Drive and Passion: An Introduction

Drive and Passion. Passion and Drive.

I feel that they both work in tandem. By having passion and drive, you can really achieve whatever you want. Extremely easy to say but finding what drives you to achieve more can often be hard for young people. The problem is 17/18 year olds are thrown into making a decision for what they want to do for their entire life. This causes so many people to be confused and just going with the motion of completing university, but graduate still not knowing what fulfills them. I’ve been lucky enough to be able to figure out sort of what I want — or at least have a way to get to narrow it down. This article’s purpose is to give some aid in how to find purpose in what you’re doing by taking smaller, methodical steps to help with passion and drive, as well as give a little background about me :)

To put things into perspective for how I figured what I wanted to do, we’re going to have to go back to high school. I was mostly an average kid until grade 10. I used to have around 75s throughout and honestly just played video games all day. Thanks to my parents I got my stuff together starting in grade 10 (better grades) and then I sort of knew I wanted to do either business or engineering by the end of grade 11. I went full steam ahead in grade 12 to grind and get into the University of Waterloo for Mechatronics Engineering. At that moment in life, my only goal was to get in and nothing else. I still remember just wanting to work so hard to achieve that goal. Not all of it was great, I sometimes had nightmares of losing a single mark on my math tests haha. But in the end, I learned a lot about myself and am grateful to my old self for putting in the extra effort.

After getting into Waterloo, I’ve been more relaxed in terms of grades because of the amount of pressure I put on myself to secure a great internship/co-op placement. I’m often asked by peers and juniors how do I keep working at something or how do I always know what I’m doing. To be honest, I still don’t know exactly what I’m doing and how I should go about it. What I do is set smaller goals to work towards and try to achieve them. I just try to make the most out of everyday. For example, I’m currently at the stage where I’m racking up experience in different domains — Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, IoT, PM, Full Stack Development, Electrical Engineering, etc. I still don’t necessarily know what I want to pursue for long term, but I do know where my strengths lie and also know how to capitalize on them to be the best at what I do. Read below on how to figure this out!

Identifying Skills

We often feel like we don’t know what to do and that we don’t know how to start. One thing that I did was identifying skills I was good at. This started out with things like: building cool projects, public speaking, math, coding and marketing. So I then went ahead and figured out what all activities I do which correlate to these skills. The more I looked into these few skills, I found more skills which I was good at.

Happiness! :)

Next up, I figured out what I enjoy doing and was not necessarily good at. These skills and activities can be completely unrelated to your career but they will help for later.

Overlap

When you have these skills and activities listed out, try to find an overlap. If there is overlap between them, it is a good point for starting to set small goals to help you achieve a bigger one. It is also advisable to set goals which build habits, as doing some work everyday is a lot better than doing a lot on one day. For me, I found enjoyment in building things and public speaking. Building things is quite straightforward for an engineer as we’re always creating something. However, for my love of public speaking, I try to tackle every engagement I can where there is any sort of presenting or networking involved. Being creative to apply skills is a great way to enjoy what you’re doing on a day-to-day basis!

No Overlap? Explore!

Didn’t find any overlap? Don’t fret! If you don’t find any overlap it is perfectly fine, it means it’s time to explore! In my opinion, exploring completely randomly can sometimes be a waste of time. If you have some self-guidance when exploring, it can help you understand your skills as well as likes and dislikes. For example, if you know that you lack knowledge about electrical systems, but think they might be cool, go try and do something to build upon it. Join a design team or come up with a project! It can also be something like trying to go to networking events and talking to people in different industries and trying to see if one might be a fit for you. The only thing that really needs to be done, is to put some time and effort into this exploration phase to see if you really like something.

Burnout

While on the topic of working away hard at finding a passion or working towards something, students often also get caught up in taking on too much too soon and burning out. I think while in university, one should also have a good time, and not miss out on the university experience. Remember the skills and activities which were not career-centric from the Happiness section? You can always do those things which are not necessarily career focused to de-stress and chill.

Work hard, play hard

Putting it all together

When you understand what makes you happy and you start working towards that goal, the passion now exists to provide you with drive to achieve your goals

Thank you for reading my first article, hope it was helpful! I’ll be posting a flurry of topics in the future, stay on the lookout!