Purpose Isn't Found. It's Built With Someone Beside You.

When I was a young executive at Sunkist, I spent a lot of nights on the road. Those nights usually ended the same way, with a phone call to my father. When he said something that mattered, I wrote it down on a restaurant napkin. Over the years those napkins filled 90 shoeboxes.

I have told that story before, in 90 Shoeboxes of Napkins. What I understand better now is what those calls were doing. I was not finding my purpose on the road. I was building it, one conversation at a time, with someone on the other end of the line who knew me.

That difference matters for every parent who has heard their teenager say, "I don't know what I want to do with my life," and felt a jolt of panic.

Most Young People Are Still Under Construction

William Damon, who directs the Stanford Center on Adolescence, has spent much of his career studying how purpose develops. He describes it as a lasting intention to accomplish something that matters to you and also contributes to the world beyond you. In a 2024 paper with his Stanford colleagues Heather Malin and Anne Colby, Damon restated a finding from the team's earlier research: "only about one-fifth of young people are fully purposeful by early adulthood."

If that number worries you, look at it the other way. Four out of five young people are still working it out well past high school. Your teen is right on schedule.

And they want to matter. Anne Colby, Heather Malin and Emily Morton, colleagues at Damon's center, surveyed 1,500 students at 11 U.S. colleges about their life goals. Only 10% named becoming rich or successful as their foremost goal, and 55% showed an orientation beyond themselves. The desire is there. What most young people still need is a clear picture of what they bring.

One more honest note from the same 2024 paper. When the team followed 1,019 college students over about three years, college experiences predicted only modest changes in purpose, and the authors called the effects very small. Institutions can help, but purpose forms slowly, and mostly in relationships.

Purpose Needs Someone Paying Attention

Who those relationships are with turns out to matter. In a study led by M. H. Do with Harvard's Nancy Hill, researchers followed 645 racially and ethnically diverse high school students for three years. Early support from parents, along with satisfaction with school counselors, predicted a stronger sense of purpose a year later. Purpose, in turn, predicted more confidence and more action toward the future in the last years of high school. In this study, positive relationships with teachers did not show the same link. All the measures were self-reports, and the design is correlational, so it shows what went together, not what caused what.

A separate line of work points in a similar direction from another angle. Andrew Fuligni and his colleagues at UCLA surveyed 1,301 high school students and found that teens who felt needed by their families also reported higher self-esteem and a greater sense of meaning. It was a single survey taken in 2020, and the authors themselves call for longer-term follow-up.

Put those findings next to each other and a picture forms. Purpose grows when someone sees you clearly enough to reflect back what you are good at, and when you are trusted with something real.

This is where I part ways with the way we usually talk about it. We ask teens to commit to a contribution before they know what they bring. Purpose follows identity. A young person first needs an honest answer to a simple question: what do the people around me keep counting on me for? The problems they keep noticing and the ways they help without being asked have to come into view before they can aim any of it at the world. And the answer at 15 will keep changing as they grow. That is fine. The point is to start noticing.

How to Be the Voice on the Other End of the Line

My father never told me what my purpose was. He listened, he asked, and he was there every night. A few ways parents can do something similar:

Make the conversation routine, not an event. Purpose talks feel heavy when they happen twice a year. Short, regular check-ins, in the car or at the end of the day, do more.

Ask what problem they keep noticing. "What bugged you today that nobody else seemed to care about?" tells you more than "What do you want to be?" I explore that question in What Problem Do You Want to Be Known for Solving?

Help them keep their own napkins. A notes app, a journal, anything. When your teen says something that sounds like them, encourage them to write it down. Patterns appear over time.

Resist handing them your purpose. The best guides discover who a young person is instead of reproducing themselves, as I wrote in The Best Mentors Discover You.

Bring in other adults. In Hill's study, school counselors mattered too. A coach, a relative or a family friend can see things in your teen that you are too close to notice.

Purpose is where conviction begins: the earned capacity to act on what you believe before the outcome is certain. No one earns that alone. They earn it with someone beside them who keeps asking, keeps listening and keeps believing the answer is worth waiting for.

So here is my question for you this week: who is writing down what your teenager says matters to them?

Research cited

Damon, W., Malin, H., & Colby, A. (2024). Purpose development in the context of higher education. Applied Developmental Science.

Colby, A., Malin, H., & Morton, E. (2022). What college students are after and why. Journal of College and Character.

Do, M. H., Cui, Y., Hill, N. E., et al. (2025). Adolescent self-efficacy and orientation about the future: Longitudinal associations with family/school support and sense of purpose. Journal of Research on Adolescence.

Fuligni, A. J., Trimble, A., & Smola, X. A. (2024). The significance of feeling needed and useful to family and friends for psychological well-being during adolescence. Journal of Adolescence.

Want to explore these ideas further? Learn more about my work on leadership, identity and conviction at www.theglennllopis.com.