It’s graduation season, and we’re going to honor all those graduates flooding out of school and into the Real World by talking about finding your passion.
What are you passionate about? Do you know? (And if you’re the type who hates the passion question, hang with me–you’ll like how this ends.)
In a recent piece entitled “Your Passion Project,” business writer Laura Vanderkam remarked that young graduates are often encouraged to “follow your passion”–but what if you don’t know what that is?
Vanderkam offers practical advice on how to zoom in on your passions: basically, combine a little bit of dreamy soul-searching with a whole lot of pattern recognition. Pay attention to your interests and habits: What topics suck you in? What blogs do you read? What did you love to do as a kid?
On the other hand, Author Dan Pink detests the passion question. He thinks we’d be better off if we’d “take a break from this daunting and distracting question and ask a far more productive one: What do you do?“
What did you do last Saturday afternoon – for fun, for yourself?
What books do you read or blogs do you visit, not for work, but just because you’re interested in them?
What are you great at? What comes easily to you?
What would you do – or are you already doing – for free?
So what about you? What are you passionate about? Or, what do you DO?
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27 comments
My passions? What am I doing?
Be a wife.
Make a home.
Write.
I’ve taken spiritual gifts inventories before, and that’s been really helpful…hospitality, encouragement, and teaching are gifts that exhibit strengths in. Knowing what my gifts are has helped me become more aware of ways to use them.
Basically, what I’m already doing is what I’m passionate about. I just want to get better at all of it. 🙂
Love it, Jaimie!
I’m passionate about sharing with others my relationship with Jesus. The idea that we don’t have to have it all together – Jesus says come. “Come to me….” in your mess and “I will give you rest”. He will do the work – in His power. So often I think we don’t realize the power of God in our lives. We TRY and when that doesn’t work we TRY HARDER only leaving ourselves full of anxiety and beaten.
This is what I’m passionate about….sharing Jesus and what he’s done in my life with other women. There is a purpose for all of us. We cannot stand still and live each day checking off the hours on the calendar. We have a purpose and it’s not to “be better” it’s to allow God to work in and through us for His Glory.
I see this playing out currently in my life through a local counseling class I’m being trained to co-lead, writing and living in my community as a generous and prayerful friend.
I think this is why I’m so excited about the Influence Conference =) Getting together with a bunch of people that are heading in the same direction.
V, I LOVE the ways this is playing out in your own life right now. Great examples of channeling your passions in ways that you love and that benefit others as well.
Like most of the mothers/wives reading this blog, I’m passionate about my family and God.
What else? Reading the classics –Don’t get me started!
(For a long time, I thought I was passionate about homeschooling, but it’s turned out the person I most yearned to homeschool was myself. Yes, since my kids went to public school, I’ve been the perfect homeschooler.They are relieved to be out from under all of the “classical education” pressure I had them under. Now they are VERY generous with encouragement for me as I pursue a classical education for myself!)
Adriana, that’s so interesting how you figured all that out! I’m so glad that you’re able to channel your passions in a way that now makes everybody in your family happy 🙂
You know, sometimes I confuse what I’m good at with what I’m passionate about. I’ve always been good at writing, and I write a lot, but I don’t feel passionate about it. Makes me wonder if I should still write and maybe I’ll become passionate, or try to figure out what else it is that I should be doing. Hmph.
Rachel, I think maybe you’re trying too hard to define your passion. You probably do feel passionate about writing if you’re good at it and make time to do it all the time. The way we spend our time says a lot about what we really value.
Yeah, but if it’s my passion, shouldn’t I enjoy it more? 🙁
Do you really not enjoy it? How does it make you feel?
I linked to an article below that I found really helpful. When the author set about finding something he was passionate about for work, he looked asked himself, “What will make you happiest this second, but what will make you happiest over some longer period, like a week or a month?” And he added that each day he should be able to say of his work, “Wow, that’s pretty cool.”
I’ve always enjoyed writing. I forced myself through the writing of two novels on the idea I was meant to write. It wasn’t until recently that I realized I was passionate about non-fiction, magazine- or blog-style writing. Now writing is that thing that makes me the happiest–besides being a wife and mom, of course!
So it is my passion. If it isn’t yours, I hope you find what is!
Writing is a tricky passion to have. Most days I prefer “having written” to “writing.” Then there are those rare beautiful days where the words fly off the page and I’m in awe of the ideas and dialog. I appreciate those days when they happen but most days it’s a matter of sitting down and doing the work. But it’s still my passion!
