How to find your North Star

I talk a lot about using your North Star to make decisions, but I don’t think I’ve ever fully broken down how to find it.

Below is an excerpt of chapter 1 of my new book ‘Work With The Best’ - but I’m sharing it with you because I think it’s that powerful - and I want ALL of my friends and readers to implement it.

Enjoy (and implement 🤝):

There’s a scene in Alice in Wonderland that haunts me:

Alice is walking down a dirt trail when she hits a fork in the road. She doesn’t know which way to go, so she looks up at the Cheshire cat perched in a tree and asks, “Mr. Cheshire cat, which path should I go down?”

The Cheshire cat responds, “Well, where do you wanna go?”

Alice replies, “I don’t know.”

The Cheshire cat says, “Then it doesn’t matter. If you don’t know where you want to go, any path will take you there.”

And my gosh does that scene live rent-free in my head.

How often do we spend our days rushing around trying to accomplish things that we haven’t clearly defined? We say things like “I want to be happy,” or “I’m chasing freedom,” or “I’m building my career,” but we never stop to ask what those things mean to us.

At the risk of stating the obvious, it’s hard to hit a target you can’t see, yet many people are so busy being “productive” that they never actually get what they want.

But isn’t that the whole point of life? To squeeze it for everything it’s worth, to live intentionally, and to get absolutely everything you want out of the one shot you’ve been given?

So I ask you: what do you want?

Not what sounds good in a LinkedIn post or what your parents would be proud to tell people at dinner. What do you actually want?

If that question is hard to answer, you’re not alone. It’s a paralyzing question no matter what stage of life you’re in, because facing it means confronting the possible reality that you’re not where you want to be. And as long as you keep it vague, you never have to do anything about it.

But that’s exactly why you need to write down what you want. The discomfort you feel when you try to honestly answer it is the same force that will push you to act on it. Once you put it on paper, it stops being an abstract feeling and becomes something you can move toward.

Before I give you the exercise to help you answer that question, I want to set an expectation. The point of defining your North Star is NOT to get the perfect answer. What you write down today will almost certainly change. That’s fine. In fact, that’s the point. The value isn’t in the answer. It’s in the habit of reflecting.

I know, I know. We’re barely into the first chapter and I’m already giving you homework. But this is the most important exercise in the entire book, and everything that comes after it builds on what you write down here. So don’t skip it.

Here’s my answer (for brevity’s sake, I’ve cut it down to its core elements, but it could and should be multiple pages for you):

My North Star (age 20, 3/18/2026):

A perfect Tuesday for me comes down to three things: working on something meaningful, doing something physically hard, and ending the day with the people I care about.

An ideal day right now would be:

• Wake up around 6-7am.

• Make breakfast & read.

• Get lost in writing one of my books.

• Lift & run.

• Write my newsletter & social media content.

• Eat lunch.

• Go for a walk.

• Interviews & calls in the afternoon.

• Eat dinner.

• Chill with friends & family.

Right now, I’d love to live in a city where I’m close to many of my ambitious friends so we can all co-work and level up together.

Eventually, I want to live by the beach so I can hear the ocean waves when I wake up in the morning. One of my aspirations is to eventually move into a beautiful house (with a basketball & pickleball court) and have my close friends live in a cul-de-sac community together, where we can all raise our kids.

I want to feel high energy and athletic. I want to be able to lift heavy, run fast, and play sports at a high level. I want to be proud of my physique when I look in the mirror.

I can’t wait to be a husband and a father. What could possibly be more beautiful and important than building a family and raising healthy children? I want to be the kind of dad that my kids look up to, but also feel safe enough to talk to about anything. High standards with high support.

I want to be the kind of husband who provides, and I mean that in every sense of the word. Financially. Emotionally. I want to be present, not buried in my phone or my work when I’m home. I want to be someone who listens. A safe space. A man of my word. I don’t want a relationship where either of us shrinks to fit the other. I think a great relationship is 1 + 1 = 11, not .5 + .5 = 1. It’s two whole people who are both growing, pursuing things that matter to them, and actively supporting each other in doing it.

My ideal work environment is one where I’m indoors and have long blocks of uninterrupted focus time, but also complete control over my schedule. I want to be able to go for a long, aimless walk at noon. Be in the gym with all the retired old people at 2pm. Take a random Thursday off to hang out with friends, and never feel physically chained to a desk or an office.

