One thing that many folks struggle for years is discovering their own passion; doing what we like to do doesn’t necessarily uncover a passion. We love to watch our favorite show, but surely that’s not what we make a career out of, right?
Humans are dynamic beings. Interests change over time; some increase, some decrease, some go away entirely, and some appear as brand new. It is common to try dozens of hobbies over the years. Off the top of my head, my childhood hobbies included guitar, piano, video games, karate, woodworking, just about every sport imaginable, go-karts, and more (not at the same time of course). In all of these, I found that my enthusiasm for these activities faded over time. It could have been age, stage in life, friend group, or something inherent to my personality. These old hobbies simply became a phase of my life that came and went.
There is one passion that remained with me – and that is always learning about business. I walked dogs when I was 10, I mowed lawns when I was 12, I was a DJ when I was in high school, and I was in entrepreneurship clubs while I was in college. And yet, all that was only the beginning of my entrepreneurial journey.
Discovering passion may be the single most important thing you can do to put yourself in a position for personal fulfillment and achievement. Being passionate about something allows you to achieve mastery quicker, especially given the requirements to become fully proficient. In fact, according to writer Malcolm Gladwell, it takes about 10,000 hours of practice to achieve mastery in any given activity. More importantly, passion carries you through the dips, the challenges, the hard times, and the struggles associated with the particular activity. Without passion, minor challenges can be enough to derail and abandon the path to mastery – as I’ve done many times in the past.
What is one way to discover passion? How do we tap into our energy reservoir? Instead of telling ourselves certain things, we should let our bodies tell us. Humans may be emotional and irrational, but there is still a high level of predictability in which we operate. We can let our bodies tip us off to our passions by being highly self-aware about what gives us energy.
There were times in my first job where the afternoon lull would hit, and I would literally start nodding off. It was frustrating, embarrassing, and not professional. Nodding off for me would happen while reading through dense documents or trying to learn about subject matter that I truly did not care about. Can you blame me? How awful would it be if we got sleepy every day at our jobs for 30 years? That doesn’t seem like a fulfilling life.
As I moved through my career, I moved into roles that tapped into my energy reservoir, and my afternoon lulls became more and more rare. Even outside of work, I still found energy when building spreadsheets and building business processes, no matter how tired I felt. I would even lose track of time and end up going to bed way too late – exactly what happens during a “flow” state.
Your energy can come from anywhere. It can come from gardening, building things, cooking, doing math problems, and even socializing. In fact, a giveaway sign of an extrovert is gaining energy from being around other people (I’m the opposite!).
Anyone can tap into their energy. We just need to be introspectiveness and willingness to listen to our bodies do the thing they like to do. Once we find that thing, we can then re-organize the activities we take part in to tap that energy reservoir.
