How do you find your passion? It's just like searching for your lost keys
“Just follow your passion” is the well-meant advice that we keep hearing over and over again. Easier said than done. Unfortunately, we often don’t know what that passion is, and idly wait for some miraculous discovery of our true talents and life direction. Seeing others around us who have found their passion and the ‘why’ behind what they do, can make us feel even more insecure and directionless. Rather than setting us free, this advice can make us doubt ourselves, get us into our head and freeze us in inaction.
So, let’s set the expectation straight here: There is no one true passion hidden somewhere inside you, waiting to be discovered. No innate talent, once found, simply leads to fulfillment and top performance. Instead, passions are built. Over time, through consistent effort, trial and error.
Great – but how then do you find which talent to build? It’s just like looking for your misplaced keys. You just start by looking around, in the places your intuition steers you to or where memory tells you they might have been. You don’t look in the same place twice and you stop your search once you’ve found them (until you lose them again).
Of course, ‘passion’ is a more blurry concept than keys, but we shouldn’t make the search unnecessarily complicated. In some simple steps, the process is as follows:
1. Open up opportunities
Start looking places, preferably a variety of places. If you have had lingering interests that you have not acted upon, this can be a good place to start. Or, think about what fascinated you when you were a kid, when time, money, and a job were not an issue yet. What intrinsically motivates you? What do you enjoy doing in your free time? What are you naturally good at? When you have listed some opportunities, do not stop here but actually open them up. This means that you take that course in coding, or plan a coffee with that entrepreneur with the cool product. Gather information and create possibilities that were not there before. Not too much downside, yet all the upside.
2. Learn to recognize what you are looking for within the opportunities
When you are trying out different things and creating options for yourself, the most important thing is to recognize when you’ve found what you are looking for, or at least when you are getting closer. This is one big ‘hot and cold’ game, in which your feelings are your guide. When something gives you energy, gets you excited, makes you happy, and feels effortless, that means you’ve come a little bit closer. When what you are trying exhausts you, feels negative, and makes you procrastinate, this means that you are going further away from what you are looking for. This is exactly why it is so easy to recognize in others when they have found something that makes them tick: they radiate, are energetic, and passionate. Learn to listen to yourself, not those around you, as you cannot please everyone.
3. Stop looking once you have found an opportunity that resonates
Once you’ve found what you are looking for (or something close to it), it is time to stop the search and to focus. It takes determination and deliberate practice to develop a skill and to go into depth. In addition, you need to find out if this thing sticks in the long run or if it is just the excitement of something new that moves you. When you find the key, open that door.
All of this takes time, experimentation, and the ability to make use of the random opportunities that cross your path. Detours and mistakes provide invaluable information, on what not to do or on how not to do it. Setbacks are part of the game and empower us, because we get better in what we do as we work through them. Be curious about why some things did not pan out the way you thought, what about it did not work for you and how does that inform your next experiment?
What if you don’t find your keys? Life does not stop, but you won’t be able to enter that one door, so start looking today.