Key Takeaways
- Andy had been a minister for almost thirty years and would have told you he’d already found his purpose, yet the process still overturned his first answer about what made him feel alive.
- His first hypothesis was that his Why was about people and serving them, but it failed one simple test: a whole day of it would have drained him. A true Why fills you rather than drains you.
- The real answer, exploring, was hiding at item nine on a list he found strangely difficult to write, and had been running through his life since he was a young man exploring invented worlds in early video game simulators.
- A one-word Why is only half a Why: it took two more sessions to find the conditions that make it true, including one, sharing, that Andy had never noticed about himself.
- The finished statement passed the only test that matters: not agreement, but a physical reaction, goosebumps, and the words “That’s it, that’s it, that’s it.”
Did Andy Even Need a Why?
Andy is the last person you’d expect to be searching for purpose. He’s a pastor in Poole (on the south coast of the UK), in his early sixties, and he’s been a minister for almost thirty years. He loves his work. He’s energetic, endlessly curious about people, and settled in both his job and his home life. If you’d asked him whether he’d found his purpose, he’d have said yes without hesitating.
That’s exactly what made him worth listening to when he agreed to go through the Why process with us. If the process only works for people in crisis, it’s a rescue tool. If it works for someone who already loves his life, it’s something else: a way of finally seeing the instrument you’ve been playing all along.
Andy came in expecting to confirm what he already knew about himself. What happened instead is the reason this story is worth telling.
What Did Andy Think His Why Was?
Andy’s first answer was “people”. When we asked him for the moments in his life when he felt most alive, every one of them seemed to point the same way. Counselling someone in a quiet café, completely tuned in, until the person across the table said, “I don’t think I’ve ever told anyone this.” Preaching. Deep one-to-one conversations that mattered.
When we asked him what it was about those conversations that he loved, his answer came easily. “If this doesn’t sound too super spiritual,” he said, “it is serving the person.”
It made perfect sense. A pastor of thirty years, gifted at listening, whose days are full of people, whose peak moments are full of people. Of course his Why was about serving them. It’s the answer his whole life seemed to be pointing towards.
What Test Broke the First Answer?
One question dismantled it: could he do it all day and end the day with more energy than he started with? A true Why works like that. It fills you rather than drains you, from early morning to late evening. That’s the test.
So we asked Andy to imagine it. Tomorrow, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., nothing but those deep, meaningful, one-to-one conversations, with breaks in between to walk and mull things over. Would he come home full?
“No.”
He didn’t even have to think about it. One hour of that kind of conversation left him exhausted. A whole day of it was unimaginable. And that answer stopped us in our tracks, because it’s the exact opposite of what a Why does. Whatever this thing was that made Andy feel alive, “serving people” wasn’t its name.
Which left us with a much better question. When Andy is with people and feels completely alive, what exactly is happening inside him?
Where Do You Look When the Obvious Answer Fails?
The answer was hiding in what Andy didn’t want. Before the sessions, he’d written a Don’t Want list, everything that drains him, and the top of it wasn’t what you’d expect from a man in his position.
Alongside admin and long meetings sat deeper entries: shame, embarrassment, relational disharmony. And underneath almost all of it ran one quiet theme. Nearly everything on the list was a situation where he knew exactly what was going to happen.
Fixed agendas. Predetermined outcomes. Tuesdays, his worst day of the week, not because anything bad happens on a Tuesday, but because it’s a string of scheduled meetings with no surprises in it anywhere at all.
He described sitting in those meetings as claustrophobic. The problem was never being busy, and it was never the people in the room. The thing draining him was predictability.
Then came the Do Want list, which he found strangely harder to write. He worked through it slowly. Completion. Acceptance. Challenge. Fixing things. And then, at item nine, he stopped.
“When I got to nine, exploring, I suddenly went: oh, that’s interesting. I love exploring.”
Once he’d said the word, he couldn’t stop finding it. Exploring a person’s life in conversation. Exploring the harbour in his kayak. Exploring a Bible passage until it breaks open. Exploring new ideas, new places, new relationships. He remembered being a young man in the earliest days of video games, when someone built the first flight simulator, and the thrill of it had nothing to do with flying. He could explore a world that didn’t exist. He remembered that even now, driving somewhere, he’ll deliberately take a different route back, just because he hasn’t been that way before.
