How To Find Your Passion?
7:00 a.m.: It’s a Monday morning and I still haven’t recovered from my last night’s hangover. I check my fb and It’s full of motivational quotes and excited people. They all seem passionate. I hate these people. I get angry for not knowing my passion and I’m afraid that I’ll never find one in this life or ever.
9:00 a.m.: I’m in a meeting. The CEO is talking about some potential Dubai clients and stuff. And here I’m fantasizing about a holiday trip to Maldives. Then suddenly, I hear boss say something about passion. Maybe it was the same quote I read in the morning or maybe from someone on the bus. And I again find myself on an endless and hopeless quest for a myth called Passion.
5:00 p.m.: I am relieved that the day is gonna end, I’ll be home and all will be over soon. But someone doesn’t like to see me happy and there comes in a colleague who starts blabbering about his plans to start a startup. About how passionate he is…. *Oh God Not Again!!*
There are a lot of us who read and listen to a great amount of content and talks on being successful, happy, and of course on how your passion can help you achieve all of the above. If you are a Millennial, you’ve lived through ‘The Unicorn Era’ of the startups. You’ve seen hundreds of founders and CEOs starting up companies about the things they are passionate about. And you still don’t get it. You often ask questions like ‘What is Passion?’, ‘Why are some people born with a passion and some without it?’. You wonder, ‘How does it feel, to have a burning desire to do something? Something that is bigger than yourself. A mission that’ll not only affect your life but life of a million people.’ But before answering these questions we must understand:
The Timeline of Passion
Passion is an abstract concept that has deluded the greats and the commons alike. Contrary to the belief, no one is born with a passion. It is, but a skill, gradually learned. There are 3 stages of a fully developed passion.
1. The Birth
“Everything begins with an idea.” ~ Earl Nightingale
The Passion takes birth in the form of a thought. A thought is not even an idea, it’s just one thought out of a billion thoughts you have in an entire day. It’s tiny. It’s benign. It lacks strength and courage to be spoken of, to be trifled with. It has a 99.9999999% probability of bursting into flames and turning to ash. But It is also like an ember that glows bright, and even though it can fade away with a single blow, it stays there, surviving on splinters. And with this it enters the phase on which it’s entire life depends, The Doubt.
2. The Doubt
“Doubt has killed more dreams than failure ever will.” ~ Suzy Kassem
The Doubt has the power to kill every single idea that ever survived the birth. It’s the most challenging stage of an ember-like-passion. It brings a storm of self trials and a tirade by those who did not even dare to try. It has brought down dynasties. But only those ideas that survived the havoc, brought down by the Devil himself, are the ones that truly hold the secret to finally becoming a Passion.
3. The Fire
“Be fearless in the pursuit of what sets your soul on Fire.” ~ Anonymous
“If you were that ember that lit up when the others only desired,
If you are that pyre that raged up when others got tired,
Then rejoice my child,
Cause You are the beacon that the whole world admires!”
When you will have that idea that has fought a billion other thoughts to be the one to catch your attention, the idea that faced the confrontation of an army of critics and has gained the distrust of those you loved, only then you have truly earned the right to call your idea, A Passion. Now that we’ve learned the true anatomy of a passion, we can focus on practical ways by which we can find a passion.
4 Simple Ways To Develop A Passion
There’s a lot of emotion that goes into developing a passion. Often times you come across an idea that seems so cool, but you forget about it or you feel funny, the very second you begin to delve deeper into it. Your passion fills you with joy, breaks you to into pieces and forces you to leave it, but what it doesn’t do is, bore you. Here are some of the tried and tested ways to start, kindle and invigorate your fire of passion.
1. Talk To People
Having deep conversation with people is the first and the easiest way to explore new ideas. One gets to know about issues that are affecting so many people including oneself. You get to know yourself better. You realize those topics that interest you and can be talked about for hours. Sometimes having conversations lead to confrontations and arguments, as you share your ideas and views with the others. These are the ‘moments of truth’ either make you more determined towards your ideas and turn them into a passion or convince you to leave them. Conversations clear out your thoughts and help in refining your thought process. They also points out the flaws in them. So pick up a phone, call your friend and set up a meeting to talk about some crazy sh*t!!
2. Watch Movies That Question Reality
While every movie is a source of inspiration, watching movies that forces the audience to ask questions, to think about the meanings of simple things like dreams, life, justice and innocence.Some of the greatest mind bending movies are The Matrix, Predestination, Inception and sci-fi movies like Blade runner, Terminator trilogy are some of the greatest movies. Even some TV series like Person of Interest ( which is also the reason of my passion ), Lost, 21 Monkeys etc. are some amazingly inspirational series to start with.
3. MOOCs
Massive Open Online Courses are one of the main resources that can help us believe in our passions. The movement that started with the start of the Course Machine Learning, taught by Andrew Ng ( Director of AI Lab, Stanford University, and Co-founder and CEO of Coursera) on Coursera.com was a founding stone that led to various Graduate University Level courses being made available to non-university audience. Some of the most amazing MOOCs are Udacity, Codeacademy, Edx, Udemy etc. Coding would be the mandatory education for a High School Level student and these organizations will help in providing the education to the masses. And as far as the different topics are concerned, it is suggested that to find your passion, one must check out all possible topics of study, then choose what she likes the most.
4. Books That Inspire Us To Take Extraordinary Measures
They say the books are one’s best friends and this just as true as Tyrion from The Popular HBO Drama Series and Book Series ‘Game of Thrones’ states,
” A mind needs books just as a sword needs a whetstone.”
They truly shape our thoughts and always have something to take from. Fiction teaches to find out the unexplored territories both in the outer space and those within our minds. The wonders of the lands unknown and dangers of the valleys have always inspired mankind to push their limits and take risks. The most notable fiction classics are the The Foundation by Isaac Asimov, The Duke Series and The Dark Tower and Sandman Series by Stephen King. The Non-Fictions including The Biographies and Auto-Biographies of great men and women like that of The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, and those of Mahatma Gandhi, Benjamin Franklin and Abraham Lincoln inspire us to follow our passions with great vigor and responsibilities, extending to the fact that our passions form the future of our Nations.
This article is the product of experiences of a number of our readers. We have tried to put in as much knowledge as we could, that we hope, would help our readers to find their passion and follow it. The only way to be happy is to do what you love.
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