Rachel, I truly think it’s okay to not have an ecstatic this-sets-my-soul-on-fire feeling about the key work that people sometimes call their “passion.” Maybe that’s where you are? Maybe writing is what you DO, because you like it and you’re good at it, and maybe it’s okay to not feel over-the-moon ecstatic about that.
Then again, for years my favorite part of my legal job was the writing. It finally occurred to me that I love writing, but would be happier writing about a different subject matter! I was close to my “passion” but hadn’t quite nailed it yet. And I’m definitely still evolving.
Thanks for getting a great discussion started!
But I don’t feel like I have a soul-on-fire feeling about ANYTHING. Am I just not capable of that sort of emotion, or have I just not found the thing yet?
Rachel, maybe you haven’t found the thing, but I think it’s more likely you’re not the soul-on-fire type. I’m really not, either 🙂 Have you read the Pink article yet? Take a look at it (it’s short!): instead of searching for soul for intense emotion, just pay attention to your habits, and ask a far more manageable question of yourself: what do you like to do? How do you spend your time?
(And maybe this isn’t the best time to ask since you have a teeny baby, but you get the gist, right? I hope so!)
It’s like a friend told me long ago about spiritual gifts. He said our gifts usually line up with what we like to do already. God gives us desires consistent with how he made us as individuals, and that’s where our gifts and passions can be found.
Tim
I love how that works. Thanks for pointing that out, Tim!
This is so great, Anne. I am passionate about what I do…being a wife/mom, reading, learning about how kids learn, teaching, and writing about it… now if I could only translate that into a few dollars here and there 😉
Yes, that would be fabulous! You’re fortunate to know what it is that you love. Of course, having that pay well would be fantastic!
Hmm…I am passionate about what I do, plus passionate about things I just don’t have time for being 31 weeks pregnant and having a 16 mth old! Education, mothering, homemaker, sewing (lack of time), gardening (lack of time, it’s incredibly hot out and full of biting bugs!) cooking (yay! I do this every day), reading (lack of time, but blogs make it easy to get a little “bite of reading”).
Overall I feel blessed to love my job of being mom!
Yes, I get that! You’re in a crazy season, and it’s fantastic that it aligns so well for your passions, Suzette. Even if maybe there’s not room for *all* of them right now 🙂
My husband referred me to this article (http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html) a while back. It’s a great examination, especially for young people, about how to find and do what they love.
Alison, I just clicked over. That’s a great article–thanks for sharing!
The thing that always frustrated me most about the passion question is that we tend to know so little about the opportunities to apply our passions! I work with an aviation museum and LOVE it – it ties in to all my passions. I get to read about history, share incredible stories and teach during tours, and plan events. But I didn’t discover this as even being a possibility for myself until just a couple years ago!
While I don’t regret the meandering road that got me to where I am, I often wonder what would have happened if I’d never taken the chance and tried this – how long would I have gone still searching for the right fit without knowing what it looked like?
Jamie, I am so interested in hearing how you found your way to the aviation museum! I’m so glad you took a chance and ended up there!
I love that I found this post because I have a post scheduled for tomorrow about this exact same topic that I wrote a few weeks ago. Thanks for the link to “Your Passion Project”!
I always felt a little bugged by “the passion question” because I don’t have just one main thing; I’ve always had a number of main things that are important to me. Recently I was ranting about having read a bunch of self-congratulatory articles on The Vocation of Motherhood which made it sound like a mother who does anything other than care for her children and home is not a real mother because that other thing must be her vocation and therefore it’s not fair to the children. My partner said he’d recently read something about “finding your life’s purpose” which said that your life’s purpose is the thing that, when you even think about it, gets you kind of choked up because it’s just so important.
Well, that means my passion/vocation/purpose is not motherhood.
It’s not being the data manager of a social science research study.
It’s not caring for the environment.
It’s not being a good Christian and serving the church.
It’s not cooking healthy vegetarian food.
My passion is a line from the Girl Scout Law: “To make the world a better place” or, in the less succinct older version I learned as a girl, “To protect and improve the world around me; to help where I am needed.”
That’s what brings tears to my eyes. That’s what I want to do with every fiber of my being.
And it includes ALL of the above. 🙂 So I am pursuing my vocation after all.