HOW TO FIND OR DEVELOP A LIFE PASSION

We all know the secret to success, greatness, and happiness, do we not? Haven’t we been told and seen studies and read the research that the way to success, greatness, and happiness is to find and follow your passion? Yes, of course! That’s the secret! Now that you know the secret of life, have a good one!

What? There’s something else? What? Oh the how; you want to know “How to find and follow your passion?” Ah, that’s a different question and one that’s not so easy to answer. But there is an answer.

1) Find your Passion For many the answer is to simply begin to notice how you answer the following questions: What makes you feel most fully alive? What naturally and inevitably excites you? What do you dream about doing, experiencing, having, or giving? Or you could begin to recover those dreams that you had as a child or a teenager. What did you continually dream about in those early years? And even if you didn’t talk about it aloud or discuss it with others, what captivated the inmost places of your heart?

Now if you, like so many people, have had the dreams of youth extinguished, if parenting, schooling, “being realistic,” or the hard knocks of life have knocked all the dreams out of you, you might give yourself to some self-discovery for recovering an awareness about yourself and what’s within. Or if you, like so many, have had self-knowledge and self-awareness tabooed so that you’re not allowed to go there, then begin to giving yourself the permission that’s been taken away. Then you too can begin the odessey of discovering and “knowing thyself.”

Finding your passion will, more often than not, mean discovering your natural talents and dispositions. But you knew that, didn’t you? Surely you’ve heard that a hundred times. “What are you good at? What do you do with ease that others find difficult? What are some of your natural dispositions?”

Generally speaking, your passion will be inside your natural “strengths” as your innate talent or disposition, which if you give yourself to the effort and discipline of learning, you can cultivate into a skill, then a competency. And if you stay with it, you will turn it into an expertise and after some more years, into a mastery. No one is born an expert; everybody has to learn. No one is born a master; people become masters in a given field after years of commitment, discipline, and effort. Howard Gardner documented this in his work, Creating Minds as he explored the biography of seven geniuses of the twentieth century, one corresponding to each of the seven intelligences of his Multiple Intelligences Model.

Now if you find any of the words in the previous paragraph shocking or disappointing, that might very well explain your challenge in finding your passion. Passions have to be developed. They have to be cultivated. They do not just land in your lap full-grown. “The Myth of the Easy Passion” is precisely what discourages many. When they come up against the effort, discipline, and challenge of developing their passion, they experience a disillusionment as if they had been betrayed or sold a bill of goods.

“I have to work?” “I have to put out effort?” “Why can’t it be easy?” “Why does there have to be set backs, challenges, discipline? If it was really my passion, it would all come easy, right?”

Perhaps the Myth begins with the word “find.” I suppose find could suggest or imply that you will just happen upon it, and then, “Lo, and behold, There it is!” But find can also imply a search, a hunt, a digging around as in a gold mine, filtering through all of the rock and dross to find the gold. Find can suggest that you have to look here and there, turn over this rock and that, until you discover it. And this search may take years and lots of experimenting to find your passion.

2) Create your passion So what if you can’t find your passion? What then? Well, the next choice is to create it.

“Create it? I can do that? Just create it? How is that possible? What does that mean?”

Don’t let the idea that there is a passion for you—somewhere, some time, and that you have to spend your whole life off on some Indiana Jones adventure trying to find it—deceive you. You don’t. Don’t be deceived into thinking that you can’t start living, being successful, experiencing greatness, enjoying happiness until you find it. That’s a Myth also. And it’s a dangerous myth at that. It encourages passive waiting, procrastination, and path-of-least resistance living.

Because passions never come to you full-blown and at a red-hot temperature, they have to be develop. But there’s more. We have to develop them and we also have to be developed for them. This is true for both the passions that you find in your natural talents and gifts and for those that you choose to create. So how do you just “create” a passion? There are several steps.

First, take interest in something. Anything. In fact, if you look around to see it, you will find human beings highly interested in all kinds of things. And many, many of these things are things that you might scratch your head wondering “How in the world could anyone be interested in that?!” Take anything and you’ll find someone somewhere is interested in it! Take anything and someone finds it absolutely fascinating and interesting! Now isn’t that fascinating?

