Hello friends!

I spent a lot of my early-to-mid-20's feeling confused about what I should do with my life. During this period, I collected a lot of questions that I thought would help me gain clarity. And then I noticed something interesting...

The most commonly suggested questions always left me feeling more confused:

• What is your purpose?
• What are your strengths?
• What world problems do you want to solve?

While certain variations of those questions seemed to be far more effective:

• What makes you feel alive?
• What feels effortless to you that it shocks you when others seem to find the same thing to be difficult?
• What feels like play to you, but looks like work to others?

Upon reflection, I think I've figured it out. It's all about the balance between optionality and signal strength.

That's what this week's exploration is about.

This week's theme:

What creates clarity out of confusion.

1. Confusion vs Clarity

Think back to a time you've arrived at a new city and you want to know which restaurants are worth checking out. You open Google Maps and get instantly overwhelmed with suggestions. Online "top restaurants" lists are just as nauseating.

That's confusion.

But now think back to a time when you met a local guide who just said to you: "This is my favourite restaurant, just go there." You ignore all the other options and follow their advice.

That's clarity.

So what's really going on here?

It's the difference between optionality and signal strength.

• When you have too many options with very weak signals cutting through, you end up confused.
• When you have fewer options but strong signals, you end up with clarity.

2. Why this matters

So if you're confused about life (as I was), then you're in state where you have too many options and too weak of signals.

In this state, guess what will leave you more confused?

That's right... more options.

And now let's go back to the list of questions which left me feeling more confused: "What is your purpose? What are your strengths? What world problems do you want to solve?"

What do you think these questions do?

That's right... they create more options.

And so no wonder why I get left feeling more confused.

3. The types of questions you should be asking

So if you're done with being confused, the thing to do is to narrow options and increase signal strength.

Going back to the other more effective questions, we can see how they achieve that:

This question gives you a signal you can follow... the feeling of aliveness.

This question gives you another signal to follow... the feeling effortlessness. It also narrows down options by filtering for things that are uniquely effortless to you.

The signal here is the feeling of being drawn to something. And the narrowing down is through the filter of others are repelled by.

So there you have it. If you're feeling confused, stop asking questions that give you more options. Start asking questions that give you stronger signals.

If you'd like to explore this more...

This week's video goes into this topic in more depth. You can watch it here:

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That's it for this week's issue of Emotional Explorations! I hope it brought you clarity and I look forward to writing to you again soon.

Best,
Eric