Ever dreamed of a life that’s rooted in your deepest Passions?

Ever looked at successful people like Steve Jobs, Mark Cuban, or Richard Branson and think, «Damn, If only I find that thing that I could do with the same passion that they do.»

There’s no doubt the most successful people don’t spend their daily work hours on something they dread to live for the weekends.

And there’s no doubt that if you want to achieve the most incredible life you can live, doing work you are passionate about can be one of your best assets.

This article will explore:

• The most common pitfalls people fall into when applying the «Find your passion» advice,
• The 2 situations you can be in if you don’t know what you are passionate about.
• A Step-by-step to find your passion in a way that feels both practical and exciting.

Success without fulfillment is the ultimate failure.

Like it or not, your work-life constitutes a significant portion of your life. Doing something that, in addition to money, brings you growth, joy, and gets you closer to the life you want to create, is key to creating a fulfilling life.

In a world where rarely any failure is final, it makes no sense to cling yourself to a work that condemns you to an unexciting, meaningless professional life.

You are at more risk of losing the next 10 years of your limited life doing something you dread than giving a chance to what you are excited about.

Even if you hit a few roadblocks around the way.

To find your passion is different than making a living off it.

But oh, if only that were so easy, right?

You might have heard the advice that you have to follow your passion, and magically your life will unfold. The money will follow, you’ll love it every day, and you won’t work another day in your life.

That’s BS served on a silver plate (paid by someone who did something more than just following her passion).

While doing work that you are passionate about is a vital part of creating an extraordinary life, oversimplifying it as if it were the cure-all can lead to disastrous results and harm your overall quality of life. 

Noticing the things that make you tick or finding new ones and develop them is one thing; making a living off them is an entirely different game. Well worth it, but a different game nonetheless.

For this article’s purposes, we will stay with the first step, which is plain and simple finding those you are passionate about. 

The Common Pitfalls When attempting to Find Your Passion.

To do that, we must clarify some huge misconceptions that prevent most people from tackling the problem the right way.

These are the ones that arise from taking the advice «Find your Passion» in a literal way.

Your passion is not hidden somewhere waiting to be found.

It’s not that there’s something that’s for you to be discovered, that you must find, and otherwise, you are doomed to a mediocre life.

You have a massive role in what you become passionate about. It’s about the things that already interest you, and you feel drawn to them. But, it’s also about the things you can become curious and excited about if you give them a try.

At some point, it comes down to you choosing what you want to nurture and develop. Working on something and becoming good at it can lead to becoming passionate about it.

Does that mean I should become passionate about my soul-crushing job?

Well, you can try, but I can’t recommend it. 

There is more than one single path to create a passionate life, but this doesn’t mean that any path will do.

Usually, the right passion for you will feel great, bring you joy and be something you are curious about. It will also bring you purpose and make you grow as a human being in a meaningful way.

Passion might ignite the fire, but Meaning will keep it burning.

Actually, I tried it. I studied 2 degrees (Maths & business) based on fear and choosing a safe career path that would bring me financial success.

While I was in college, it was not that I couldn’t enjoy programming, algebra, or finances. Whenever I devoted enough time to something to gain mastery, I could see the beauty of it and enjoy it.

My main obstacle was that I knew it wasn’t leading me towards the overall life I wanted. I was far more excited about public speaking, personal development, health, and entrepreneurship. These were the things I was devoting all my free time to. These were the things I wanted to be exceptional at.

And there was no point not giving them a fair try.

So, while you can learn to enjoy almost anything, not everything will give you that sense of meaning and fulfillment. Not everything will fascinate you. And that’s why you must learn to identify these things within yourself so you can invest your time and energy in what has the highest chance of making you happy. 

Your passion is not written in stone.

As Alan Watts said,

You are under no obligation to be the same person you were yesterday.

You’ll change throughout your life, and the things you are passionate about might change with you. That’s okay, and it’s about adapting your life to who you keep becoming.

Do you want to know more about the common passion-myths you have to avoid to have a passionate life?

Check this out:

I tried but I haven’t found my passion yet. How can I go about it?

Two things could be stopping you from finding what you are passionate about. At the root of both, you’ll find fear:

1. You haven’t experimented enough.
2. Your passion is right in front of you, but you are ignoring it.

1. You haven’t experimented enough yet.

If you are thinking something like:
I don’t have a passion. I am not passionate about anything. There’s nothing that really fascinates me, gives me energy, or that I am that excited to become better at…

I got you.

As we said before, your passion is not written in the stars. It’s something that develops as you engage in activities.

You start doing things, and at some point, there’s something that sparks your interest, gives you energy, and you enjoy digging deeper into that.

As Cal Newport states in his book «So good they can’t ignore you»:

Passion comes after you put in the hard work to become excellent at something valuable, not before.

Trying to choose a passion, though, without experimenting enough, will put unnecessary pressure on you and limit your options.

What can you do?

It’s about taking action and reflecting upon these actions, with an extreme bias for action.

A very common way to disguise fear is to try to sort things solely from thought instead of engaging with them.

Thought won’t take you far on that journey if you are not taking action in the first place.

As Marie Forleo States:

Clarity comes from engagement, not thought.

So, it’s time to engage in things. Follow your curiosity, go gain as much experience as possible in stuff that you are interested in. Go have fun. Play. Volunteer. Interview people.

Do not do it for the money nor expecting to find The Thing in your next venture.