Don’t write that off as a pathology. That’s our usual tendency, isn’t it? That’s what I often do. But when I’m at my best I know that this strange fact that anything and everything can be interesting to human beings is a gateway to finding and creating passions. This realization first struck me a few years ago and when it did, I made a trip to the dictionary to find out what the word “interest” really meant. And that’s when I discovered a jewel—a real jewel.

Interesting enough, the word interest is comprised of two words— est (to exist, to live in) and in (to be inside of something). So interest means to exist inside of something or to put oneself inside of something.

Wow! Did you catch that? We typically talk about something “getting” our interest, “catching” our interest, or of something as “being” interesting. And when something is interesting to us, we get involved. We get inside it. We are inside it. And we want to be more inside it! After all, we’re interested in it. Yet the word itself reveals the secret of why and how you find something “interesting” or “boring.” And what is the secret? The secret is whether you put yourself into that thing or not. If you do not put yourself into it and live there, you will find it boring. If you do, then you are in-ter-est-ed in it—you yourself will be inside it!

Think about something that you find interesting and notice how you think about it. You probably have a movie playing in your mind in which you are involved with it, you are inside the move seeing, hearing, and feeling. Compare that now to something that you consider “boring” or un- interesting. Do you have a movie or just a snapshot? And is it in color or compelling? Typically you represent one so that it is colorful, close, and that you are inside it whereas boring things are black-and-white, at a distance, and you are just observing it.

Now we have the key question for creation a passion: Are you willing to put yourself into something and to live in it? If you are, you will begin to become more and more interested in it. In fact, most things are like this. Think about all of the things in your life that you are not interested in that you had to learn how to take interest in it. You had to learn the distinctions, the rules of the game, the key factors.

So what would you now like to take interest in? What would you like to create a passion out of? I remember when I first got involved in real estate. I say “involved” because I was not interested. So why did I do it? One reason. Because I figured it was something that I could do on the side to build some equity and create an investment. And why did I do that? Because I was sick and tied of debt and of living paycheck to paycheck. That aversion pushed me kicking and screaming into real estate. Not exactly a passion, right?

But today, these many years later, real estate has become a passion for me. Ask my friends. I’m always talking about it. Always asking questions about real estate in various places, reading books on it; taking workshops on it; watching real estate channels on television! You’d think I’m a nut about it, and I guess I am. It has become a passion. I created it as a passion by taking more and more and more interest in it.

Second, once you’ve begun with an interest, develop a strategic plan for cultivating your passion in that area. With real estate, I began with one rental property that was an owner-carry loan and I put in a lot of physical work cleaning, painting, repairing, etc. Then I got burned. I didn’t select the right people. So I had to learn how to get them out. Then I got burned again. I selected more wrong people, again! Now I was getting interested. One facet of the rental business really got my attention and interest: How do you select the right people? Knowing NLP, I began asking, “How do I ‘read’ people and their meta-programs to pick a responsible person who will be straight-forward from one irresponsible and refuses to be held accountable?” That’s what I wanted to know. And that drove me to figure that one out, which I eventually did and briefly wrote about in the book, Figuring Out People (1997/ 2007).

I developed my passion in that area by attending workshops, reading lots and lots of books, and setting out a plan for buying one investment property a year. Doing that, in turn, cultivated my interest in that. It is not my biggest passion, but it is one. And definitely one that I was not born with nor a natural gift.

As you cultivate your passion, be sure to constantly check that you have given up the non-sense and stupidity of waiting for a moment of magic when some passion hits you up against the head and gets your attention. It does not work that way. You have to go after it.

Summary There’s no need to miss the joy and meaningfulness of a life lived passionately. You can create one. A life passion can be found and if not discovered, it can be developed. And passion in life is not merely nice, it is essential. It is especially essential for living life fully and with vitality. It is essential for joy, ecstasy, and meaningfulness; it is essential for unleashing your potentials.