It’s everywhere: “Follow your passion!”
Instead of being inspiring or motivating, these quotes make you feel bad.
You are working a 9-to-5 job. And you’re pretty good at it.
But is it your PASSION? Nope, not really. And since social media is telling you to follow your passion, you start asking yourself ‘should I?’
Great, now you feel worse. Even if you wanted to follow your passion, you can’t.
Because you don’t have a clear passion. So it would be completely ridiculous to give up your job and follow that passion you don’t have.
And now you start to get unhappy. You feel like you’ll only be truly fulfilled if you follow your passion. But since you don’t have one, you are FUCKED.
So here you are. Feeling unfulfilled and passionless.
Well friend, as far as I can see you have two options.
- Accept that you don’t have a passion. Be grateful for what you do have and love the heck out of your job
- Stop whining and create yourself a passion.
Wait, but Laura, a passion is something you have or you don’t have, you can’t CREATE it.
Uhm yes, you can!
A passion is not something you just stumble upon when walking across the street.
A passion is something you create. It’s an activity you do so much until you can’t remember how life was before you started doing it.
For some people this activity has grown on them since they were little.
For others, it’s something they only started doing later in life.
For you and me, it might be something we consciously want to create.
But how do you do this?
- Follow your interests: What do you like doing in your free time? Write down a list of activities/hobbies that give you energy regardless of whether you’re good at it.
- Choose an activity and try it out: Do it daily (as often as possible) for 3 months. You’ll become skilled while doing it.
- Evaluate: Do you still like it after 3 months? If yes, keep going. If not, go back to step 1 and pick another hobby.
Creating a passion is a choice. You choose. If you don’t want to have a specific passion. Then great for you. If you do want it, then choose. You’ll need to decide what you want to do intensely for the coming years. Only with intense and consistent practice this interest will turn into a passion.
Don’t worry though, this is not forever. If you want to create a new passion you can, any time you want. Jack Johnson for example was a professional surfer, and when he couldn’t surf anymore he became passionate about singing.
You may not realize it, but you could be skilled at more than 1 thing. All you have to do is choose 1 thing at the time. You can have it all, honey, just not all at once.
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