5 tactics to finally find your passion (or: why you should be more curious!)

“The only way to do great work is to love what you do.” — Steve Jobs

“The only way to do great work is to love what you do.” — Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs is probably right.

However, according to some studies, roughly 80% of people do not feel passionate about their jobs.

And I am sure that the numbers look quite similar for people who don’t even really know what their passion is or if they have any at all.

Find your calling. You need to look for your bigger why. There is one thing that you can do like no one else can.

Sounds so true and convincing right? Then go out and find your passion now.

But wait, how am I supposed to …
How can I …
It is not so …
I am doing this thing …
I don’t know what I should …

I’m sure many of you had a conversation with themselves similar to this before.

And as a result have at least temporarily, given up on what seems to be something only the very chosen few among us ever get to taste: living a life full of what you love doing.
Spending hours intensely engaged with something that excites you. Knowing why you are doing what you are doing and feeling aligned with your innermost drives and interests.

You want that. We all want that. But it just appears to be this utopian scenario that will never unfold in front of you… Maybe you’re right.

But maybe you’re just too damn lazy.

Just do this exercise and you will find… or maybe not

Many smart (and also not so smart) people have expressed their thoughts about passion and created tools and tactics to help you find yours.

Steven Kotler for example says that your passion exists at the intersection of three of the things that you are curious about.

So just make a list of 10 things that you like and find what they have in common. Then, come up with 15 problems that you would like to have solved, find the connection et voilà: you just also found your purpose.

If you are aware of that many interests as well as problems worth solving, good for you! You’re an anomaly and this approach might work for you. If not, however… well, you’ll just be frustrated about your (seeming) lack of interest in the world.

Then there are more generic exercises like revisiting your childhood and remembering what it was that you loved spending your time with.
You know, when you were like 7 or 8 years old, were climbing trees, caught (and at some point probably ate) earthworms and tried to convince your mother that you’d only eat cheeseburgers, pizza, and chocolate when you grow up.

The problem is: a lot has changed since then.

Or how about the famous billion dollar question:
“If you had a billion dollars, what would you be doing all day?”

Well, this won’t make you find something new. Instead, it will just make you prioritize what you already have in mind. And most likely, you’ll come up with: traveling. Welcome to the club!

Okay, so what’s at the core of all of these approaches?

It’s finding and being aware of what you are interested in and what you like spending your time with.

And for most of us, exactly that is the problem.

There is so much you don’t even know that you know nothing about

If you don’t really know what it is that excites you and that you love doing — chances are, you haven’t really tried much.

Let’s keep this simple:

There are so many things you are not doing. There is so much you haven’t ever thought about. There is so much you know nothing about. But most of all, there is so much you don’t even know that you know nothing about.

The world is full of amazing things to be enthusiastic about:

It’s filled with beautiful art, astounding cultures and mind-blowing nature that you can explore.

It’s loaded with controversial discussions, unsolved questions and puzzling mysteries worth diving into.

It’s impregnated with fascinating science and discoveries that will change your perspective on life.

It’s full of countless practices that people have developed, love to share and that you could also find a hobby in — an abundance of potential skills that you can develop and cultivate.

And fortunately, it’s also packed with a myriad of resources, tools and tactics to find what will excite you!

Open the gates and follow down the rabbit hole

Now, here are 5 concrete things you can do and tactics you can apply in order to tap into the vast pool of amazing and fascinating things the world has to offer:

Watch Youtube videos.

Apart from all those videos of fat cats wearing a pink ballerina costume and dancing to rap music, there is actually plenty of amazing content on Youtube, ranging from sub 1-minute long fact snippets to high-class, full-length documentaries, talks, and interviews.

You’ll find an almost infinite number of channels about science, philosophy, politics, history, culture, art, do-it-yourself, how-to’s and pure inspiration.

Youtube will even make it easy for you to go deeper and deeper into one topic because of their related videos suggestions.

Read Wikipedia articles.

