What Gives You Meaning?

By Emily Esfahani Smith, author of The Power of Meaning: Crafting a Life That Matters (Crown, January 2017)

When I was a senior in high school, I thought I knew what I wanted to do with my life: I was going to be a doctor. I loved science, and easing the suffering of others, I reasoned, was a noble purpose. My freshman year in college, I enrolled in pre-med classes and worked in a lab. But as I got caught up in the details of the pre-med track—dissecting mice brains, filling out lab reports, and foregoing humanities classes in order to take organic chemistry—the idea of being a doctor increasingly left me cold. I had a nagging feeling that there was something else that I should be doing with my life. What that was, though, I had no idea. After dropping pre-med, I drifted from one career track to the next, unsure where my path lay. I felt lost.