How to Find Your Passions
The better approach to finding your passions is actually fairly simple:
- Try a lot of different things
- See what you enjoy
The biggest obstacle to overcome is a narrow vision of what you can do. If I wasn’t passionately interested in anything, I’d try to cast a wide net to look at dozens of different activities. Staying safe and familiar is the reason I’m bored, so now is the time to experiment.
Dabbling is key to the art of finding what drives you. Dabbling means committing to something for 3-6 months. This amount of time isn’t enough to become really good at anything. But it is enough time to get over the sharp learning curve in the beginning.
I didn’t enjoy programming for the first few months I worked on it. I didn’t know enough, and it was too frustrating to continue. But once I got over the frustration barrier, I found that programming is an activity I really enjoy.
If you don’t have any project that makes you want to wake up early and sacrifice leisure for, you should start dabbling. Find new activities completely outside your comfort zone you can do for a few hours a week, and commit for at least two months.
Sometimes You Need a Spark…
Sometimes the problem with a passion isn’t the activity, but the goal. I enjoyed working on small self-made projects. But it wasn’t until I saw that people actually made self-run businesses out of those efforts that I became really engaged. Until that point, my goal was just to dabble in something fun. After that point, I realized there was room for a challenging goal I hadn’t considered before.
Equally important to dabbling in activities is to dabble in experiences. Meet people from weird and unique backgrounds. Read books that don’t normally appear on your shelf. Randomness increases the chance that one of your interests will be sparked into something more.
Always Look for More
Dabbling is a continuous process. Committing yourself to one goal is good. But that should still leave time for brief experiments. If you’re always dabbling, you have a large base of passions you can do interesting work from. Don’t tolerate boredom.