Follow your passion! If you’re like me and you’ve had the fortune of sitting through a commencement speech a time or two, then you’ve surely heard this theory espoused in one form or another. It is the stuff of motivational speakers everywhere. Year after year, thousands of graduating seniors be it at the college or high school level are challenged to follow that thing that lights a fire within as opposed to necessarily chasing a big pay day. If you’re also like me, in addition to all the challenges that the future posed, one major consternation was figuring what exactly your passion was in the first place. I read a book a long time ago where the writer put it like this: “I’ve never been afraid of hard work. I just needed to find the right vehicle for success.” I remember reading that and thinking to myself “at least someone out there knows my plight.” In reality, this problem of figuring out a person’s passion is more common than most of us think. The aching feeling of hopelessness that is a by-product of not being able to figure out what exactly one is supposed to be spending their life doing is something that plagues many youths (and adults) across the world today. So instead of relentlessly talking about following your passion, maybe a more useful discourse to have would be how exactly we go about finding our passion in the first place. Is there a science to finding one’s passion? Is discovering your passion something that manifests itself as some sort of an epiphany where one day you go to bed aimlessly roaming and the next day you wake up, the light bulb goes off and you’re instantly sure without a shadow of a doubt what your passion is? Or is passion something that is peeled back over time to reveal itself? I don’t have all the definite answers, but I can share with you some things I have learned in my journey of figuring out how to identify what exactly my passion is or should be.
The first advice I can give with regards to how to find your passion is to do away with the myth that falling in love with a passion is going to be sudden and swift. In actuality, more often than not, a first encounter with what might eventually lead to a lifelong passion is just exactly that….a first encounter! It is no different than meeting someone who might turn out to be your life long partner for the first time. There is that initial exchange of pleasantries, but after that must come a period of sticking with it, trying to deepen your knowledge about the other person where you might find that there are so many other facets to this person you didn’t know about in the beginning which may make you like them more or less. Simply put, what may become a lifelong passion does not start out as a passion. It starts out as an interest. In her book titled Grit, Angela Duckworth puts it like this: “passion for your work is a little bit of discovery, followed by a lot of development, and then a lifetime of deepening”.
The second bit of advice I can give kind of expands on the first: passion (or interest in its nascent stages) is not discovered through introspection. Instead, interest is triggered through interaction with the outside world. Angela Duckworth whom I referenced earlier talks about how the process of discovery can be sometimes messy and inefficient due to the fact that you can’t predict with certainty what will capture your attention and what won’t. Don’t force interests on yourself. Without experimenting, you will be hard pressed to figure out which interest is going to stick and which won’t. Most people have heard the saying that “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” the implication being that we must take care of work before we play. In most contexts, this is accurate. However, when it comes to interests, the reverse is actually the case. Before hard work comes play. To put it in another way, nobody (even a person with a high degree of self-discipline and ability to follow through) is going to work doggedly on something they don’t find intrinsically interesting. Before the development stage which requires some time, energy and sacrifice, there has to be a period of messing around, triggering and re-triggering interests. A high number of the most accomplished of experts start out as unsure beginners.
For my third advice, if you’ve found something that sparks your interest, I would encourage you to stick with it for a little bit and not give up at the first sign of turbulence. This lends itself to the idea of development and deepening referenced above. In advanced geometry, we often talk about the concept of Spatial Reasoning. It refers to the ability to project objects into space and think about them in three dimensions, and to draw conclusions about those objects from limited information. I want you to think about your interests as these objects and metaphorically project them into space. Explore them from different angles. Discover the nuances which were not readily apparent at first glance. Dedicate yourself to spend the time, energy, sacrifice, hard work and self-discipline required to do this.
To drive this point home, I will summarize by sharing a bit of my own experience with these ideas (my writings are meant to be a form of introspection after all). In my everyday life I automate complicated systems so that they can function with little to no human interaction. However, I did not always want to do this. My earliest ambition in life was to become a soccer player as I was (and still am) head over heels in love with everything about the game. As I grew older, I would watch my dad go to work every morning, smartly dressed in a suit with his briefcase in hand. I liked the look of this and would often imagine myself all grown up in a suit, shaking hands and closing big deals in the financial sector. This combined with my affinity for books naturally led me to have an interest in business and accounting. As I progressed further in my education, I found a real love in mathematics. The result of being pulled in different directions was that at the end of high school, I still wasn’t exactly sure what direction I wanted to pivot my life. I finally decided that while I seemed to love math, I needed something with a bit more variety which would mean more opportunity in the future but still had some math in it. So on a whim, I decided to experiment with electrical engineering. Even there, I faced more challenges as it offered so many lanes and it all felt a bit inundating. In my junior year of college I considered switching majors and even went as far as starting the initial process. However, that year I walked into a control systems class, and a spark was lit. Not a flame, just a spark. I was intrigued by the fact that with some math and some programming, I could in some sense play god to complex machines and systems and give them a sense of autonomy. I explored this spark and while there were some tough moments, it gradually started to become more than an interest to me. It started to become a passion. What has followed since those years has been an unrelenting quest to further develop and deepen this passion. I was 19 years old going on 20 before I would learn my first programming language or write my first line of code (kids today write their first line of code at about 11 or 12). Today I have written code in about 9 languages all of which were self-taught with the exception of 1. I am still pushing myself to hone in on my skills by learning new languages every day, and figuring out better ways to use the skills I already have more efficiently. In general, I continue to experiment as I try explore other interests and try to discover new passions. For one, I have always had a thing for books and writing. These blogs in some way are a form of experimentation for me as I try to explore that interest and see if it leads to a newly found passion.
Your interests may have nothing to do with books or anything technical, but the principle remains the same. The first stop on your journey to finding your passion begins with experimenting with your perceived interests (discovery). You must explore and experiment outwardly with freedom and without putting any pressure on yourself. Don’t be afraid to try things. How do I know what to even try? Here’s how: Ask yourself some basic questions. What do I find myself thinking about? How do I enjoy spending my time? What do I find absolutely unbearable? Begin with the answers you’re surest of and build from there.
Cheers!
* I don’t normally do this, but I would like to take out time in this week’s blog to give due credit to Angela Duckworth. Her book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance in my opinion has some of the most compelling and articulated material I have read on the subject of Passion. The second section of the book talks about growing grit from the inside out. Chapter 7 deals specifically with interests, and some of the ideas in that chapter have been repeated in this blog post. She does not sponsor my blog, but I highly recommend this book as a must read for everyone.