I ask a version of the question “what lights you up?” to younger attorneys, friends, and clients all the time. This is not what pays the bills, not what your resume says you’re good at, not what your parents or your professors told you made a respectable career. What actually lights you up. Most people don’t initially have an answer to the question because they’ve spent so many years optimizing for stability, prestige, or the next title that they’ve lost track of the feeling entirely. If you want a shortcut back to the answer, stop asking what you’re supposed to want and start paying attention to what you want.
That’s the tell. Losing track of time isn’t a small thing, it’s data. I’ve watched attorneys who drag through certain assignments come alive the second the conversation turns to the type of assignment they really enjoy. The task itself isn’t the variable. What lit them up was the differentiator. Most of us never stop long enough to notice the pattern because we’re too busy getting the work done to ask why some of it drains us and some of it energizes us.
You don’t need to have this fully figured out to start paying attention to it. In fact, almost none of us do, and treating that as a problem to solve immediately is part of what keeps you stuck. What you can do is start noticing, honestly, without judgment, which meetings you leave with more energy than you walked in with, and which ones don’t. Which projects you’d keep working on after hours without anyone asking you to. Which conversations you replay in your head afterward because you’re still turning the problem over, not because you’re anxious about how it went. Those are the clues. You collect them over years, which is what makes it hard to catch them, group them with prior similar thoughts, and process them, let alone to put them into action.
None of this means you quit your job tomorrow because a spreadsheet bored you. It means you start treating your own attention as information worth taking seriously instead of noise to push through. Careers get built one decision at a time, and the professionals who end up somewhere that actually fits are usually the ones who paid attention early and kept adjusting, not the ones who waited for a single lightning-bolt moment of clarity. You may not know yet exactly what you’re building toward. That’s fine. Just notice where you thrive, follow it honestly, and trust that the pattern will tell you if you make the effort to pay attention.
