Finding our path

How do we know what our passion is?

I believe that I am lucky. When I started to dive down this journey of personal development, I realized that I had a passion staring me in the face for over a decade. Fitness. Since I was 16 years old, I went to the gym. I don’t think I really knew what I was doing for a very long time but I went. And most importantly, I enjoyed going. It was part of my routine and I never wanted to stop.

When I finally decided to take action and pursue coaching, I stumbled upon a new passion. Personal development.

Ever since then, I have had the urge to learn as much as I possibly can and spread all new information to as many people as I can. For no other reason than I really do like it. Obviously making money from this venture would be great. I am not going to pretend that is not part of the equation. But every penny made through passion means infinitely more than the dollars made working on a project that does not inspire me.

I no longer get Sunday scaries. I care about my passion too much to be nervous about whether it works out or not. I don’t need to worry about that because I will be exploring my passion regardless. I care about it enough to make the time.

The reason I think this is so important is because increasing energy for one aspect of your life spreads. I see the motivation I have in other areas increase. I care more about improvement and I am able to identify junk in my life that I can either throw out or cut back on.

I say all this to reiterate how lucky I am. My passion and path were innate. I did not decide but instead it naturally came to me. We want to be able to find our path because it makes things in life easy. We don’t get decision paralysis. We don’t get lost in a string of unproductive days being forced to do things that we don’t enjoy. We want the hunger to get up everyday and pursue something that makes us feel like we can do anything we choose.

How do we find this?

1. What did we like as a kid?

   Usually this is the perfect place to start. As a kid, I loved playing sports. Anything active, I was in. What did you do as a kid? Write, draw, run, hike, cook, tell stories, read, sing, dance. Anything you can remember doing, give it a try today.

2. Action

   We need to actually do the thing! We’ll never know unless we do it. Set aside 10 minutes of focused action on your test passion. If you are trying to draw, don’t just doodle on the side while you are working. Sit at a table, grab a pencil, grab some paper, and draw something. Set a timer for 10 minutes and when it goes off, stop immediately.

3. How do you feel?

   Did you want to keep drawing or was the 10 minutes too painful to even get through? If painful, let’s move on. Find something else. If not, leave it. Come back tomorrow and get excited about it. Continue the same drawing or pick something new. Set aside another 10 minutes for tomorrow and see how you feel.

4. Don’t stop

   The hardest part by far in pursuing a passion is staying consistent. Let’s say we go on vacation for a week and we don’t draw at all during that time. We come back home and in getting back to a busy work routine we push off our 10 minutes of daily drawing. After some inconsistent months we stop entirely. I bet this sounds very familiar if you’ve ever tried building a habit.

   Reframe your thinking. Don’t think about the act of leaving work or chores. Think about how drawing made you feel. If it made you feel happy and energized, that is worth 10 minutes. Hell, it’s worth hours of time if that’s really the case.

   Staying consistent is how we turn a passion into part of our lives. Part of our personalities. Don’t stop pursuing this and we will see insane returns.

What’s the point?

Let’s say we have a really great job making a lot of money. We don’t love what we do but it pays the bills and it allows us to live a nice life. We have a good family and we get to enjoy our time outside of work. Do we really need to explore a passion? We don’t even have time between work and family duties.

I am not going to say you have to do anything. But what if I told you that you can have something that allows you to wake up everyday with energy? With a hunger to get up and attack the day. Keeping the world around you on its heels. What if you could do something that brings you ultimate happiness and that happiness will spread through you and those around you?

This is what a passion is. A passion is not something that takes up time but instead adds energy, focus, and drive to your life.

Do you need to explore it? Of course not. I personally felt like I needed to devote some time to work that is just for me. To improve upon myself in the hopes of spreading that passion to the world around me. It created a drive in me that felt different. I no longer enjoyed sitting on the couch scrolling on my phone. I no longer felt that the weekends were much different. I no longer cared about what people thought about me.

I felt a sense of calmness and freedom.

I want to spread this. So, no. You do not need to pursue a passion if you do not want to. But if you do want to, there are endless benefits on the other side. A bunch I’ve just mentioned but the most obvious, you will become amazing at something if you choose to pursue it. Give yourself 10 years of drawing and I guarantee you will be a fantastic artist. 10 years of consistent effort will put you in the top 1% of any discipline you choose. 10 years feels daunting until you realize we’re all banking on retirement accounts to appreciate over 30+ years,

Final Thoughts

Whether you are spiritual or not, there is something out there you are naturally attracted to. You just feel an extra sense of passion towards. We put so much in front of us to block this out because it may not be lucrative or perceived well by the rest of society. But it’s there.

Don’t ignore what you are naturally drawn to. I guarantee something is there. Use it for your benefit. Get ridiculously good at something you love. Try and make some money from it. Taking the action to actually do it is the hardest part. 10 minutes a day. Keeping the consistency is the most important part. Once we no longer need to worry about building a habit, we can focus on ramping up intensity.

One definition of passion is “strong and barely controllable emotion.” Barely controllable hits very hard here. Embark on the passion, lose yourself in it, and you’ll reap the benefits on the other side.

-Ian