Prior to college, I spent a gap year in Jerusalem studying ancient Jewish texts. It was a pretty privileged time. I had limited responsibilities and was immersed in a place of inherent spiritual meaning. One concept from the year stood out: the idea of longing, seeking to find my home in the world.

When I began Penn, excited to explore, I started hearing one question on repeat. "What do you want to do?" I had no idea what to respond the first time. When I did, my answers seemed forced. The question incentivized a predetermined path, maybe even closed-minded projections for the future. I knew my general direction: I wanted to figure out hard, important problems with smart people I admired. I didn't know what that meant tangibly.

Jerusalem and Penn offered two modes to cultivate direction. I call these projection and pursuit. Projection – the default at school – places a premium on concrete, linear thinking. It tends towards the proven. It's a business oriented view of life, encouraging a calculated manufacturing of the you-in-ten-years. Pursuit considers the abstract, the creative, the authentic. It's the art of living, hearing the whisper of your inner child.

My argument is not about choosing but ordering. Pursuit first, projection follows. Take, for example, the freshman year dilemma: projection is the question "what do you want to do?" Pursuit is the question "why do you want to do what you do?" Projection is the what. Pursuit is the why. Why before what.

This is not so easy. Our education system does a good job at teaching projection and rewarding it. So does the job market. Students are presented hoops and get really good at jumping through them. The best become excellent sheep, people capable of jumping through any hoop without asking why. It's the respectable high-school-to-college-to-fancy-job pipeline. My experience at Penn was representative of that.

And so, talented young people often lose sight of pursuit – the ultimate power and necessity of choice.

"Man is condemned to be free," writes Sartre, a twentieth-century existentialist. We are not free to choose, but we are free to choose, he argues.

David Foster Wallace puts it more simply. "There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship."

And our apparent options aren't all so great. "If you worship money and things, then you will never have enough," Wallace continues. "Worship beauty, you will always feel ugly. Worship power, you will feel weak and afraid. Worship your intellect, you will end up feeling stupid."

Worshipping the transcendent, on the other hand, helps guide us. Think: noble goals, like truth and liberty and our other ideals, or service, spirituality, and positive freedom, like the notion that "the essence of living as a human being is being challenged, being tempted, being called."

Pursuit is discovering this call. That's the story of Steve Jobs, Steph Curry, Warren Buffet, and the Buddha. It's about knowing your job. It's vocation.

Projection, at its best, is about enabling your pursuit. Both are within us. And both are crucial for success and flourishing. Projection without pursuit is an empty way to live. It's jumping through hoops for the sake of it, following someone else's dream. But pursuit without projection is unrealistic. There will be no achievement. Because "if you fail to plan, you plan to fail." Executing against a strategy is required. It can be difficult and unsexy. Hopefully it's joyful. At the very least, it's ours.