9 ways to figure out what you want to do with your life

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"So what do you want to do with your life?"

If this question strikes terror into your heart and you're unable to render an answer, you're not alone.

Even some of the most successful people figured out what they wanted to do later in life.

Luckily for you — and anyone else who hasn't quite figured it all out yet — there are a few steps you can take to help you stay calm and move toward a career you'll love:

Take a deep breath and know this is normal

Understand that the way to your dream career is not always a straight path, says Ryan Kahn, a career coach, founder of The Hired Group, and creator of the video course "How to Get Hired." What's important is that you're traveling in the right direction.

"You may find in your career that the journey getting there is more fun than the destination," he says.

If this advice isn't consolation enough, then consider the many success stories that began much later in life.

Julia Child didn't learn to cook until her late 30s, and she wrote her first cookbook when she was 50. And Jon Hamm was working as a waiter at 29, not a successful actor playing a philandering ad man in a hit TV show.

Lean into the uncertainty

In a LinkedIn post, Deepak Chopra, popular author and founder of The Chopra Foundation, said that he wished he embraced the wisdom of uncertainty at a younger age.

"At the outset of my medical career, I had the security of knowing exactly where I was headed," he wrote. "Yet what I didn't count on was the uncertainty of life, and what uncertainty can do to a person."

"If only I knew then, as I know now, that there is wisdom in uncertainty — it opens a door to the unknown, and only from the unknown can life be renewed constantly," he wrote.

Experiment

Following your passion sounds great, but when you don't know what that is, things get a little hairy.

Ivanka Trump recently told Business Insider that the best way to discover what you love is to try new things. Think less and do more.

"Passion is something that's hard to discover purely through introspection," she explains. "You have to have experiences — you have to learn real time and through experiences what makes you tick."

This means identifying the things that you could potentially be interested in and then just going for them, whether it's through internships or taking jobs in fields that could potentially be interesting for you.