Money buys me the freedom to say no to projects that don’t interest me and steal my focus away from the things that I want to do. More importantly, it gives me the ability to create an amazing life for my family and friends.

I want to be rich. I’ll admit it. But not so I can buy a Lamborghini. I’d prefer a Porsche. Kidding. I want to be rich so I can control my time. So I can sit at a cafe and order my wife breakfast without looking at the prices. So my parents don’t have to worry about money. So I can travel freely and show my kids the world. So I can take my friends out to dinner and say, “Don’t worry, it’s on me.” So my kids can get the very best education. That’s my idea of a rich life. Money isn’t the goal; it’s a tool to live a deeper, more fulfilling, adventurous life.

When I was younger, I had this intense desire to make my name known for something, to be one of the best to ever do it. What I’ve realized is I would much rather live a life I’m proud of than chase a legacy. The pursuit of public greatness, at least for me, has always come from a state of lack, a feeling of “I’m not enough.” As I’ve gotten older, I’ve felt that fuel burning out and being replaced by something cleaner. I don’t actually want to go to Mars. I’m more than happy being in orbit and enjoying the view.

The skill I want to master is the craft of writing. The word “inspire” comes from the Latin root “inspirare” which means “to breathe life into.” If my writing can breathe even a little bit of life into someone, give them the push to go after what they want, I’d consider that a success. I think the world will be a better place when more people figure out what they want and get to work on it.

As for what I want people to remember about me, I want to be remembered as someone who gave more than he took. Someone that other people liked having around because he was always looking for ways to make their lives better. I’ll be honest, I’ve had to work hard at thinking about others first and being observant about how people are feeling. I’m still working on it. But if I get it right, I’ll be remembered as someone who was useful.

Exercise: Define Your North Star

Again, please don’t skip past this exercise. If you don’t answer these questions, I will come find you.

I want you to grab a notebook and write down today’s date and your age at the top. Then I want you to answer the bold prompts below (if you’re having trouble, the other questions are there to guide you):

1. If money were no object, what would a perfect ordinary Tuesday look like right now? From the moment you woke up to the moment you went to sleep, be specific about where you are, who you’re with, and what you’re doing.

Note: Why Tuesday and not Friday? Because Friday is the highlight reel. Everyone’s Friday looks good (date night, hanging with friends, the weekend ahead). Tuesday is the most ordinary day of the week. No one romanticizes a Tuesday, and that’s exactly why it’s the right test. If you can only describe a life you’d love on Friday nights and vacations, you haven’t designed a life, you’ve designed an escape.

2. Where do you want to live? What does your environment look and feel like? Do you live in the city, the coast, the mountains, somewhere abroad? Do you live in a house, an apartment? Do you have multiple homes? Do you want to stay in one place or move often?

3. How do you want your body to feel on a daily basis? What does your energy, health, and physical life look like at your best? Do you want to optimize for aesthetics, longevity or flexibility? Maybe all three?

4. What does your inner circle look like? Do you want to build a family, close friendships, a tight community? What kind of person do you want to be to the people closest to you?

5. What does your ideal work environment look like? Are you inside or outside? Alone or surrounded by people? Are you moving around or sitting still? Working with your hands, your mind, or both?

6. What does money do for your life? What do you want money for? What does your life look like when you have “enough”? What is “enough”? What can you do with more money that you can’t do right now? What do the people you love no longer have to worry about?

7. What do you want to get really good at? What is the craft, skill, or domain that you want to spend years mastering? What would it feel like to be world-class at something? (It’s okay if you aren’t sure yet, we will dive deeper into this in chapter 3).

8. What do you want people to say about you at your eulogy? Will they list all of your impressive accomplishments, or will they care about something deeper? Were you someone who showed up? Were you generous, present, honest? Did you inspire them? Did they trust you? Did they feel seen when they were with you?

Pro Tip: Change your physiology to change your psychology. If you feel stuck, write these questions in a notebook, then go for a walk. Bring your pen and notebook. Don’t listen to music or scroll social media. Just walk. Ponder and reflect on these questions.

If you run into a Cheshire cat and don’t have your answers yet, that’s okay. Keep walking. They’ll come to you.

