“Just follow your passion, and the riches will follow.”
“You’ll find happiness when you find your passion.”
“Passion is all you need to preserver.”
I cannot even begin to tell you how much those kind of quotes frustrated me.
For years, I loathed the question, “what are you passionate about?”
It plagued me for years. I thought something was wrong with me because I didn’t have just one burning desire that consumed me. Most of the time, I found myself interested in a little bit of everything. I still do.
As I got older my “lack of passion” for any one thing started to frustrate me. I constantly found myself pursuing one path only to change direction somewhere along the way. I knew I couldn’t keep this up, because I was headed nowhere fast.
Then I decide to place laser-like focus on “finding my passion.” Looking back now, I laugh at how I treated the process. As though my passion was in some remote location and I just needed a map to get to it. I was convinced that all I needed was a formula. All I needed was a step-by-step process to ascertain what made me tick.
Well, many, many, many self-help books, personality quizzes, and freak-outs later I still hadn’t found my passion.
I felt like a total failure. No, I felt like a loser.
I had done all of the work. I had a clear list of my strengths and my weaknesses. I knew I was an ENFJ. I knew exactly what interested me, and the obstacles and opportunities involved in exploring those interests damn it!
And still, I had yet to find my passion.
It wasn’t until my back was pressed against the wall that my passion smacked me in the face. I was living life unfulfilled as a practicing attorney, and I thought I was going to burst if I had to spend another day doing something I couldn’t care less about. That is when it hit me.
It didn’t matter what I did so long as I did it for me, and I did it to benefit others.
That was what I was passionate about. I was passionate about being a creator, a director, and a producer. I wanted to be an entrepreneur.
Looking back, my passion was right under my nose the entire time. I just couldn’t see it because I was too close to it. I couldn’t see it because somewhere in my mind I had blocked out entrepreneurship as a possibility for me. I thought of it as out of reach. I was looking for a formula to find my passion, so I couldn’t see what was coming to me naturally. It wasn’t until I was forced to stretch myself that I considered the possibility a reality.
Once I removed the barriers in my thinking, the ideas and inspiration overwhelmed me.
Here is the irony in it all.
Not only was my passion in front of me from the outset, but my passion found me.
So, what am I saying? I’m saying it’s okay not to “know” what you are passionate about. The key is to hunt for it like starving lion. If you seek your passion relentlessly, you will find it. And if not, it will find you. But, you have to search for it. Sitting idly by hoping for it to smack you in the face is not only unrealistic, it’s irresponsible.
If you are 40 years old and people are still telling you “you have great potential,” it’s no longer a compliment. It’s an indictment. Don’t disappoint yourself. Start pursuing your passion today.
photo credit: Click Addict
