How Persistent Curiosity Becomes Your Purpose: The Origin Story Question
A Story About How The Question You Can't Stop Asking Reveals Your True Calling—And Why Ignoring It Dims You
Imogen had been a features journalist at a major broadsheet for eight years.
She was good at her work — finding compelling angles, conducting sensitive interviews, crafting narratives that resonated with readers. Her articles appeared regularly, her byline was recognised, and her career trajectory looked solid.
By conventional measures, she had a successful journalism career.
But one question haunted her across every assignment, every success, every published piece.
"Whose stories aren't being told?"
She'd been asking it for years and dismissing it for just as long. Telling herself it was the inevitable limitation of journalism — every journalist faced editorial constraints, word counts, audience expectations. Her role was producing quality work within those frameworks, not questioning the entire structure of what counted as newsworthy.
But the question wouldn't quiet. It appeared during interviews when she noticed whose perspectives she wasn't capturing. During editing when she realised whose voices she was minimising to strengthen her narrative arc. At editorial meetings when she looked around the room and recognised how homogeneous her colleagues' assumptions were about whose stories mattered.
How Persistent Curiosity Becomes Your Purpose: The Origin Story Question tells Imogen's story — a journey from award-winning journalist to community documentation facilitator, driven by a question she tried to dismiss for eight years before finally finding the courage to follow it.
What began as recurring discomfort she rationalised as professional idealism became, over time, something she could no longer explain away: a question that grew louder with each success rather than quieter, that implicated her directly in its answer, that pointed not toward better journalism within existing frameworks but toward entirely different work she would have to build from nothing.
Imogen discovered that origin story questions don't arrive as clear vocational revelations. They arrive as persistent, inconvenient curiosity that threatens your current career rather than enhancing it — growing more insistent the longer you suppress them.
It wasn't about becoming a better journalist. It was about finally following a question that had been trying to show her her real work for years — and discovering that authentic calling often requires leaving behind the success that has been making it easy to keep dismissing the question.
What you'll learn
- Why the question you can't stop asking across different roles and assignments is often pointing toward authentic calling rather than just identifying professional limitations you should accept
- How dismissing persistent curiosity to protect professional success creates growing misalignment between your work and what actually matters to you
- What happens when you follow the question instead of suppressing it — even when following it leads away from everything you've built
- How origin story questions reveal authentic calling not by asking you to do your current work better but by pointing toward entirely different work that may not yet have a recognised professional category
What's included
- Imogen's complete story
- The Persistent Question Framework
- Reflection questions to help you identify the recurring curiosity you've been dismissing — and what it might be trying to show you about your authentic calling
The Reading Room — Where stories spark insight and learning begins. Read, reflect, and let the power of stories shape your perspective.
The Writer's Table — The power of the written word to clarify thought and purpose. A writing assignment that makes the lesson personal to your own experience.
The Workshop — Takes your thinking deeper, developing the technique into a systematic approach you can apply across your professional communications.
The Rehearsal Space — This is where you put it all into practice — the power of embracing challenges and pushing boundaries.
The Art of WorkLife Storytelling Story Lessons explore how the stories we tell shape the way we communicate who we are at work — our values, our thinking, our experiences, and what we stand for. Each lesson follows a protagonist who discovers that knowing how to find, shape, and share the right story at the right moment is one of the most powerful professional tools available. These lessons help you recognise the stories within your own experience and learn how to tell them with clarity, authenticity, and purpose.
About School of WorkLife
School of WorkLife creates story-based learning resources that help people think more clearly about the challenges, conversations, and decisions that shape a working life.
Each story is drawn from real WorkLife situations and developed into practical learning experiences that combine narrative, reflection, and structured application.
This lesson is part of The Art of WorkLife Storytelling Story Lessons— a collection focused on how the stories we tell, and how we open them, shape the conversations, relationships, and opportunities that follow.
Author’s Note
The stories I write are based on real WorkLife challenges, obstacles and successes. Persons and companies portrayed in the stories are not based on real people or entities. Carmel O’ Reilly.