Struggling to find your passion? Start with these foundations.
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Many of you are here because you’re struggling to find something to dedicate your lives to. You may feel that you don’t have any one real passion, or that there are too many things you could be doing so that all things become equally meaningless. As time slowly slips away from you, you may feel, as I did, like you’ll never find your calling. Here, I try to distil the mental foundations that I used to help find my passion(s) into a quick 10-minute read.
In my last article, I said that a deep understanding was the best way to build a successful career while dabbling should be reserved for hobbies and leisure. I spoke about embracing specialisation in one or more subjects rather than achieving basic competency in many. I advocated for developing expertise before moving onto a new topic, rather than stalling or changing course every time your latest venture stopped being fun.
(Disclaimer: This is not healthcare advice and is not designed to resolve emotional distress. If you’re struggling emotionally, please take the time to look after your health and contact your local healthcare provider.)
But saying those things is obviously easier than doing them. So what is it that holds so many of us in the developed world, with the privilege of practically infinite choice, from fully committing ourselves to a lifelong pursuit? Yes, infinite choice is paralysing, but I think it goes deeper than that. It’s all well and good to talk about commitment and discipline, but how do we actually choose the right thing to study if we’ve tried many subjects and a) they’re all equally interesting, or b) nothing is sparking a fire stronger than our need to trawl Instagram?
For those of us still searching, it can feel like we have no real passion, that we’re adrift amongst the stars, lost and without guidance. But let me reassure you that you’re not without hope, just by reading this you’re showing a dedication to finding your path.
If you’re here, you’ve likely moved from ‘pre-contemplation’, where you were unable to perceive a problem, to ‘contemplation’, where you’ve noticed a problem and aim to fix it. As a motivated individual, you’re now ready to move into the ‘planning’ stage to try and solve the problem. Here, you’ll need to do a good job in order to stay the course during the coming ‘action’ and ‘maintenance’ phases. As noted by Verywellmind, ‘oftentimes, resolutions fail because the previous steps have not been given enough thought or time.’
I, quitter
We know that almost any subject can be extremely interesting and stimulating if looked at in the right way, so why do so many people quit even the most fascinating subjects?
As you start a new skill, you progress quickly, get strong validation from others impressed by your new abilities and it’s really fun to pick up a new skill with little effort. But once you’ve spent a couple of days or weeks or months, growth plateaus and you get into the weeds. Suddenly you’re confronted with slow growth, repeated failures, obvious weaknesses and physical or mental stress. Just take a look at this depressing learning curve. What a bummer!
Applying Occam’s Razor, we can posit that learning just gets difficult (AKA very uncomfortable) past the beginner stage and as pressure mounts, we soon start asking ourselves some hard questions that we may not have answers for. Questions like: ‘is it actually worth practising instead of playing Zelda right now?’ or ‘someone told me I was bad at this skill, does that make me awful and worthless?’ or ‘will all this hard work pay off to get me that dream houseboat in the Bahamas?’ Without early consideration and the right reasons for doing something, it’s likely that the option that creates less anxiety and avoids painful realities will always win out. By quitting and moving to a new task we avoid the big questions of an unsuccessful venture, and we get to settle with belittling ourselves as lazy quitters.
The Laziness Myth
Though maybe it’s not so simple. Current research suggests that laziness doesn’t actually exist. Instead, psychologists say that procrastination comes from a low motivation to act which sounds similar but is not the same thing as being lazy. For example, you may find a lot of resistance to getting dressed for the gym or picking up the paintbrush, even though these tasks are logically important to you and you know you should do those things. Maybe you want to get fit so you can finally get #Instafamous, or maybe you want to become a master painter so that hundreds of years later a Ninja Turtle™ will be named after you. Both are valid aspirations and yet you haven’t been able to get up from the couch/bed/chrysalis (depending on how far into the future you’re reading this). It’s not that you’re unwilling to move, but something is holding you back (and it’s not your exoskeleton, future reader).
The psychological perspective points at several good reasons you may experience low motivation and they’re worth investigating, but I feel there are two real points of resistance:
- Fear of failure
- No good reason to act
People who don’t encounter these points of resistance are lucky enough to have either stupid levels of confidence or just never experience the unending existential self-doubt that makes someone read an article like this in the first place. Lucky them!
Fear of failure can present itself in unexpected ways, like fearing letting yourself down by not writing words no good, or not being able to do 20 pushups, even though you feel like you should be able to! You can fear a lack of validation or disapproval from others if you stop improving quickly or make a mistake. These fears are powerful deterrents because we associate our own self-worth with success or failure in these tasks. Even if we know that failure is just part of becoming an expert. [For further study, please see Carol Dweck’s talk on the two mindsets]
Having no good reason to act, however, is the real key to address here since, without a good reason to study or learn, all the lifehacks in the world won’t matter and, with or without self-worth, encountering any challenges to learning will mean you’re likely to stall or quit.
