Recipes vs. Ingredients
Yes, the title of this essay is Ingredients vs. Recipes. And no, this is not an essay about cooking or food. I’ll get to each of these metaphors in a minute, but before I delve too deep, I want to set the context for each of these so we’re speaking the same language.
The Recipe Culture
You have probably noticed that there isn’t exactly a shortage of people on the internet or social media telling you exactly how you should live.
Wake up at a certain time, and follow a specific morning routine consisting of meditating and reading, coffee (or no coffee), journaling, cold water exposure, etc. to unlock your morning.
Follow and practice a specific fitness routine to achieve the physique you’ve always dreamed of.
Follow this budget or financial model to finally have the life of your dreams.
Eat a specific diet to unlock longevity, lose weight, or have the energy you’ve always wanted.
Build an optimized habit stack to maximize your life.
Just like a set of ingredients you use to bake or cook a recipe for something, these example “recipes” you just read are sets of ingredients that people put together to convince you that if you do what they say, your life will look like theirs.
When someone hands you a step-by-step formula for how to eat, exercise, budget, pray, or structure your morning, it feels like a gift. Someone has already done the hard work of figuring it out, and all you have to do is follow the instructions. Recipes often remove the need to think, and that is their primary value (but also their primary danger).
The vast majority of the content economy is engineered to sell you this, and most of us (to some degree or another) have experimented with one (or more) of these. An Instagram Reel about "5 habits that changed my life" will probably outperform one that says "here are some questions worth sitting with." At a basic level, recipes compress the complexity of a human life into a checklist that promises that if you do the right things in the right order, the right outcomes will follow.
But recipes are often designed for the person who created it. Their wiring, their season, their constraints, their values, their history. When you import that recipe into your life without examining whether it fits your life, you are building on someone else's foundation. And foundations built for a different structure may not work for yours.
To be clear, I’m not saying that other people's wisdom is useless. Books, mentors, frameworks, and even specific habits and patterns from other people can be genuinely helpful. But there is a difference between learning from someone else’s principles and copying their specific formula. The first helps you think, but the second removes most of the thinking from the equation.
The inevitable reality is that no two people are the same. We all have different life circumstances, dispositions, habits, goals, and ideas of what a “good life” looks like. Adopting someone else’s recipe for an area of life (no matter how good it is) without thinking about the why underneath it often results in quiet disappointment when the results don’t show up the way you thought they would.
Your Ingredients Are Not Someone Else's
Think of ingredients just like the individual components in a recipe. For the point I’m trying to make here, these are the things that all of us have, but that are unique to us as individuals. They are the things that make you, you, and the things that make me, me:
Time, talents, and financial resources.
Your season of life, constraints, wiring, and history.
The seven pillars I started writing about over the past several weeks are career, relationships, fitness, diet, finances, spiritual habits, and hobbies. Each of these pillars is a vehicle of expression for your unique ingredients. The pillars in and of themselves do not tell you what your life should look like. They give you categories for thinking about your life as a whole, and where and how you can incorporate your unique ingredients to make your own recipe in each of these pillars. For example:
Your season of life is an ingredient. Whether you are 25 and single or 42 with three kids or 60 and entering a new chapter, each of these seasons helps to shape what intentional living looks like for you right now.
Your constraints are ingredients. Your financial resources, your time, your talents, your energy, your health, your responsibilities. Someone with different constraints will build their recipe differently. That’s not a point for negative comparison, it’s an honest response to a different set of ingredients.
Your wiring is an ingredient. The things that energize you, the things that drain you, how you process the world, what kind of rest actually restores you. Two people with very similar values can live them out in completely different ways because they are working with a different internal architecture.
Your history is an ingredient. The things you have walked through, the lessons that only came from hard experience, the convictions that formed because you lived through something. No one else has your history, which means no one else can write your recipe.
These examples are just a few of many, but the point I’m making is that when you try to force someone else's recipe using your unique ingredients, the result won’t taste right or hold together. And you end up blaming yourself for what was really just a mismatch between the recipe and the raw material you started with.
When you learn your own ingredients and when you slow down enough to actually examine what you are working with, you stop needing someone else to tell you what to do. You start building something that is yours. It won’t be perfect and it may not be optimized. But it will be more aligned to you.
Application
If you have been reading the essays in On Purpose from the beginning, what you have been reading is intentionally not a recipe. Instead of giving you a set of instructions, I’m trying to lay out a set of ingredients for you to learn how to make a recipe unique to you.
The idea that purpose is something you live, not something you find.
The evidence that your time reveals what you actually value.
The reality that drift is the default and direction requires active choice.
The distinction between responsibility and control.
The counterintuitive truth that constraints produce clarity.
The gap between achieving goals and finding meaning.
The difference between being balanced and the practice of balancing.
Each of those ideas is meant to help you to think about your life and your ingredients. None of them told you exactly what to do, but all of them asked you to look honestly at your life and consider whether what you see matches what you say you value.
That is the work. Not following a formula or copying a routine just because it feels easier. Instead, you and I should be learning to understand our own ingredients to build a life that reflects who we actually are and who we are becoming.
Yes, learning how to work with the ingredients unique to you may be slower than following a basic recipe, and yes, it requires more of you. But it produces something a prepackaged recipe never can: a life that is yours.
I want to close with a question that I think captures the tension at the heart of everything I write about: Are you building your life, or are you following instructions for someone else's?
Because the world will never stop offering you recipes. There will always be a new framework, a new influencer, a new set of steps that promise clarity and fulfillment. Some of them will be genuinely useful, and many of them will not. But none of them can replace the slow, honest, and sometimes uncomfortable work of examining your own life, understanding your own ingredients, and choosing to live with intention inside the constraints and opportunities that are uniquely yours.
That is what Born For a Purpose is about. Not giving you answers, but helping you ask better questions. Not telling you how to live, but inviting you to pay attention to the life you are already living.
Your life is speaking. It always has been.
The question is whether you are willing to listen, and then build something with what you hear.
