A step-by-step process for discovering what makes you feel alive and building a life around it.
We spend our days generating enough energy to just get through them. Whether it’s the job, the studying, the admin, the housework, or looking after the kids – we’re all just wading through mud and we’ve decided that’s normal. But some people are more alive at the end of the day than they were at the start. They’re not luckier or more hardworking. They just know what they were wired for.
Here’s what makes that possible: every single person is wired differently. Your best moments, the ones where time disappeared and energy came from nowhere don’t look like anyone else’s. What makes you feel alive is yours alone. When you find what it is, decisions get easier, because you finally have a filter. You stop saying yes to things that look good but drain you. Tiredness stops being the default.
Inside this book you’ll meet ten people living completely different lives, energised by completely different things. One comes alive exploring the unknown. Another, bringing order to chaos. Another, in high-stakes moments that demand everything he’s got.
Their stories will help you find yours.
George is the founder of Clear Ads, a London advertising agency. Two years ago he was burned out and driven by anxiety. Every time he thought he’d found his Why, he got shut down by Steve Simonson (the creator of the framework).When it finally landed “I am most alive when I’m creating” , it changed how he worked, slept and lived, and he decided the process needed to be a book. He ran the interviews with the ten people whose stories run through it.
Izzie is a youth worker by vocation and the writer of this book. Her own Why “bringing order to chaos” turned out to be exactly what the project needed: she took the framework, the interviews, and George’s ideas and turned them into the pages you’ll read.
Steve is a serial entrepreneur who built and sold multi-million-dollar e-commerce businesses, and now mentors founders around the world. In the early 1990s, a business coach named Bjorn sent him a letter with fifty dollars inside and a proposal: meet me for half an hour, and if it’s not worth your time, keep the money.
That fifty dollars bought Steve two years of being told his answers were wrong until his real Why finally landed. He’s spent the years since refining the process and taking other people through it. The framework in Why Am I? is the result: the same process, made accessible to anyone willing to do the work.
