I was seven the first time I broke something on purpose.
The family computer sat in the corner of our living room, beige and humming and completely off-limits. To everyone else it was a machine. To me it was a locked door, and I couldn’t stand not knowing what was behind it. So one afternoon, with a screwdriver I wasn’t supposed to be holding, I started taking it apart.
I didn’t have the words for it then. What I knew was that I wasn’t trying to break it. I was trying to understand it. The pull was to see how the small parts talked to each other, how something so quiet could do so much. Every screw went onto the carpet in neat little rows so I’d remember where they belonged. I got most of it back together. Mostly.
What I remember more than the parts is the feeling. A kind of certainty that’s rare at any age and almost unheard of at seven: this is the thing for me. Not computers specifically. The deeper thing underneath them, building, figuring out, making the invisible visible. I didn’t know that’s what I’d spend my life doing. But some part of me did.
Why finding your purpose has no deadline
Here’s what I’ve come to believe since then, and it’s the real reason I’m writing this.
We’ve turned “finding your purpose” into a race with a deadline. Pick the right major. Land the right first job. Have it all sorted out by twenty-five or you’ve fallen behind. It’s a quiet kind of pressure, and it makes a lot of good people feel like they missed a train that was never actually theirs to catch.
But purpose doesn’t keep a schedule.
For me it showed up at seven, on a living room floor, surrounded by screws. Someone else finds it at forty, in the middle of a career they’re finally brave enough to leave. Another person stumbles into it at seventy-seven, picking up a paintbrush they put down decades ago and realizing their hands still remember. None of those timelines is more legitimate than the others. The seven-year-old and the seventy-seven-year-old are doing the exact same thing: listening closely enough to hear what they’re actually drawn to, and then having the nerve to follow it.
The screwdriver was never about the computer
The screwdriver was never really about the computer. It was about a kid learning, early, that curiosity is worth trusting. That the thing you can’t stop poking at is usually pointing somewhere. And if you haven’t felt that pull yet, if you’re reading this thinking everyone else got the memo and you didn’t, I promise you haven’t run out of time.
Take something apart. See what you can’t leave alone. Your purpose isn’t a train you missed. It’s a door you haven’t opened yet.
And the screwdriver was always in your hand.