Here’s a bottom-up approach to discovering your purpose.
I am partial to the idea that when we were born, we didn’t have a given purpose (there is no destiny). Even if there was one, we were not aware of it. My intuition tells me that it was tiny decisions I made along the way from childhood to adulthood that determined what we I am interested about at the current moment. We try different things out and take note of what resonated to us and what didn’t (convergence–divergence model of creativity).
However, trying different things out produce too much information and magnets of attention that could easily produce overwhelm. We need a certain tool—a purpose or a question—to make sense of all these information. This means that a purpose is simply a narrowing tool that gives us a sense of control and direction.
Realizing that purpose is simply a convergence tool implies that you can find your purpose through divergence–convergence. This method applies to thinking about the purpose of your life as well as the purpose of your smaller projects.