Finding your Passion

You should spend your life doing something you’re passionate about, right? Everyone agrees with this, but tons of people have trouble figuring out exactly what their passion is. It seems like the kind of thing that should be glaringly obvious, but for some reason it just isn’t.

I think a big part of the problem is that we’re looking in the wrong places.

Passions are very rarely big nouns like, cars, computers, or dogs. They’re usually verbs, and they’re usually specific.

Here’s an example. One of my friends, Steve, is the owner of a very successful internet company. His company, and I’ll admit I don’t know all of the intracacies of it, is basically a middleman for internet advertising.

His passion isn’t internet ads, though. No one’s is, probably. Anyone who knows Steve would tell you that his passion is incremental improvement based on rigorous testing and measurement.

He loves it. He takes great pleasure in tweaking one variable at a time in any part of the business, measuring the results, and starting another test.

His internet advertising business is just a manifestation of that. It’s an outlet for him to practice his passion.

Tonight at dinner my friend Vince asked what my passion was. I thought about it and told him that it was living as extraordinary a life as possible and helping other people do the same.

I love it.

And when you look at the things I’ve been really invested in, you’ll see that element in all of them.

Is pickup extraordinary? Yep. Was I helping others do it? Yep, and I still do through my book. I think anyone who has read my book would agree that this enthusiasm is applied to it.

How about my blog? Of course. Half of it is my stories about unusual and worthwhile things I’ve done, and the other half is trying to convince you to try some of them.

Life Nomadic is an obvious incarnation.

Even gambling fits. It’s certainly extraordinary, and when I first started I spent hours trying to convince my friends to get into it too. That’s a bit of a stretch, but passions start as interests and get built up. Gambling was one of my first ventures.

The best way I can suggest to find a passion that you’ve built is to think about what really excites you. Forget about business, just think about what in life makes you live in the moment and ignore everything else. For me it’s evangelizing living an awesome life.

I love telling people my stories and showing them how they too can live their lives as they want. I love going out and living my life with total disregard for convention.

It’s critical to be doing something you’re passionate about. I don’t believe anyone will have runaway success without this. To be massively successful you need to put 110% into it, and few people can do that without passion. I know I can’t.

Don’t look for a business that you’re passionate about. Find one of the thousands of businesses that you can apply your passion to, and develop it. Focus on it exclusively and push through the dip.