Now that you’ve written your North Star, don’t treat it as a one-time exercise. Come back to it regularly - especially when you’re facing a big decision or notice that your day-to-day life is drifting away from what you wrote. Your North Star is meant to evolve as you do, but it should keep giving you a clear way to ask: am I moving closer to the life I want, or away from it?

What you’ll also notice when you write down your North Star is that it creates a gap between where you are and where you want to be.

Psychologists call this drive theory. When you’re deprived of something, your brain creates an internal pressure to get it. The more deprived you are, the higher the incentive value of the thing you want becomes.

Food tastes better when you’re hungry. Water means more when you’re thirsty. When you’ve written down a vivid picture of the life you want and then look up at the life you currently have, that distance creates a drive that motivates you to take action.

Investor Naval Ravikant once quipped, “Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.”

That sounds like a bad thing, but it’s not. Think about what happens when you’re underwater and running out of air. You don’t casually swim to the surface. You kick and claw. You fight your way up with everything you have.

The nuance is that deprivation is incredible fuel for getting started, but it’s not great fuel for sustaining. Eventually you’ll want to transition to cleaner fuel. We’ll talk about finding that in chapter 3 when we cover “finding your unfair advantage.”

But first, now that we have a draft of our North Star, the next thing we need to solve for is how to use it. Because just writing it down and shoving it in the back of a drawer does nothing for our lives.

What comes next is how to take your North Star and integrate it into your daily decision-making.

Read the rest of the book here.

Until next week,

Jay “Define Your North Star” Yang

Author of You Can Just Do Things & Work With The Best

Ps. More books I like

Cofounder of OpenAI Andrej Karpathy on learning:

“There are a lot of videos online that give the appearance of education, but if you look close enough they really are just entertainment. This is very convenient for everyone involved: the people watching enjoy thinking they are learning (but actually they are just having fun). The people creating this content also enjoy it because fun has a much larger audience, fame, and revenue. But as far as learning goes, this is a trap. It's like snacking on those "Garden Veggie Straws", which feel like you're eating healthy vegetables until you look at the ingredients.

Learning is not supposed to be fun. It doesn't have to actively not be fun either, but the primary feeling should be that of effort. It should look a lot less like that "10 minute full body" workout from your local digital media creator and a lot more like a serious session at the gym. You want the mental equivalent of sweating. It's not that the quickie doesn't do anything, it's just that it is wildly suboptimal if you actually care to learn.

I find it helpful to explicitly declare your intent up front as a sharp, binary variable in your mind. If you are consuming content: are you trying to be entertained or are you trying to learn? And if you are creating content: are you trying to entertain or are you trying to teach? You'll go down a different path in each case.

For those who actually want to learn: Unless you are trying to learn something narrow and specific, close those tabs with quick blog posts. Close those tabs of "Learn XYZ in 10 minutes". Consider the opportunity cost of snacking and seek the meal - the textbooks, docs, papers, manuals, longform. Allocate a 4 hour window. Don't just read, take notes, re-read, re-phrase, process, manipulate, learn.

And for those actually trying to educate, please consider writing/recording longform, designed for someone to get "sweaty", especially in today's era of quantity over quality. Give someone a real workout. This is what I aspire to in my own educational work too. My audience will decrease. The ones that remain might not even like it. But at least we'll learn something.”

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on the best career advice he ever got:

“The best career advice I got was from a gardener.

I went to the temple with the largest moss collection in the world. There was this old man working with a tweezer. He said he was taking care of the garden.

I asked, "But this garden is so big, and your tweezers are so small. How can you take care of the whole garden?"

And he said, "I have plenty of time."

That's the best career advice I can give you.

I don't wear a watch because “now” is the most important time. I don't aspire to do more. I aspire to do better at what I'm currently doing. Nvidia doesn't have a long-term strategy. Our long-term plan is: what are we doing today?

You have plenty of time. Enjoy your work. Do the best you possibly can, keep learning every day, and good things will come to you.”

Want to accelerate your career? Be overwhelmingly useful to everyone you work with and meet.

The world is abundant with people who can point out what’s wrong with things.

Be someone who brings solutions to the table.

If you’re a problem solver, the world is yours.

You schedule your work sessions.

And your meetings.

Why aren’t you scheduling time to think, strategize, and scheme?

When you can build anything.

Deciding WHAT to build becomes increasingly paramount.

The people at the top aren’t just outworking you, they’re outthinking you.

The price of being competent is looking incompetent for a long period of time.

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