The pattern had been running his whole life. He’d simply never had a word for it. And it explained the counselling moment better than “serving” ever did: sitting across from someone opening up for the first time, Andy wasn’t performing a service. He was exploring a person, and the territory was brand new.
Why Isn’t “Exploring” the Whole Answer?
A statement without its conditions is half a Why. “Andy is most alive when he’s exploring” was true, and we could have stopped there. But a single word can’t tell you why some exploring lights him up and some leaves him flat, so we spent two more sessions testing it, and the word earned four companions.
It has to be new to him.
Not new to the world, just new to Andy.
This is a man who doesn’t cook, who nevertheless disappeared into sourdough baking, learning from a friend, watching tutorials, experimenting, failing, because the whole territory was unexplored.
Millions of people bake sourdough. Andy never had.
That was enough.
It has to stretch him.
We’d been calling this “pressure,” but the sourdough broke that word too. There was no deadline on that loaf, and he was alive the whole way through it. What his work deadlines had been doing all those years, the Saturday mornings writing a sermon for a 10:30 Sunday deadline, was forcing a stretch. The stretch was the real ingredient. The deadline was just its delivery mechanism.
It has to be free.
Genuine exploration, not managed exploration. Andy can tell the difference instantly. A Bible study where the leader knows the destination but gives everyone real freedom to find it feels like discovery. A tick-box study, or a question with one predetermined answer everyone must be steered towards, feels like being a puppet. His word, not ours.
And it has to be shared. This was the one that surprised him. “Which I hadn’t realised,” he told us, when it finally surfaced. Andy explores alone, and prefers to. But exploring something and never telling a soul isn’t him and never has been. The sourdough had its big reveal to his wife, Carol. The kayak route becomes “isn’t this beautiful? You’d love to do this as well.” The sermon is a week of solitary exploration built entirely towards the moment of sharing it. He doesn’t need anyone to act on what he shares. Showing them the joy of what he found is enough.
How Do You Know When the Statement Is Right?
The right statement isn’t one you agree with. It’s one you feel. We’d learned this standard from Steve, who built the framework this book is based on: when you finally read your true Why, it produces energy in your body, not a nod of the head.
Over the final session, word by word, the statement came together. One last ingredient, independently, was added at the very end, after Andy remembered trying to write a church vision by committee, going round and round in circles until he gave up and wrote it alone. Then we read back to him a character reference built from everything he’d told us: endlessly curious, asks the right questions, enthusiastic about new ideas in a way that draws people in, a thoughtful risk-taker.
He couldn’t keep still while he listened. “I’m getting excited because I’m going: that’s it, that’s it, that’s it.” Goosebumps, by his own account.
The finished statement reads:
Andy is most alive when independently, freely exploring something new to him that stretches him, and that he’s able to share with others.
His verdict on it was simple. This wasn’t a description of his job. It linked his entire life.
What Changed for a Man Whose Life Already Worked?
Andy started rebuilding his week before the process was even finished. The statement gave him permission to say something out loud that thirty years of ministry had made him feel guilty about: he should not be the one uploading videos to YouTube. There’s someone in his church who would genuinely love that job. Handing it over isn’t laziness. It’s giving two people more life at once.
So the admin started moving off his desk. He talked it through with a colleague, and he began holding his diary up against the statement, asking of each thing in it: is there any exploring in here, or is this another Tuesday?
And he noticed one more thing, the kind of detail this process keeps producing. The reason the sessions themselves had energised him week after week, when they should have been tiring, is that exploring his own Why was itself something new to him, stretching him, that he’d one day get to share.
You’re reading the sharing now.
Andy’s story is one of ten in Why Am I?, and his Why looks nothing like the other nine. If you’ve ever answered the question “what makes you feel alive?” too quickly, the book walks you through the same process Andy went through, exercise by exercise, so you can put your own first answer to the test. If you haven’t read it yet, start there.
