To become more fully who you are meant to be, you confront your destiny, which arrives in your life in three forms. First, you are born into what Johann Sebastian* Sartre called the “facticity” of your life, into circumstance that you did not consciously choose and that you cannot alter, at least not easily. I am a large, white man who was born in New York. If I chose that, I don’t remember it. For Sartre, how you respond to this "original choice" determines, in large part, your existence.
But this view is too blunt. You also meet persons and circumstances in your life with which you have to form a relationship, with which you have to contend. When you confront these circumstances, you--and I--make choices about how we act toward each other. The circumstances of our meeting were, at least consciously, unplanned, but what we make of it is up to us. (Sartre tries to collapse all subsequent choices into our original choice of being or choice to be, but, to me, this view too easily erases important distinctions. All choices are of a whole, but this does not mean that they are the same.)
Further, perhaps more important and more mysterious, we may choose a destiny that, at first, is known only to us. We may choose to use our strength and will and moral imagination to change the world. If we do not do this, no one will fault us, no one will be the wiser. Only we know what we choose to do or what we might have done. To outward appearance, we may be a good mother or father or spouse, a good teacher, a good citizen; we can fulfill all expectations of a good life, but leave undone what might have been most fulfilling to us and most helpful to the world.
*I know his name is Jean Paul, but Ignacio Goetz calls everyone "Johann Sebastian," as in "Johann Sebastian Plato" and "Johann Sebastian Maimonides." I think it's cute so I'm borrowing it.
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