Coco Chanel used to say that she didn't understand why women didn't make themselves up at least a little bit before leaving the house, "because you never know when you might have a date with destiny, and one should be as pretty as possible for destiny"...

More on this in a bit. One of the great pleasures of life is contemplation, but it's very tricky not to let this become paralysis. The difference between the two, I think, is that proper contemplation is something active, while long deliberations about all possible options corral you into a kind of passivity, cut off from the main currents of active life, increasing your sense of powerlessness. (but see also: fitful, rudderless self-doubt)

I don't think you can necessarily know what you want to do with your life in a vacuum any more than you can invent your ideal partner. You're not Pygmalion -- the person you love is someone in the world, they already exist; you have to meet them as they are and respond to them as a different human being, not a product of your imagination (post). But this encounter makes you yourself much more three-dimensional.

Likewise it is hard to invent yourself without the world, unless your ambitions are fairly colorless (I want to be famous!). The world is full of interesting problems to solve and things to do and, among these, are problems which will respond wonderfully to your particular gift. How do you find such problems? By developing yourself as much as possible, and by accumulating interesting and useful experience, and above all by testing your intellectual muscles against things which challenge you and command your complete attention. And keeping your eyes open. First to find out what your gifts are, and second to see how they might be used. Returning to Chanel -- it's best to be as pretty as possible for destiny.

To continue the dating analogy -- when you are looking around you often notice that bits and pieces of ideal traits are scattered around the populace -- one person is kind but a wimp, another is brilliant but neurotic, etc etc. Nonetheless when you find yourself falling for someone you are inevitably amazed by what a beautiful whole person they are, how well their various traits and intricacies fit together. I think it is like this with work also. When you find something which fully engages you, you will start to understand how the various threads of your other interests fit together.

One more important thing to say, but this is a bit harder to express. I think many people when they are young are quite passive. They are used to having life happen to them, and all they have to do is react. It is a major step when you start to understand that you have a part in creating the world. As silly and obvious as it sounds, realizing it on a deep level changes how you act and what you expect in a significant way.  If all the authority figures in your life disappeared, how would you feel about things? What would you do? 

My advice is, try to understand yourself in a deep way -- that's already quite a project. Surround yourself with people of the highest possible caliber. And develop your talents, figure out precisely what they are and what their capacity is, and the rest will follow. 

"How do I become dedicated?" An interesting and complicated question. I would say, practice.

Think about the people you know who are obsessively pursuing their doctorate in physics and from there will begin obsessively pursuing their Nobel Prize-winning research on string theory. Probably when they were little they were obsessed with something else. Maybe it was dinosaurs or balsawood bridges or poker or what makes jokes funny. And those little periods of intense focus gave them practice to develop their concentration; some subjects they outgrew, but those skills will stay with them when they get to subjects which are much deeper.

I don't think that in order to be dedicated you have to spend your entire life on a single project (see: monogamy). What's important is the quality of attention you bring to what you are doing at the moment, and whether you are able to really enter into it. That said, I'm not sure it works if you set a time limit on it: it's like digging for oil, it's not enough to be really focused on each stroke, you have to be willing to stick it out for as long as it takes to strike oil.

I would say, find something which interests you and is a reasonably sized project and find some interesting people you can talk to about it. Then set out, kind of as an experiment, to really become the world authority in that area. Pursue it relentlessly, allow it to keep you up nights, to awaken you from sleep in order to continue. For instance, maybe you could pick some author you like and read every single one of their books, and think seriously about them; or listen to everything by a particular composer, in all the various interpretations; or learn a language from scratch to fluency; or whatever appeals to you, but try to pick a skill that you will really in some ways master so that for the rest of your life, whenever this subject comes up, you can say "Ah yes. In my youth I loved..." and give your wise counsel.

 This is a really fascinating discussion, which calls for both a theoretical, general reflection, on the terms used in the various comments, as well as seeming to call for a practical response, usually referred to as advice. I want to start with the more theoretical side which has to do, first of all with the very strangeness of the question itself: “how do I become dedicated?”. In order to understand why I call this question strange, or perhaps even paradoxical, we need to examine the basic terms around which this question revolves and which Mark has formulated so precisely and poignantly. First of all, the question seems to mark a paradox in that what Mark seems to really want is to really want something, to want something very badly, a want that we call dedication, that we sense is a want stronger than any other want. Mark wants to be dedicated, thus wants to really want something. But, of course, and this is part of the paradox, it is the very strong “want” that Mark wants, that is unknown, cannot be willed, and which thus also seems to exceed his capacities to achieve. In our more common everyday life, these three terms – will, knowledge, and capacity   - can usually can be coordinated, or at the very least, we can somehow understand what it takes to achieve their coordination. Say, I am thirsty and want a coke (diet, obviously), I immediately know what I want and I also probably have the capacity the get what I want, I have probably a 1. 25$ and legs to go to the 7/11 across the street and get one. Knowing, being capable, and wanting, all come together perfectly in this great achievement of getting the coke and satisfying my thirst. A slightly more complicated case occurs when I really want, say, a BMW 7 series. A very expensive car. I want it, I know what I want, but unfortunately at the moment it is not within my capacity to get what I want. But since I want something and know it, it is possible for me to devise a strategy of getting it, by way of developing capacities or skills that will help me achieve my goal. I can decide to become a really good student, in order to get excellent grades, be first in my class, get accepted to Yale law school, be hired by a fancy New York law firm, earn a huge salary, and buy my BMW. Or, alternatively, I can hang out many hours with some of the less respected members of my neighborhood that seem to have nevertheless some very desirable skills of knowing how to break locks and deactivate alarms. Learning from them for a while their skills I can also develop the capacities that will help me get my bimmer. It might take some time, but finally my want, my knowledge, and my capacities ad skills come together.
 