Just imagine you had the whole knowledge of humankind available for free at your fingertip, accessible anytime and anywhere, well structured and even presented in an easily readable format.

Well, Wikipedia comes pretty close.

Just start by reading the article of the day and follow down the rabbit hole of blue hyperlinks. It won’t take long and you’ll find yourself reading, thinking and learning about a completely unrelated, yet fully captivating topic.

Take notes.

Whenever you come across something you don’t understand, find fascinating or simply are wondering about, take notes (now that’s finally a good use case for the notes app on your iPhone!) and follow up on that specific topic, idea or thought.

How? Just apply the Youtube and Wikipedia thing above.

Listen to people.

And by listening, I don’t mean waiting in silence until you get to speak and rehearsing your response mentally.

I mean listening as in focusing on what the other person actually says, paying attention to the spoken words and processing the formulated thoughts. You’ll be amazed at how much interesting ideas and views people will happily share with you if you just let them.

And if you find a nugget here and there: take notes. And no, in this case, it is not at all impolite to pull out your phone in the middle of a conversation; a simple “that sounds interesting. I need to take some notes so I can read more about it later” will do the trick.

And it might even improve the quality of your conversation since you’re showing real interest in what the other one has to share with you.

Read books.

Self-explanatory. Take notes. Follow up on whatever seems to be worth it (which should be about everything you don’t know everything about).

Be humble enough and acknowledge that you are probably unaware of so many beautiful and interesting things out there. Fill that nescience with open-mindedness and curiosity. This will very naturally lead you to more and more sources of inspiration, fascination, and enthusiasm.

If you already feel convinced at this point, took notes while reading and did a google search for interesting youtube channels, then you can stop reading right here and spend the rest of the day bombarding yourself with new topics (but leave a comment before please).

However, if you’re still not sure about how natural curiosity could potentially play out to find your passion, allow me to share my personal story.

Until I was 16 or 17, I wanted to become an astrophysicist and I read books about the origin of the universe, time travel and quantum mechanics. Frankly, I didn’t understand a word of what I was reading.

Intense conversations with my grandfather about the complexity of the universe and the underlying physics later lead to discussions about similarly complex yet more mundane topics like capitalism and finance. This brought me to reading and watching documentaries about economics, management, and the stock market. I became fascinated and studied business administration, majoring in finance.

During my studies, while still being convinced that I’d become an investment banker, I came across this thing called ‘behavioral economics’. It guided me towards the mysteries of human behavior, social group think and psychology in general. So I watched Youtube videos about that and read pop-science psychology books.

Jumping from topic to topic in that area, I stumbled over the science of motivation and willpower, in the context of behavior change and habit formation. I’ve always played sports and had an interest in exercise, so I applied learnings from that field to my training and nutrition routine. I became almost obsessed and changed my lifestyle completely; now having fully integrated an intense exercise routine and healthy nutrition into my daily life.

Experiencing how much more control over my life I could exert than I had previously imagined, I started to dive deeper into the field of self-development, and human potential and how I could share those insights with other people.
With that in mind, I’m now learning about social media influencing and how to grow your reach — which brought me to Medium, now publishing my first ever blog post.

So now, I’m a fitness and healthy lifestyle enthusiast, working at a digital fitness and self-development startup. In my spare time, I watch documentaries on topics like wildlife in Africa, poverty in Guatemala or the mysteries of quantum mechanics (still fascinating!). I binge-watch talks and interviews about the use of social media. I read books on philosophy, self-development and non-religious spirituality. I’m listening daily to podcasts on nutrition, exercise, politics, finance and the nature of religion. And I’ve just started to dive deeper into machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Have I found my one and only passion? I don’t know.

But what I do know is, that I am spending most of my time with a lot of different things and topics that I feel passionate about. Every single day.

And I am very grateful to have been able to build a career around the most important pillars of those passions.

Most importantly though, I feel that curiosity has always been and still is the driving force behind me diving into topics, learning and growing — and feeling great about it.

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Phil