Passion and work don’t often go hand in hand. And while pundits tell you to find your passion to find your work, few tell us how to find our passion in anything except the most generic of terms. Yet, knowing our passion is like an undisputed tenet of finding a job.
Passion is not that easy. Passion is an end-point of a process after doing a whole lot of stuff that excites you and makes you happy. It’s not the start of the process.
That’s why Zen Habits (http://zenhabits NULL.net/) post, The Short but Powerful Guide to Finding Your Passion (http://zenhabits NULL.net/2009/11/the-short-but-powerful-guide-to-finding-your-passion/) is such a good one. There are ten solid steps to finding what areas give you the most excitement that can translate into passion. There are no instant answers, but, in life, there never are instant answers.
Read through the steps. Figure each of them out. Then start trying what you find on for size.
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Scot
It won’t make me popular saying this and it isn’t intended to be rude, but I reckon using the term passion in this context is not useful.
In fact it creates a problem, as lots of people know deep down they are not passionate about their work and never likely to become so, thus they feel guilty or confused when people like you speak of it.
It’s also something of a cliché – I wrote a piece about this last week on my site and received a huge amount of traffic.
@ Bill — Actually, I agree with you — Passion is a crappy term to use, but it is done all over the place. So, here is a bit of a nuanced reply…
I think many people don’t like their job but they should have passion for the work. You might not like your job because of your manager, your company, your coworkers, your commute, your benefits…tons of reasons and all good ones for not liking your specific job.
But the work, on the other hand, needs some passion. If you don’t like doing Business Analyst work, it doesn’t matter how all the rest of the job is; you won’t like any job you have as long as you don’t like the work. If you don’t like working in Compliance doing compliance work, the rest doesn’t matter.
So the nuance is that I think people need to discover what work excites, satisfies and, perhaps, gives them passion. Then they need to find a job where the rest of the story — manager, company, coworkers — fits best with their style of work. Only then do you get a satisfying job. And also why it is so tough to find the right job…
Passion is one of the things I rarely write about except to criticize. Most of the writing is all mumbo-jumbo feel-good stuff and not what it really takes to get to passion. The article mentioned here really does get you to the nuts and bolts of figuring out what you like to do and that can lead to passion for the work…but not necessarily for the job.