But what happens, as in Mark’s case, when I want something, yet, strangely, I don’t seem to know what it is, all I know is that I want to want, but want what? Unknown. What skills and capacities should I develop in order to get what I want? It is obviously not clear, since I do not know what I want, and therefore cannot develop anything towards it. Margaret has a very good advice, since you don’t yet know what is the content of this want that you want, you develop many skills that, luck has it , you happen to fall on a want which you finally really want, you will be ready, as the well dressed girl is. You should go to law school, AND learn how to break into cars, and learn how to dress well, etc, and the more skills you have the better equipped you will be to deal with the unexpected discovery of a want that might all of a sudden take over your life. While this is very good advice in general, it does not yet feel really satisfactory, and in two ways, first, on the conceptual level, it would seem to miss something in the very paradoxical logic of the want, in that what I want is to want something and not a skill or a capacity, thus all the while when I'm developing skills I feel something greatly missing from my life, this mysterious want that I want. On the practical level, we have seen that in a way we develop skills only because we want something for the achievement of which these skills are necessary, but when we do not know what we want there is nothing that will really drive us to develop skills. The skills seem to need the desire that will motivate their coming into being. It is a complex question whether most skills can at all really be acquired if we do not want that which they are the skills for. This gap between the skill or capacity and the elusive want that is supposed to motivate this skill brings us a step closer to the paradoxical nature of dedication which seems to involve wanting something which we do not understand or know what it is, and thus are incapable of pursuing, an incapacity which exhausts us and as if strikes us with paralysis. We are paralyzed in the face of that which Mark calls the “extra mile”. What is this extra mile? It is a mile that is somehow there, but is not really there, existing, but somehow without being located. We do not know where this mile is, and where it leads to, and in this sense is very different from that extra mile left before we reach the end of a marathon, a mile that we cannot cross since we are so exhausted by the preceding routes that we simply cannot go on, it is no longer within our capacity to go on, though we know perfectly well where it leads an what it takes to cross it (perhaps more practice, developing better our capacities to run without exhaustion, etc). the extra mile Mark is talking about, while also facing us with exhaustion, with not having the capacity to cross it, is of a very different nature, since we do not know where it is, where it leads to, and therefore what capacity will help us cross it. Why is it at all that we then feel the need to “run” this extra mile, by which we are exhausted, in the sense of having no capacity to cross it, again not in the sense of FAILING in a capacity that we know we need, but in the sense of not even know what capacity is needed, and in a way without even knowing whether this extra mile is there. It might be our imagination, there might not be at all an extra mile. Why is it that we feel so strongly that we want to cross this extra mile, a mile of the existence of which we cannot even be sure? Mark names perfectly the way that this extra mile is supposed to be present in our life: the extra mile is that which calls. It is a calling. While all the miles besides the extra miles are visible and clear, and when we want them we know what we want, the extra mile exists only as an invisible calling, a calling that might be a deceptive sirens call or a delusional fantasy. To be called means that something comes to us from an elsewhere, an elsewhere Margaret named an encounter. If something comes to us from an elsewhere it is by definition not something that can originate with us, it has to surprise us and somehow force itself upon us. If we want to be dedicated, if we want to cross this extra mile, we need then to paradoxically, want the call, or want that which by definition we cannot know, for it has to surprise us and come from elsewhere. This points to the paradoxical nature of want itself. On the one hand the want is that which is supposed to originate in us, we are the ones deciding on what we want. On the other hand the want is that which activates us, it is not that we decide what we want, it seems that something decides for us that we need to want it, it makes us want it. want is created, as have often been pointed out, and as every clever advertiser knows. We can be made to want that which we didn’t know we wanted, about the existence of which we never previously dreamed of, but that somehow all of a sudden becomes essential to our very existence. After we are made to want something it would seen that we can become originators of the want and decide whether to go after it or not, but the want itself seems to have been created and preceding us. This is true then for every want that on the one hand originates with us on the other hand creates us as wanting creatures. What is different about wanting the call, or wanting to want, rather than waning this or that specific thing? The advertiser that creates the want is the one infiltrating in this basic structure of wanting the want which we do not know….unfortunately, I have to rush out now, hopefully leaving you wanting more, and will continue later