I once was lost, but now I found. (What to do with my life.)

Intro

Deep down in our thoughts, there’s always a voice.

The people who deemed successful, they don’t become successful just because.

They listened to their inner voice and stick with it.

As a mere mortal myself, I had been struggling to find out “what I want to do with my life” for as long as my conscious mind goes. But now, I am happy to announce that I have finally found my passion, and I’m going to share my own method with you in this article.

Let’s define passion

To me, it can be simplified as something you like and repeatedly doing it without anyone asking you to do it. That’s your passion right there.

But that activity you do right there, might not be the “exact thing” or passion you’re into. It might just contain an element that matches your passion.

My experience

I was once very into Jazz piano, I love its background, the way it’s constructed, its complexity nature and of course how it makes me feel. But the more I studied and practised, the more I feel like it is not the thing I originally thought it was. Now that I’ve switched my focus to programming, I realised there are similarity between the two, and what my passion has been is really creativity and autonomy, not the activity itself.

The core of Jazz is improvising, to non jazz player it usually being defined as “play what you want”, and “there’s no wrong notes in Jazz.”, so they said. But the thing is in order to play what you want is actually within a frame of music theory, which I never minded. What troubled me was the way it is practised – you have to transcribe (listen to other players’ lines and copy them) a lot, practice every line in all keys, so you can play that line no matter the key you’re in. That’s just so boring man, I don’t want to copy anyone, even if it means it’s just a necessary process. So I struggled a lot during the study, then eventually I put it aside.

Now that I realised what I liked about back then was just my idea of Jazz, not the actual Jazz playing, at least in a traditional sense and the way it is educated.

Therefore, a passion is the underlying elements behind the activities that you do. The more matching elements inside an activity, the more passionate you are about the activity. It’s like people who love sports, they are willing to try so many types of sports, because their “passion” is being active.

So, the real thing here is to find those elements, but how?

Find your passion

I can’t guarantee a 100% success rate, but it’s free, and worked on my overthinking self. I’ve struggled with “what do I want to do with my life” for over 20+ years, I’m so glad it had come to an end.

The following is a method I created:

1. List out all the hobbies you have, the things you want to do and the things you enjoy doing. No matter how silly they are. It can be a topic, an activity, a task, a stupid little thing, a profession you’re into, a goal you’re after. The item has to be a broader activity. For example, an item should be “book reading” instead of finish Chapter 3 of Book A, so that it can stay in the list.
2. Try to sort out the best 10–20.
3. Put that list in your daily to-do.
4. In the coming 30 days, you’re going to touch on these tasks every single day. Touch means you try to perform each task on the list every single day. However, it doesn’t matter how long or when do you do it, and you don’t need to schedule them at all. It doesn’t matter if it means just 5 seconds of doing the task, so be it, it counts. Though if you can continue doing the task, continue on, until you decided to stop, it’s flexible. As long as you try to touch on every single item every day.
5. As time progresses, say on the first week ends, you will probably find some tasks you enjoy so much that you’ve spent hours on that, as well as some tasks you barely touched on. Now, try to merge two “almost failed” items into one single item. For instance, if you have very few time spent on both kickboxing and drawing, put them together as one item “Kickboxing and drawing”. From then on, you can just touch on either of that activity, and called it done. As time further progresses, try merging these items one by one, just don’t merge with the highly achieved ones.
6. When you hit month end, you will get to see which activity you liked best, which activity you enjoyed the least. Funny for me though, I also realised some activities I thought I loved the most but actually not. Our conscious minds are excellent at misleading us.
7. There will be this one or two activities you do them religiously, willingly and intuitively. A task you’d always find to get your hands on the first in the list. A task that perform way longer than all the other tasks. That’s your passion right there.

How and why this method works

It is like 5 seconds rules combined with breaking down big goals into small pieces. The hardest part of being productive is starting. As long as you start doing a task, it can last for hours, day, weeks, even years.

The method works by fooling ourselves that we have all control. Therefore, no stress, no guilt, just a flexible schedule to do the work. By merging low performance tasks, we can figure out which are the tasks we think we enjoy, but our body and action tell us otherwise. And that’s the facts we are looking for here. If we are so clever that we knew what we really are interested in, no one will have difficulty finding out what they want to do in life. Action speaks louder than thoughts. Let our body tell our what we’re really interested in.

Don’t mix your goal with passion

Another core value I found is that – Passion, or productivity can hardly be found if you don’t enjoy the progress of the task, allow me to further explain, this is crucial.

Say you want to become a professional athlete, you have to either bear or enjoy your daily tight training schedule religiously all day every day, so that one day you might become a sensation. There’s almost no way you can get through it without a strong will, reason, and a lot of passion. I understood this from my experience trying to become a Jazz pianist, but I didn’t enjoy the process necessary to becoming one. And It matters a lot.

When you think of it, most of our lives we spend time doing stuff. A goal is just a milestone that happens for a split second, then what? We have to find other things to do.

So, what matter the most, is the process of trying to achieve a goal, not the goal itself. We will be miserable if we don’t enjoy the process, the chores that we do daily to achieve our goals.

Therefore, find a task that you’re passionate in, and focus on that. Goals will follow.

But my passion is…

Ok, what if all you did was playing a video game? IT IS OK.

The reason you’re asking that because you believed it is a bad thing, while it is true it is unhealthy to play video games all day, if it’s your passion keep it.

However, please know that the underlying question might actually be: “But it doesn’t make money?” If that’s what you meant, then it is easy.

Just figure out how to make money with your passion. This is your real task here. Because productivity happens naturally if you enjoy what you’re doing. And if it is not a typical job position that related to the thing you want to do, make your ways.

I read on somewhere that there’s a guy who loves cleaning window for who knows what reason, and that’s his passion. So he started a window cleaning company.

Bottom-line

You can only die trying or die not trying.

You can either work with passion and pride till the day you die, or working soullessly with regrets till the day you die.

The choice is yours.

Good luck finding your passion.