Put on the explorer hat and take tons of action.

Want some help on how to do that? 

I know that getting into the exploration mode can feel scary, especially if you bought into the idea that you should have your life already figured out.

Here you’ll find a process on how to design this exploration phase.

The right mindset to find your passion.

Now, let’s talk about mindset. As I said before, one of the main obstacles people have in that phase is fear. Fear that they will lose their time and energy fear that they will get behind and get back to square 1.

These fears are all normal, especially if you’ve been raised thinking that success would be a straight line and that you are in a kind of race against the rest of the world.

But the truth that you already know is:

If you are not where you want to be, moving anywhere will be a better time investment than staying stuck there.

Trying to go for mastery without considering what you really want before, is what leads so many people to a midlife crisis if they’re lucky or to regretting on their death bed what they didn’t dare to do in their lifetime. 

Whether you are in your 20s, 30s, 40s, or 50s, the best moment to start was yesterday. The second-best moment is now.

Consider these ideas in your adventure: 

• Every experiment where you don’t find your passion, it’s a success.

  You’ll be one step closer to finding what makes you tick.

• Nothing is wasted if you decide to use it to your advantage.

  You are taking with you the experiences, skills, and relationships that you built in everything that you do. And you don’t know when this is going to be valuable.

• Do things for the sake of getting experience, not the money. 

  Yes, I know, there might be a certain amount of money you might need to make to support yourself and your family if you have one.

  But besides that, prioritize gaining valuable experience whether it’s for two hours a week or your whole work-days. This will enhance your chances of making the amount of money you want in the long haul.

• Do not seek certainty where you can’t find it.

  You can’t know what the results of your actions will be or if your next adventure will bring you what you are expecting of it. Attempting that it’s a sure recipe for frustration.

If you need it, built some certainty around the idea that if you keep trying things, you’ll eventually stumble on something that can become Your Thing.  

• Avoid meaningless distractions. 

  Things like spending many hours on TV or Netflix can numb your feelings as much as basing your diet on fast food filled with additives can numb your tastes.

Though you can find valuable information from the things you use to distract yourself, the spare time for reflection will do more for you than just keep the over-stimulation.

Clear up space for reflection.

When you explore, take action, and engage in things, you are gathering information. When you reflect on it, you connect and process that information. You train your self-awareness.

For many people, one of the things that mess this up is a lack of connection with their emotions. We are so trained to live in our heads that it’s easy to forget about what you are feeling in your body.

To work further on that, go to:

And do the exercises in the section YOUR INNER COMPASS.

The more you get yourself used to pay attention to your emotional world the easier it will be to gain the awareness you need to make the right decisions in your life.

2. Your passion is right in front of you, but you are ignoring it.

You already have a bank of life experiences, which means that a big part of the work is already done.

This is what happened to me, and it’s the most common case.

Remember I told you that I was investing all my free time learning more about personal development and entrepreneurship?

It took me 6 years and a coaching process (best investment of my life) to finally get my act together and realize, damn it, I should give it a try!

What made it invisible to me?

Fear and limiting beliefs. 

• How will I make a living out of it?
• Will I be throwing away everything I’ve work for?
• How on earth will I turn that into a successful career?

Keep in mind,

Finding what you are passionate about and learning how to make money out of it are two different things and require 2 different thinking processes.

If you mix them up, one will get in the way of the other.

The first step is to find:

• What are you passionate about or could be passionate about?

When you are finding your passion, do not aim for it to be rooted in reality, that messes with the whole process as your mind will try to keep it within the limits of what it believes you can do or not do.

To Find Your Passion is 25% Action-Taking, 25% Self-Awareness, 50% Your Choice.

You co-create your passion with what is already inside you, your interests, past experiences, deepest needs, values, and desires.

It’s a job of gaining awareness about who you are, how you feel, what you care about, and how you can use all of it to create the life you want.

17 Questions to Find your Passion

Now, with all that in mind, the questions you will find in the second section of your Step-by-Step Guide will help you do some self-discovery work.

At the end of the day, passion is about following your curiosity and excitement, trying things out, and finding that thing that gives you more energy than it takes.

And most probably, you’ll find many areas of interest that could potentially develop into your passion. That’s great and completely normal.

The point is, finding what you are passionate about is eventually you choosing which one of these things you want to master and turn into your passion.

Finally, that’s one more thing that you need to take into account when you aim to find and follow your passion.

Many people fall into the expectation that once they find it, everything will be downhill and easy. That can lead them to turn back when they face the sure-to-be-there difficulties.

If you want to develop your passion, if you want to turn it into your mode of living, expect the roadblocks cause they will be there.

The important thing is, would you rather overcome the obstacles on something you don’t care for or on something you are passionate about?

If you want to give yourself an advantage:

Do not expect it to be easy; expect it to be worth it. 

Conclusion

Doing work that prompts you to grow in the direction you want, allows you to contribute in a meaningful way, and integrates with the life you want to create for yourself, will radically affect every area of it.

Contrary to popular advice, your passion is not something to be found it’s something that gets created throughout your life. And you have a big role in that.

It’s about noticing and leveraging what’s already inside of you, taking action to get the much needed external input, and finally making the choice of nurturing something into a passion.

This process won’t be free from dealing with fears, stepping into the unknown, and learning to bet on yourself. Still, it’s the most important process that any human being goes through.

It’s the process of becoming you.