Find Your Assignment

By Maria Shriver
May 02, 2026

Listen to this article.

0:00

/768.178413

Last week I wrote about fierce hope. The kind that survivors carry deep within them. The kind of hope that has been tested, beaten down, and still gets back up. The kind that those who have lived through the unforeseeable use to find the strength to keep moving and keep looking forward.

That kind of fierce hope was on full display last week in former senator Ben Sasse’s interview on 60 Minutes. Ben was diagnosed with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer in December, and in the interview, he speaks openly about what it means to face the end of his life with clarity, faith, and an unwavering sense of purpose. If you haven’t watched it, do yourself a favor and go watch it right now. It will take your breath away.

Ben showed us what life can look like when you stop white-knuckling it and finally let fierce hope lead. It looks like ease. It looks clear. It looks, dare I say, beautiful. Listening to him, I felt as though he was operating from a different place entirely.

Which brings me to my friend Tom.

The other morning I woke up to an email from Tom. Tom is a beautiful, wise writer who always seems to find time to encourage me forward. That’s exactly what Ben Sasse is doing as well: encouraging us all forward, even while knowing his own path forward is limited. To me, that is the very epitome of grace, hope, and charity.

But back to Tom. That morning, he wrote to me: “I don’t know what the next breakthroughs are for you, but your life makes me think of Byron Katie, who says: ‘My life is not my business. I’m just taking orders.’”

I stared at those words for a long time. Long enough for my coffee to get cold. My life is not my business. I’m just taking orders.

I love Byron Katie. I’ve interviewed her, read her books, and done The Work. But somehow this line had missed me. Or I read it and kept moving. This time, though, these words stopped me cold. Because at this point in my life, they landed differently. They landed like truth.

Here is the truth: every morning when I wake up, I ask God for my assignment. Then I listen. Sometimes I strain to hear what’s being asked of me, and many mornings I get nothing at all. And so I wait. But on other days the message is crystal clear. And when it’s clear, I’ve learned to move in ways big and small.

Today, when I feel called to use my voice, I do. When I don’t, I don’t. When I feel moved to tell someone I love them, I say it. When someone has hurt me, I say that out loud too. I try to live closer to the surface of my own truth. Less managed, less performed, and more free.

That is real delight. Not the Instagram version. The real kind. The quiet, hard-won, grace-soaked kind.

Before we go any further, I want to ask you something: do you know your assignment? Not your job. Not your role. Not the title on your email signature. Your assignment. The thing you were shaped—through loss and love and every unexpected turn—to do right now. Hold that question. We’ll come back to it.

This week I’ll be at the Cleveland Clinic for our Global Women’s Health Forum. We’ll give grants to researchers, hear from the brightest minds in the field, and release our newest report on the state of women’s health in 2026.

I never set out to be an Alzheimer’s and women’s health advocate. But I started asking questions, pushing for answers, and one thing led to another, the way assignments often do. I did this work quietly and persistently until I realized it was something I was meant to be doing all along.

I am going to Cleveland with my whole heart, on assignment from up above. And I am going to delight in it.

Truth be told, I have not always delighted in my assignments. Not even close. For a long time my to-dos crowded out everything else. My shoulds ran the show. Unrealistic self-imposed expectations felt heavy, and I let other people’s negativity color my outlook in ways I didn’t even recognize. I let judgment of others and of myself block my ability to move, breathe freely, and enjoy life.

And grief. I stuffed it. For years I stuffed it. And unbeknownst to me, it was running my life, shaping my choices, and dimming my delight in ways I was only beginning to understand.

Maybe you know what I’m talking about. Maybe your assignment has felt like a burden at times too. Maybe the weight of what you’re carrying—the losses, the disappointments, the gap between the life you imagined and the one you’re living—has made it hard to feel anything close to delight. I understand that. I’ve been there.

What changed for me was making the decision to give up control. Actually, it was more of a realization that came from watching others who delighted in their service. That, and allowing grace in. That is my word for this year, by the way. Grace. Not as a concept, but as a practice. Grace extended inward to the parts of myself I’ve judged most harshly. Grace extended outward to others, including those who have hurt me. Grace is what finally, slowly, began to lighten the load.

I’ve come to believe this: grace is the door that delight walks through. You can’t quite get to one without the other. There is a profound spiritual difference between fighting the good fight and delighting in the good fight. One comes from fear. The other comes from trust—from the radical, almost unreasonable belief that you were put here for exactly this reason, and that the One who gave you the assignment has not abandoned you in the middle of it.

My life is not my business. I’m just taking orders. That is not resignation. That is freedom.

People like Jenn Levi remind me of this every day. Jenn is a fellow mother who lived in the Palisades. I’ve introduced you to her story before, but here it is again. Jenn’s house burned down in the Palisades fires and she moved her family to Manhattan Beach. Then the unthinkable happened: her beloved son Braun was killed by a drunk driver.

When I read Jenn’s story, it gutted me. My heart broke for a woman I had never met. In the months that followed, mutual friends connected us, and what I found on the other end of those messages was someone who had taken the most devastating loss a mother can suffer and turned it into an assignment. Jenn has been fighting to change the laws around repeat DUI offenders. Every day she wakes up, faces her grief, and gives herself a job. She uses her heartbreak to protect other families from the same fate. She is changing laws. She is saving lives. She is doing it while carrying a weight I cannot fathom.

I won’t say Jenn delights in her assignment. That would not be the right word, and Jenn deserves the right words. What I will say is that she has found her purpose inside her pain. And she has refused to let that pain be the last word.

That is its own kind of fierce hope. That is what it looks like when the assignment finds you through the door you never would have chosen to open. Her piece runs here in The Sunday Paper today. Her courage leaves me in awe.

And then there is Ben Sasse.

Ben is dying. He knows it. And yet there he was on television, clear-eyed and unhurried, talking about love and loss and the life that goes on. Not performing bravery. Not managing his image. Simply living his assignment out loud, all the way to the end.

He is teaching us how to live a life that matters. He is showing us what it looks like to face the unthinkable and still choose meaning, still choose generosity, still choose to move forward. He is not waiting for better circumstances. He is not waiting for anything. He is on assignment, and he is delighting in it, in the deepest, most hard-won sense of that word. He is so inspiring to me.

I keep coming back to him. Over and over, I think you will too.

There are so many people doing good things, rising above unforeseen circumstances, inspiring others. One of those people is Sharon McMahon, or “America’s Government Teacher,” as many of you know her, who had her commencement speech canceled due to increased “safety concerns.” She kept believing her assignment mattered, finding a way to still deliver her message of hope that is worth reading today.

It’s so important, especially in this time of division, to keep our eyes and our hearts on those who are showing us in real time what it’s like to live with fierce hope and to live in service to others.

So let me ask you one more time: what is your assignment? We all have one or more.

You were shaped for it through loss, through love, through everything you didn’t foresee and somehow survived anyway. It may look like delight. It may look like purpose. It may look like simply getting up one more time and refusing to look away. All of it counts. All of it is the assignment.

Here is my invitation to you this week, and I mean it as a genuine, open-handed invitation, not a directive: Try it. For a day. For a week. See what happens when you cede control to something larger than yourself. Try to listen—really listen—for directions, for orders, for the quiet signal of what’s being asked of you. Try on the idea that your life is not your business, and that your actual business is to expand, to open space, and to make room for the unimaginable to walk in.

Why not try? You may be surprised by what shows up at the door.

Your life may not be your business. But it is, without question, a gift. I’m just taking orders. And I have never been more grateful for mine.