How to Find Your Passion and Work Happier

What would you do right now if you had nothing else to do and no bills to pay?

Don't say sleep! I mean do: what would you work on, what would you learn, what would you create?

Or, what would you spend forty hours a week doing if that time was all yours, with no financial or social responsibilities attached?

Would it be what you currently do as your job? My guess is… probably not.

What It Means to Do Whatever You Want

As you try to answer these questions, remove yourself from the contexts of "career" or "job" or "money".

This question—what is your passion—is a tricky one to answer. It forces you to think far outside of the box of precedence and expectations and far outside of the bounds of your current life.

Yet, it is, potentially, the greatest contributor to your happiness and fulfillment.

Loving Your Job Makes You Exceptional

Every day, thousands of people make money by podcasting, playing videogames, writing blog posts, photo-journaling on social media, choreographing dances, operating food trucks, reviewing products… Insert one of your hobbies and someone's probably making a living doing it.

These aren’t multi-millionaire YouTubers and internet influencers; these are creative, hard-working people who have built audiences and businesses that can support them. They're not mega-stars but they've struck gold. Why? Because they're earning income doing the things they love--many of which simply didn't make money (or even exist) ten or twenty years ago.

There are thousands of these people. Thousands of exceptions.

How have they become exceptions? They've worked extremely hard and dedicated themselves to the things they're passionate about.

The work is never easy. In fact, that's especially true for these exceptions. But when you're doing something you're passionate about, the hunger to do the work and do it well comes easy. That drives you onward.

How can you become an exception?

First, you need to discover your specific, honest passion, the thing that you'd prefer to do over anything else. You have to locate that vein of gold before you can start to mine it.

How to Find Your Passion

Finding your passion is a quest for truth.

You must dig down through the layers of assumptions, fears and social and societal roadblocks and find the thing that occupies your mind whenever you’re not stressing about everything else.

What do you daydream about while you’re supposed to be prepping for a meeting or answering emails or replacing spark plugs or serving coffee?

What’s the thing you crave first after a day at the office or in the field? Videogames? Reading? Writing? Playing an instrument?

What makes you want to hustle, even after a long day? Do you slurp down leftover pasta while working through chapters of an online course on software development? Do you share photos of every neighborhood you visit and every trip you take? Do you spend most of your evening on dinner, prepping, cooking and plating with such a love for the craft that two hours fly by before you realize you still haven’t eaten any food?

Start listing everything you like to do and everything you're good at, every skill you've developed and every fascination that's struck you. For each item in the list, decide whether each one of those things is your dream or just a hobby, your passion or merely an interest.

Try to catch yourself the next time you're doing it, whatever it is—that's it, you've found your passion.

(There's a more detailed, more visual way to explore your interests that I'll cover in a separate article soon. That method is equally effective as a tool for writers searching for their personal voice.)

How to Use Your Passion to Work Happier

How can you turn your passion, the thing that drives you, into the thing that sustains you?

You make it work. You make it into work.

You discover—or, better yet, invent—a way to monetize it. You practice. Learn. Build a portfolio. Make connections. Gain experience. Volunteer. You start your journey.

Eventually, you begin charging people for your skill. You work extremely hard to make it successful. You dedicate yourself to building a business around it so that it can grow, sustain itself and, eventually, fund the lifestyle you want.

Find your career passion. Then make your passion your career.

Ultimately, it’s your unquenchable love for the thing that will drive you to do better—better than you were the day before and, more importantly, better than the competition. It's what keeps you up at night, dreaming of ideas and improvements. It's what staves off burnout and boredom and that paralyzing fear of failure that stands at the beginning of every new endeavor like a smug-faced villain.

When you turn your passion into your career you learn to love your work. It's no longer a job. It's the realization of that old cliche: you'll never work a day in your life.

Everyone is Almost Famous

Some like to say, "Anybody can become famous these days."

That's oversimplified and inaccurate.

It's true that we’re living in amazing times, where almost anyone can break into almost any creative field with almost no formal training. Want to learn how to build furniture? Follow a few dozen YouTube tutorials and a few lists of book recommendations. Want to make short films? You can start with a phone and YouTube. Want to write a book? Publish it on Wordpress. Tweet it. Serialize it on your website.

Getting started is the easy part and it’s becoming easier. As the bar to entry sinks lower, however, competition increases.

It’s harder to stand out when a hundred million people are publishing videos and blog posts every month, when ten thousand short stories are fighting for a tiny amount of attention on a web platform.

The internet gives any person with a connection access to information, tools, platforms and a potential audience of billions.

Sounds easy, doesn't it.

The world of huge opportunities has always been open to more people than took advantage of it.

It's hard work being successful. Maybe more people than ever do get their fifteen minutes of fame but how many of them sustain it?

It takes dedication. More than that, it takes clarity—identifying your passion and focusing all of your energy on making it successful.

Don't Chase Your Passion. Activate It.

The opportunity is there for you to do the thing you most want to do and, with dedication and patience, turn it into your career. So do it! Stop wasting time daydreaming about it at work or wishing you had another hour of lunch to work on it.

It's waiting for you to find it, to choose it over everything else and get to work.