, it makes everything worse.

Because being good at something you don't want to do isn't success.

It's a well-executed mistake.

So how do you actually find what you want?

Richard Bolles spent decades on this question. One of his most practical tools is the Seven Stories Exercise.

Here's how it works.

Write down seven moments (Not 3, not 5. Seven!) in your life when you felt genuinely alive.

Not successful by someone else's measure. Not impressive.

Just fully yourself, engaged, time disappearing. Flow.

Could be from childhood. Could be last Tuesday.

For each one, write what you were actually doing. Not the title or the context.

The specific actions.

Were you organising something? Teaching? Building? Persuading?

Solving a problem nobody else had noticed?

Then look across all seven stories and find what keeps showing up.

That pattern is not a coincidence.

When Alice did this, her stories kept returning to the same things:

animals, outdoor work, quiet environments, predictable routine, caring for something over time.

From all the jobs it turned out she wanted to be a shepherd.

A shepherd! Didn't see that one coming, huh?

Neither did she.

Of course, it wasn't immediately possible.

But suddenly she had something real to work with.

And from that, we could reverse-engineer what kinds of roles might carry those same qualities.

Clarity doesn't always arrive as a job title.

Sometimes it arrives as a set of conditions.

I know this works. Because I did it too.

Seven years before I sat across from Alice, I did the same exercise.

I was working at a corporate recruitment agency.

Decent money, clear ladder, the kind of place that rewards you for staying quiet and performing well. I was good at it.

And I was miserable in the way you're miserable when nothing is technically wrong.

When I wrote my seven stories, the same themes kept appearing:

learning, writing, psychology. An obsession with diving deep into subjects.

A fascination with work itself - not just as a transaction, but as something that shapes who we are, how we see ourselves, what we become.

I was a good listener. Relentless learner. Still am.

And what I actually wanted was to combine those things to help people make the most of their working lives.

That wasn't a job title I could search for. But it was a direction.

Then one day I wrote a LinkedIn post. In my own voice.

About something I actually believed.

My marketing department told me to take it down.

I re-wrote and updated me CV that evening.

Not because I had everything figured out.

Because I finally had enough knowledge to know that staying was the wrong direction.

That's all you need. Not a plan. A direction.

The work I do now - the coaching, the newsletter, all of it - traces directly back to what showed up in those seven stories.

The subject just kept pulling me in until I stopped pretending it wasn't.

A few other things worth trying

The stories exercise is where I'd start.

But if you want to pressure-test what you find:

Run informational interviews.

Find people doing work that vaguely interests you and ask them what a Tuesday actually looks like.

Not the job description. Tuesday. Twenty minutes, LinkedIn message, genuine curiosity.

You'll learn more than six months of overthinking.

Launch something small and public.

A post, a project, a question you explore out loud. Not to build a brand.

To watch what draws you in when there's no audience and no reward.

That's signal.

Solve a real problem for someone outside your industry.

Volunteer, help a friend's startup, join an NGO for a quarter.

New context surfaces skills and interests you didn't know were there.

The thing nobody tells you

Most people treat career uncertainty like a private problem to solve in their own head.

They think more. They read more. They make lists. They update their LinkedIn bio.

None of that moves you forward.

The people who figure it out are the ones who run experiments in the real world.

Not thought experiments in their bathroom at 11pm.

Alice didn't find clarity by thinking harder about tattooing.

I didn't find mine by waiting for my agency to become a place I wanted to stay in.

We both found it the same way: by being honest about what made us feel alive, following that thread, and letting the logic catch up later.

You already know something's off.

The question is how long you're going to wait before you do something about it.

If you want to work through this properly, my career move program is built for exactly this stage.

Not when you're job hunting. Before.

Patryk