Entrepreneurship. A Creative’s Path to Purpose
- Albert Schiller
- Apr 27
- 3 min read
Updated: Apr 30
My NoSmalltalk session with Dhisti Desai
Many professional journeys involve exploration, sampling different fields, and acquiring diverse skills – the "Jack of all trades" phenomenon Dhisti Desai described in our conversation. Often, this phase is driven by a search for a singular calling or purpose.
What struck me in Dhisti's narrative, however, was her identification of a distinct "turning point": the decision at age 25 to leave employment and become an entrepreneur. This wasn't just a career change; it fundamentally altered the nature of her explorations. Her journey demonstrates a critical pivot from trying things to find purpose, to trying things with purpose, integrating disparate experiences towards an emerging focus.
Exploration as Search: The Pre-Turning Point Phase
Dhisti acknowledged embracing the "Jack of all trades" label early on, delving into teaching, motion design, and illustration. While driven by a desire to understand potential and avoid limiting boxes, she framed this period, implicitly, as a search. She mentioned trying things before the turning point "to find a purpose and a reason". This resonates with many creative individuals who explore broadly, gathering skills and experiences without necessarily having a defined endpoint or unifying framework. It’s a necessary phase of data collection, but one that can sometimes feel directionless or lead to the anxiety of being a "king of none".
The catalyst for change wasn't finding a single perfect skill, but rather a growing dissatisfaction with the perceived limitations of employment and a desire for a different perspective. Influenced by mentors and an internal drive for "more," she made the leap into entrepreneurship – crucially, without a detailed plan, only the conviction that she "wanted to do something of my own".
Integration as Action: The Post-Turning Point Phase
This decision marked the turning point. What appears significant is not that she stopped exploring or trying new things, but that the framing shifted. She stated, "...trying everything before my turning point versus trying everything after my turning point made a difference, because now I was trying everything for a purpose or a reason". Entrepreneurship provided the container, the overarching context, within which her diverse skills and innate focus on people's experiences could converge.
Her background in design, illustration, and even teaching wasn't discarded; it became integrated data feeding into a larger system focused on Customer Experience (CX). The "Jack of all trades" wasn't replaced but refined. The skills acquired during the search phase became tools applied with newfound direction. This suggests the turning point wasn't about discovering a new passion from scratch, but about creating a structure (her own business) that allowed existing passions and skills related to empathy and designing for people to coalesce into a focused professional identity – the self-proclaimed "Queen of CX".
Purpose as a Consequence, Not Just a Precursor
Dhisti’s narrative challenges the common assumption that one must fully define their purpose before making a significant career move, especially into entrepreneurship. For her, the act of taking the leap, of creating her own context, seemed to be what unlocked the synthesis of her varied experiences into a clear purpose. The structure of entrepreneurship provided the framework for integration. Trying things with purpose became possible because she had created the purpose-driven container – her own venture focused on leveraging her core strengths in empathy and experience design.
This pivot highlights a crucial distinction: exploration to find direction versus exploration guided by self-determined direction. The turning point wasn't the end of learning or trying new things (as evidenced by her expanding service offerings), but the beginning of doing so with a cohesive intent, transforming disparate skills into integrated, purposeful action. It suggests that for some, particularly multi-potentialite individuals, the act of committing to an autonomous path might be the necessary catalyst for purpose to emerge from the complexity.
5 Lessons with practical value:
What's next?
Dhisti isn’t chasing a singular calling—she’s engineering purpose through iteration. In our May feature of Alba’s NoSmalltalk, we unpack how her journey from multi-hyphenate to mission-driven founder shows that meaning can be designed through action. And in the next blog, "The Listening Loop", Dhisti dives into the underrated superpower of adaptive leadership—where active listening isn’t passive, but a dynamic tool for real-time decision-making.
I’ve felt that aimless phase — collecting skills, hoping they’d add up to something. Dhisti’s story is both validating and motivating.
The part about purpose emerging after the leap, not before, really stuck with me. We don’t talk enough about how structure can unlock clarity.
"to find a purpose and a reason" this line can make you think if you don't have any reason but still continuing with what you are doing.
Dhisti, thank you for articulating that pivotal shift so clearly. The distinction between exploration to find purpose versus exploration with purpose, triggered by your entrepreneurial 'turning point,' is a crucial insight from our NoSmalltalk session.
Your journey suggests that for creatives with diverse skills, committing to an autonomous structure—like launching a venture—can itself forge focus, integrating those skills rather than searching for a single 'calling.' Purpose emerged as a consequence of action within that new context.
A question for discussion: Can creating the container (like entrepreneurship) be the necessary catalyst for multi-potentialites to synthesize experience into purpose?