How to Find Your Passion? Don't.
Hmm, what is my passion!? I have no idea!
I used to have a cool job that allowed me to travel to really cool places, it paid all my bills and more, it made me very comfortable with my identity. I could brag about what I did for work and about the company at parties, and people always had respect shooting out of their eyes.
It felt good.
Then one day I was on a solo diving trip in one of the most famous diving spots in Thailand called Similan Island (yep, I could afford that too), a fellow diver showed me his underwater photography collection and they were amazing. When I was admiring all the colorful adventures he’s had, he suddenly asked me, “what are your hobbies?”
It took me by surprise, because I couldn’t brag about my job, and I had to come up with something cool to say.
“Hmm, I run meetups! I have the largest marketing meetup in Munich, and another meetup about artificial intelligence.”
He looked confused, “was it for work?”
“No no, it’s what I do outside of work.”
The sad truth was, I didn’t do much outside of work, not only because I was always exhausted after work and just wanted to chill, but also didn’t know what I was so passionate about that I would pursue in my free time. That also made me realize: without my job title, who am I? I have been so comfortable attaching my self worth to large organizations, but without those brands, am I still valuable?
I believe some of you would feel that too: you don’t know what your passion is and you want to punch me in the face if I dare to stand here telling you how to find a passion like rule number one, do this, and rule number 2, do that.
Well then haha, you’ll be happy to learn my answer: how to find your passion? Don’t. Because this question implies there could be one and only passion, and you have to find it.
This is why I don’t subscribe to 5-year plans. Things change, and we need to allow that fluidity in our vision and focus too.
“Just follow your passion” is dangerous. It assumes that your passion and interests are fixed, and we all have just one big calling, and we have to find it and run after it as soon as possible.
The problem is, we live in a world where change is continuously accelerated thanks to so many factors, be it 4th industrial revolution or coronavirus or robotics and AI, the truth is many jobs or work that will be created in the future don’t exist today yet. How would you know about those opportunities if you only focus on chasing something existing?
Some Stanford psychologists say, instead of finding your passion, try developing it.
One of the authors of the paper, professor Gregory Walton said,“If you look at something and think, ‘that seems interesting, that could be an area I could make a contribution in,’ you then invest yourself in it,” “You take some time to do it, you encounter challenges, over time you build that commitment.”
Just as we shouldn’t try to find THE ONE who will be everything for us: our lover, our parent, our best friend, our psychiatrist, our support, our nurse and then crushing this “the one” with so much pressure and expectation, we have to accept that our passion may not be just one thing.
There is no THE ONE. The truth is, it could work with a lot of different people if you're willing to put up with something from each one.
So there isn’t one passion. We try different things we are interested in and are good at, and maybe we decide to put more time into it.
In one of my previous videos I’ve mentioned that if we think our belief is true, we don’t question it, nor do we stay curious any more. And that is the quickest way to close our mind, instead of opening our mind.
And if we don’t try different things, we wouldn’t know what we could be good at, or what could be our next interesting problem to solve. Passion will never have a chance to be developed.
Don’t try to find your passion. Instead, stay curious.