Here is a question I wanna encourage you to ask yourself: what is something you were just as passionate about 10 years ago as you are today?
The topic of passion comes up in plenty of articles that either encourage you to pursue what your passion is (you’ll be best at the things you are most passionate about), or to dismiss what it is (passion is cute, but it doesn’t pay the bills).
Throughout the years, I have allowed myself to think through the rationale of both sides. And after living through phases in my life where I actually got to experience both sides, I saw first hand what difference the notion of passion can make in terms of excitement, dedication and success.
No matter where you stand on this issue, I think it’s undeniable that working on something that excites is “superior” to working on something that bores you. I hope we can agree on that. And while passion isn’t an imperative factor for you to be successful and professionally fulfilled, I do believe that pursuing passion has the power to get you to places that non-passion endeavors cannot.
And the reason why passion can gat you farther is simply because it allows for magic to happen. When you pursue passion, the naysayers become negligible. The problems become powerful. The ideas become irresistible. And time becomes transient. I have seen time and time again how people start with something small they are passionate about, and then grow it into something so big and so successful, that outsiders can only marvel at the obviousness of the feat.
The funky thing with the idea of identifying one’s passion is that passion isn’t something easily recognizable. It’s not an event, not an item, nothing replicable, and often times it has an unexplainable origin. Why is Tommy passionate about trains while Jimmy is passionate about food? We don’t know.
So in order to identify something so ungraspable, one needs to be have a lot of self-awareness and be good at reading their own emotions. Up until now, the best way for me to identify what I am passionate about it, was to understand what were the things that made it easy for me to get out of bed and made it hard for me to go to sleep. That was my “passion litmus test.”
But another question that came up for me as I was observing the hype around the #10yearchallenge was to ask myself what is something in my life that I was just as passionate about 10 years ago as I am today. The question can rule out erroneous judgement and help you challenge the durability of whatever you think your passion is. It’s not an all-encompassing question because I do not believe they are all innate, yet it’s one additional and powerful way to crystalize true passion.