HOW TO DISCOVER WHAT YOU ARE PASSIONATE ABOUT

How to Discover What You’re Passionate About

A common theme in most speeches and articles on goal setting is the requirement to follow your passions.  They tell you to do the things that make you want to get up early in the morning.  Now, there’s only one thing missing:

What if you don’t have any passions? I mean, what if that particular thing isn't just there? 

You might be thinking right now that's it's not possible. I'm sure everyone on this planet has interests.  But that’s not the same thing.  Enjoying playing video games isn’t the same as spending thousands of hours designing your own.  Your passion has to be something you would work exceptionally hard for.

So what do you do, if there is nothing you feel that engaged about?

People make mistakes of beginning with a survey. 

A lot of career guidance involves measuring your current skills and personality, and then deciding what you would be most suited for.  This is not an advisable approach because people are unpredictable and complex.  And any test will ultimately be a gross simplification of what’s important to you and what you like to do.

I know of a lady who wrote out a long list of what she wanted her future partner to have before she even spared him a second glance but guess what? She ended up with someone who didn't have half of those qualities. And of course, she was happy with this person. Because that's what matters! 

How then do you Find Your Passions?

The better approach to finding your passions is actually fairly simple:

To begin with, you should try a lot of different things and then find out what you enjoy. 

The biggest obstacle to overcome is a narrow vision of what you can do.  If I wasn’t passionately interested in anything, I’d try to cast a wide net to look at dozens of different activities.  

Dabbling is key to the art of finding what drives you.  Dabbling means committing to something for 3-6 months.  This amount of time isn’t enough to become really good at anything.  But it is enough time to get over the sharp learning curve in the beginning.

If you don’t have any project that makes you want to wake up early and sacrifice leisure for, you should start dabbling.  Find new activities completely outside your comfort zone you can do for a few hours a week, and commit for at least two months.

Sometimes You Need a Spark…

Sometimes the problem with a passion isn’t the activity, but the goal.

Equally important to dabbling in activities is to dabble in experiences.  Meet people from weird and unique backgrounds.  Read books that don’t normally appear on your shelf.  Randomness increases the chance that one of your interests will be sparked into something more.

And finally for today, Always Look for More

Dabbling is a continuous process.  Committing yourself to one goal is good.  But that should still leave time for brief experiments.  If you’re always dabbling, you have a large base of passions you can do interesting work from.  Don’t tolerate boredom. Be versatile. 

That's all for today and I hope you picked up a piece or two from it