I am still searching for purpose. Five years ago, that admission would have unsettled me. It would have made me feel lost, behind, as if I had missed some invisible milestone everyone else seemed to reach on time. Today, I’m more comfortable not having it figured out. I’m no longer convinced this is a problem, or that purpose is something you are meant to find once and then organize your life around forever. If anything, with each passing year and each deeper experience, I grow more suspicious of the idea that a single, stable purpose is either realistic or desirable.

That suspicion comes from watching how often the search for purpose turns into a reason to pause. Purpose is treated as something you must secure before you’re allowed to act, as if movement without certainty is reckless rather than necessary. When clarity doesn’t arrive, people wait. They stay where they are longer than they should. They overthink decisions that only experience can answer. Stillness begins to feel responsible, even wise, when in reality it often masks fear.. fear of choosing incorrectly, of closing doors, of being exposed by action.

We allow products to be released unfinished. We allow ideas to be provisional. But with ourselves, we insist on coherence before motion and often disguise it under the umbrella of maturity. We tell ourselves we’re being patient, thoughtful, deliberate, when what we’re often doing is postponing contact with reality. The language sounds responsible. The outcome is inertia. What rarely gets acknowledged is the cost of not moving. Inaction doesn’t preserve optionality the way people think it does. It erodes it. Time passes regardless, but without movement there is no feedback.. only imagination. You can convince yourself you would thrive elsewhere, that you’re capable of more, that something better is waiting just beyond your current situation. But without exposure, none of that gets tested. Stillness allows almost any self-concept to survive unchallenged. Movement does not.

Movement, not purpose, is what breaks the paralysis. It doesn’t require a narrative or a long-term justification. It only requires engagement. When you move, even imperfectly, reality responds. It introduces friction, constraint, and consequence. You begin to learn not through introspection alone, but through contact.. with environments, people, responsibilities, and trade-offs that challenge the stories you tell yourself about who you are.

Stillness also has a quieter cost. Over time, it dulls curiosity. It replaces momentum with rumination. You begin to confuse caution with depth, patience with progress. The question slowly shifts from What could this become? to Why didn’t I try when I had the chance? That kind of regret is rarely dramatic, but it accumulates. It shows up as restlessness, disengagement, and a persistent sense that life is happening adjacent to you rather than with you.

There’s also an unspoken assumption that purpose must be singular, stable, and permanent. That belief flattens the way people actually grow. Lives unfold in phases. Identities shift. What feels essential in one season may feel restrictive in another. Movement allows for this evolution without framing it as failure. It creates continuity without demanding consistency. Purpose, when it arrives at all, rarely arrives upfront. It tends to emerge quietly, as a pattern you notice over time in the kinds of problems you’re drawn to, the environments where you do your best work, the compromises you’re willing to make. But none of that becomes visible without motion.. without trying, misjudging, recalibrating, and trying again.

This became especially clear to me recently after delivering a workshop in Amman to a group of ambitious teenagers that I titled "Idea2Impact". The aim of the session was simple: to offer practical guidance on how to turn ideas into reality. Preparing the content for it forced me to reflect on my own journey. In the past, when preparing for workshops like this, I would almost instinctively reach for what used to be one of my favorite frameworks: Ikigai. It’s elegant and reassuring, offering the comfort of convergence: what you love, what you’re good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for. I used to force myself to reflect on my journey by neatly connecting it into a single story. This time, I didn’t and scrapped it entirely. Instead of presenting a clean framework, I chose to walk them through my own unorthodox path.. one shaped less by alignment and more by movement, trial, and contradiction. It felt more honest to show that direction (at least in my case) only emerged after motion, not before it.

That willingness to move is what made it possible for me to end up doing a bunch of cool stuff in different spaces. I studied law for five years. I also wrote about global sports, at one point having my work reshared by Ronaldo (not once, but actually 3 times!). Worked closely with the International Olympic Committee and represented my country within the Olympic movement, experiencing firsthand the scale of their global impact. It felt like living a childhood dream. One day in Tokyo, another in Buenos Aires, another in Lausanne, interacting with some of the biggest names in sport. That chapter taught me discipline and an honest relationship with effort, and for a while, I was convinced this was where I would find my purpose.

Over time though, I realized I was less interested in staying within that world than in translating what it had given me into something else. That realization took me down a completely different path. Building my own organization from the ground up reshaped how I understood value creation altogether. I didn’t have a clear sense of purpose or a defined North Star when it began. What unfolded instead was a rollercoaster of constraints, missteps, and learning that taught me more about going from zero to one than any MBA or executive education ever could. It showed me that solving real problems, under real constraints, is what creates lasting value.

From there, movement kept compounding. I learned social entrepreneurship firsthand while working with Nobel Laureate Professor Muhammad Yunus and his team. An Oscar-nominated director later made a short film about my work, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York. I’ve received awards from European monarchies that I didn’t even know existed at the time. We ended up launching a scholarship fund for refugee youth. Was also fortunate to be nominated and selected by the Ford Foundation for a $50 million, multi-year fund focused on backing individuals using innovation to address inequality across different global contexts. That experience opened doors I wouldn’t have otherwise had access to. It allowed me to join an incredible group of global leaders (might be the only one without a Wikipedia page). It also allowed me to visit and see their work in action from the Amazon and favelas in Brazil, to townships outside Cape Town, to refugee communities across the region. Movement meant exposure, and it led to more invitations to learn from and engage with institutions I hadn’t imagined earlier. From invitations by the Chinese government to speak with policymakers in Beijing around the Belt and Road initiative, to engaging in Stanford programs in Tunis, to lecturing Masters students at Sciences Po university in Paris.

Somewhere along that journey, I found myself crossing a bridge, from social entrepreneurship into the world of tech. Working closely with startup hubs and early-stage founders introduced a different set of lessons. The startup and venture-building world tested my tolerance for ambiguity and failure, it suddenly became less about intent and more about outcomes. More recently, I found myself working at the intersection of government and technology (with not one, but two giant regional trade and transport operators) where the questions shifted again.. toward scale, infrastructure, and the long-term impact of building systems intended to serve nations.

None of these experiences offered a clean answer about who I am. But each one clarified something essential: what energizes me, what doesn’t, what I’m capable of, and, just as importantly... what I terribly suck at. Looking back, what strikes me isn’t the breadth of domains, but how little of it came from having a plan. The common thread wasn’t purpose or some form of unique talent. It was movement. Each step lowered the friction for the next one. Over time, it taught me that more often than you think, you can just do things.

What reassured me most during the workshop I delivered was seeing how differently this generation approaches life. Today’s teenagers seem far less burdened by artificial constraints, far more willing to experiment, and far less afraid of embarrassment. They move first and make sense of things later, not because they’re careless, but because that approach feels more honest than being overly conservative. There’s a quiet confidence in that mindset, not arrogance, but freedom and I suspect it will create stronger outcomes for them, and for the societies they’ll help shape.

I don’t know if I’ll ever arrive at a single purpose, and I’m no longer chasing that outcome. What I trust instead is my willingness to move.. not constantly, not recklessly, but honestly. To stay engaged with different dimensions of the world rather than waiting for it to make sense first. Everything I understand about myself so far has come from that approach.

Purpose is often treated as a prerequisite for action, when in reality it’s more often the byproduct of it. So move.. to a different city, into a new role, across a new domain, or toward anything unfamiliar that challenges your assumptions about what you’re capable of. Not because you know where it leads, but because movement is how you find out.