Knowing how to find your passion in life is one of the most important tasks in your life. You don’t want to live a life without meaning, without purpose. You want to live a fulfilled life instead of living in an empty shell where you don’t feel great about it. Too many people go through life just to exist, not to live.
The number one thing to remember about passion is that it doesn’t come from yourself. Passion comes from mastery of a subject, not the other way around. The better we are at something, the more we want to do it. Think about your own passions for a moment. Chances are, you are better than the average at it.
That’s what brings passion. For me, I am passionate about tennis. Not because of the subject matter but because I was good at it. When I first started out, I didn’t understand tennis. I didn’t know what made someone win, I didn’t know what I was supposed to do in order to get better at it.
However, over time, as I got better, I became obsessed with it. I wanted to know how to do a kick serve, how to do a nasty slice, and so forth. The more I learned more strategies, the more I wanted to do it. I didn’t find my passion, the passion found me. The more opponents I won against, the more I wanted to play.
The number one way to know how to find your passion in life is to figure out what you’re good at. Once you’re good at something, figure out a way to be GREAT at it. We avoid activities and tasks that bring us disappointment. We continue doing things that bring us happiness.
How to Find Your Passion in Life
One way to know how to find your passion in life is to SLAP that social share button and post to your favorite social media! Your friends could use an article like this. Don’t let them live a life without purpose and aim. It won’t be good.
So with that said let’s get into the article.
1) What Gets You Excited?
Is it painting? Is it playing sports? It can be just about anything. The point is, it makes you motivated and excited to get out of bed. That’s what makes the difference. You can’t say you know how to find your passion if you don’t know what gets you excited in the first place.
For me, it’s the dreams of entrepreneurship. I don’t know exactly what yet but one day, I want to be an entrepreneur and control my own destiny. I want to do it through something in the financial space. When I was in college, the thought of the words “financial analysis” would trigger my excitement.
When I walked by the library with financial analysis books I would be giddy. So that’s when I knew I was destined to be somewhere in the financial space. There are things that gets you excited and makes you emotions spike up. It’s up to you to find out what that exactly is.
2) Can You Stick With it Over a Year?
Now that you found something that gets you excited, it has to withstand the test of time. Don’t let it be something you get excited about for a day and then let go of it. That’s how I feel about working out. I get really excited to do it and meet my New Year’s Resolution goals.
Then once February comes around, it doesn’t happen. How to find your passion involves figuring out if you can stick with it over the long term. You have a very long life before you throw in the towel. Can you stick with it? Do you have the same excitement with day 500 as you did in day 1?
One of my passions is this blog. I am glad that I started it and I am still going on strong even after over a year of consistently pumping out articles 2x a week. I don’t see myself ever slowing down and I can’t wait to see what’s ahead for year 2. That’s how I know it’s not just a fad, it’s a passion of mine.
3) Find Out What You Spend Time Reading About
If it’s important to you, you will spend some of your precious time learning about it. Next time, keep track of what you spend time looking up information on. You’re looking up the information because you’re interested in knowing the information. You have a lot of questions about it.
That’s how you find your passion. What are you curious about? What are you interested in? For me, I love reading about personal finance, what’s going on in the markets, and current events. At some point in my life, I’m going to mesh everything together and use that as a part of my career.
This isn’t something you need to consciously keep track of. If it’s important to you, you’re going to look up the information. You’re going to spend time figuring out the information because you want to use the information in some way, shape, or form. This is a powerful tactic.
4) Try It On the Side
Maybe you found an area that gets you excited but you don’t know if you really want to commit to it. Try it on the side and see what happens. Part of knowing how to find your passion is knowing what you don’t want to do with something. After you try it for a month or so is when you figure everything out.
That’s when you can say you’ve given it a fair bit of effort. No one finds their passion overnight. Try it for some time and see what happens. The worst that can happen is that you lost a little bit of time. That’s OK. Time invested to find out what your purpose is is time well spent.
The two most important days in your life is the day you are born and the day you find out why. Once you find out your purpose, your entire gateway to your life is opened up. That means something. Trust me, when I figured out what I’m passionate about, it’s when my life opened up to me.
5) Find Your Passion Through Mastery
Take careful note of your strengths and what you are good at. You will want to do more of it. Over and over again. Once you master something and feel like you are at the top, you are reaching self actualization. Self actualization is our number one goal in life which provides us with passion.
How to find your passion is by figuring out what you’re good at. Be honest with yourself, however. Don’t just think that you’re good at something. Follow the results and see where you stand. Compete against another person to see if there are many others who are better than you. Learn from them.