Helpful online guides to staying motivated in music or languages touch on the same concepts: low motivation related to fear and reflecting on ‘why’ we started our studies. But it’s not enough to come up with a surface-level reflection about why you’re doing something. One of the articles advises readers to reflect on shallow reasoning: ‘You wanted a new challenge… to become a Rock star… or to become the best player in school.’ For most of us, that kind of flimsy rationale would do little to keep us going for more than one day of self-doubt.
The role and function of purpose
In finding a reason to act, we have to consider our purpose, our ‘why’ for doing anything, something public speaker Simon Sinek made famous in Start With Why. It’s supported by the work of psychologist and author Viktor Frankl, a Nazi concentration camp survivor, who realised this same lesson much earlier. In his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl points out that ‘ever more people today have the means to live, but no meaning to live for.’
Developed countries allow us almost total freedom in choosing our vocation, but I think it’s lack of direction, not the burden of choice, that stops us moving forward. After all, you know what you like and don’t like. Through my own struggles, I realised that developed countries don’t have as many of the things that used to give our ancestors their reasons for living.
Purpose nowadays is not often handed to us except in cases of close-knit communities where every member feels they have a role, or in dogmatic teachings through religion, political views, family values and so on. The lack of purpose is part of why increased rates of depression occur in disconnected, individualistic Western societies. It’s also why so many people say they had nothing to live for until they had children, found their ‘tribe’ or found God. These things inherently create a sense of purpose by creating missions beyond the individual. But they’ve largely disappeared from our lives, so what to do?
As French author Antoine de Saint-Exupery said in Wind, Sand and Stars, ‘Each man must look to himself to teach him the meaning of life. It is not something discovered: it is something moulded.’ In other words, our purpose, our meaning of life, our reason for being, must be self-determined. If we don’t take the time to figure out our reasons for action, it becomes very easy to feel ambivalent about doing anything while focusing on shallow motivators like material wealth and external approval.
Our social monkey brains find the most powerful motivation through purpose in working, as Sinek puts it, ‘in the service of others’. Once this mission is found, it becomes much more likely that we’ll look at adversity as an opportunity to improve rather than a big failure trap. As Nietzsche explained, ‘those who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘how’.’
In his heart of hearts Johnson believed that runners are God’s chosen, that running, done right, in the correct spirit and with the proper form, is a mystical exercise, no less than meditation or prayer, and thus he felt called to help runners reach their nirvana.
— Phil Knight, Shoe Dog
How to find it
Jay Shetty, who spent 3 years as a monk and became a Life Coach, says he has about 30 questions somewhere on his website that he can sell you to answer your concerns (buy at your own risk). In a short video, he’s able to distil things to a simplified formula, saying:
Purpose = Passion + Strengths + Compassion
Alternatively, you can fork out for a Personal Values Assessment elsewhere on the internet which likely serves a similar role as Shetty’s questionnaire.
In finding my purpose, I used a version of Shetty’s formula well before it existed. I had to ask myself some challenging questions and, in the end, I settled on defining my purpose using the following questions. These questions helped me define my own purpose, guided by my passion, compassion and strengths, to settle on something directed to serve others. I’ve provided the questions I asked myself below with simplified answers as an example:
1) What do I believe is the biggest problem today?
- That there is too much injustice and pointless infighting among people and that we could be so much more if we learned to work together. [Passion]
2) What do I believe an ideal version of the world looks like?
- Good health, justice and happiness in collaboration. [Passion and Compassion]
3) In a broad sense, then, what would I be satisfied dedicating my life to? What is essential to others in achieving this ideal that I would be proud to provide?
- Reducing the burden on others that injustice causes. [Passion and Compassion]
4) How can I do that most effectively?
- By using the thing everybody needs and I learn about in my spare time: food. [Strengths, Passion and Compassion]
5) What puzzle will continuously challenge my brain in a way that I enjoy?
- Science-based healthcare at the highest level and healthcare through food, i.e. dietetics. And, as I discovered during the course, public health nutrition. [Strengths, Passion and Compassion]
Another way to think about this is: what difficult work would I do for free if I had enough to live comfortably?
Whatever you choose will take a long time to achieve, so consider what else could you be spending your time on. If you can think of a better use of your time, then you may need to explore further before deciding, but if you’ve done enough to work it out, then it’s time to go all-in.
Remember, no long-term study is a waste of time. The journalism I studied 10 years ago is paying off in letting me write for you today. The martial arts I started 7 years ago gave me the confidence and perspective to pursue healthcare. Use what you have and learn as you go. No life is a straight line, let your mission guide you.
Mr Hayami nodded. “See those bamboo trees up there?” he asked.
“Yes”
“Next year… when you come… they will be one foot higher.”
I stared. I understood.
— Phil Knight, Shoe Dog
