For 25 years I have asked people one question. What do you actually want?
Ask most people who they are and you get a job title. Ask again and you get a plan somebody else made for them. Ask a third time and the room goes quiet.
An entire industry sits on top of that silence.
Apps that regulate you.
Chatbots that agree with you.
Retreats that make Sunday feel different and change nothing by Wednesday.
You feel lighter for a week. Then the same calendar, the same patterns, the same self.
That is symptom management. Nobody taught us how to look inward without a distraction running. We learned how to cope. We never learned how to comprehend.
The thing underneath is not complicated. It is just unattended.
The research became a model that reads what a person actually says and tells them what sits underneath it. Built on a decade of proprietary research and 7,000 interviews, reviewed by psychologists, explainable line by line. It is the engine, and an engine needs somewhere to go.
More on millionways →The place people go to ask what comes next. An analysis that tells you the truth, and an introduction to the person who needs what you naturally are. It is being built in the open, with the people it is for.
Follow the build →I speak about what a life is for after the work goes, why self-understanding is the foundation for all future happiness, and what a society looks like when people follow the inner voice early. Provocative, apolitical, and useful by Monday.
Bring me to your stage →The people building AI agree it will absorb much of the work. Ask them what a person does with a life after that, and what a society looks like as a result, and the room goes quiet again.
I have spent my whole life on that answer.
I was adopted at one day old. I felt like a stranger in any environment, wondering how to follow what called to me, rather than doing what others said I should. That question runs everything after it.
For years I built home-based work for people who needed it and could not go out to find it. Homeless men, single mothers, disabled workers. I paid them properly, and I sat and worked with them. I learned that every one of them had a talent nobody had ever asked about.
Then I built a foundation in Germany so those conversations could keep happening without me in the room. Then a book. Then an AI, because 7,000 interviews is a dataset with a pattern to reveal.
The long version →A boy of eight, from a background with few options in front of him, was asked what he wanted in life. He said building ships. We introduced him to a former shipyard worker. Seven years later he worked in that shipyard.
The question surfaced the wish. The introduction did the work. What changed him was finding out he was worth something because somebody needed exactly what he already was.
That is the method. I have watched it happen a few thousand times. Every trait people have is a talent for someone else who does not have it. Nobody is talentless.
Children listen to themselves without being told to. Then they learn to be careful, and the voice goes quiet, and thirty years later somebody sits across from me and cannot answer one question about who they are and what they want.
My work builds towards a world where following your own path is the norm, rather than the brave thing to do. Where people find the life that fits earlier, and find each other on the way there.
I call myself a practicing utopian because I do not think that is a faraway dream. I think that’s a world we can all start to build. If millions of people change their own life, the direction of the utopia for the collective is already obtainable.