Tweak a few things. There were times when I really enjoyed doing something but then I found out that I couldn’t possibly evolve and get better further than this. That’s when I called it quits. That’s when I admitted defeat that no matter what effort I put into it, I wasn’t going to get better.
It’s not a bad strategy.
6) It’s a Passion if You’re Obsessed With It
What do you spend the majority of your time thinking about? In middle school and high school, I spent a large majority of my time playing a computer game called Starcraft. I was obsessed with it and I would play it almost daily and for a large amount of time. That was my passion during those times.
Although that was a really bad passion of mine that I eventually grew out of, it is a guideline of what you can do going forward. When you spend a majority of your waking hours thinking about it, then that’s how you found your passion. It’s not something that takes effort to think about.
It’s something that happens to you involuntarily. You don’t want to stop obsessing over it because it gives you so much joy. It gives you dopamine, the happiness chemical. When you spend hours, days, and even weeks thinking about it is when you know you got a good thing going that you shouldn’t let go.
7) Find Your Passion by Trying Out Different Things
There’s a good chance that you don’t just have one passion for the rest of your life. There are many things that you want to try out. Try it out and see if it’s the right fit for you. Personally, my parents pushed me to play the piano. So I would spend hours on it, trying to master the next Beethoven piece.
However, the effort was for naught. Piano wasn’t interesting to me. I was just running through the motions and letting time pass in order to appease my parents. Piano just wasn’t for me. That’s how I found out it wasn’t my passion. When you spend hours on it, putting in a good amount of effort, and still getting nothing.
That’s how you find your passion. By trying out different things and seeing if it works for you. Maybe you enjoy baking so you do that for a couple of months. Or it could be cooking. Or it could be working out. There’s a hundred of other activities that can spark your interest.
8) Listen to Other People’s Perspectives
Other people may already just be pursuing the passion project or activity that you’re looking for. Even if they aren’t, it doesn’t mean look down on them. However, it does mean that you can listen from other people and learn from their perspectives. You don’t have to know how to find your passion by yourself.
I always say, there’s ONE thing that you can learn from everyone in the world. It doesn’t even have to be what to do. It can absolutely be what not to do. I wouldn’t be where I am today if I didn’t listen to other people’s perspectives and see what they were up to. You don’t have to figure everything out by yourself.
The world of finance was new to me. I wouldn’t even have known about its existence until I talked to very smart individuals from college who showed me this was a viable path. There are people who already walked the path you want to walk in. Why would you ever want to ignore or discount their perspectives?
9) Your Passion May Just Find You
Lastly, if all else fails and you don’t know how to find your passion, lucky your passion may just find you. it doesn’t have to be an intentional thing either. Maybe you were surfing the web one day and you randomly stumble across a Penny Hoarder article that teaches you how to save money.
That’s how it started with me. That’s how I found out that I was interested in personal finance because that article led to another and another until I fell down the rabbit hole. Before I knew it, I was hooked. There was no way that I was getting out of the community.
It may just pop up and happen by happenstance. The thing is, you never know when and where it’s going to happen. But it may just find its way to you. Once it does, don’t run away from it. Embrace it and see just so far it goes. Chances are, it’s changed the trajectory of your life forever.
I know it’s changed mine.
Finding Passion in Your Life is Crucial
After you know how to find your passion, then actually finding your passion is the next step. It may just be the most important project you’ll undertake in your entire life. When you find it, you don’t question it. You feel it in your gut, in your heart, and in every fiber of your being.
I used to physically get chills when people would talk about personal finance. That’s how much it meant to me. That’s when I knew it wasn’t something that I just read about once and then that’s it. It’s something that I continually nurture and something I knew I just had to see it through.
Your life is meant to be more. You were put on this Earth to create something meaningful. There’s nothing wrong with the motto of going through life, seeing different and interesting things, and then calling it a life. There’s nothing wrong with that.
However, if you’re wanting to know how to find your passion, then you know your life just has more meaning than that. You just know it’s your destiny to become something more and appeal to a higher sense of purpose, fulfillment, and impact. It sounds cheesy but once you find it, it’s one of the best things you can do for yourself.
Figure out how to find your passion and then actually follow through with it. I didn’t even know I was leading a directionless life until I found out what my passions were. Everyone taught me that talking about money was evil. However, there’s a community who is more than willing to talk about it!
Your passions include what your biggest goal in life is.
How to Find Your Passion: Shortlist
- What gets you excited?
- Can you stick with it over a year?
- Find out what you spend time reading about
- Try it on the side
- Find your passion through mastery
- It’s a passion if you’re obsessed with it
- Find your passion by trying out different things
- Listen to other people’s perspectives
- Your passion may just find you
No. 1 and No. 2 are important but I like No. 9 since I view it as what happened to me.