Remember back when you were a kid? You would just do things. You never thought to yourself, “will coloring or playing soccer help me succeed?” You just ran around the playground with your soccer ball then you could sit and scribble all over the coloring book. You asked silly questions and looked for bugs and dug up grass and pretended the ground was lava while jumping from pillow to pillow.
Nobody told you to do it, you just did it. You were led merely by your curiosity and excitement.
And the beautiful thing was, if you hated soccer, you just stopped playing it. There was no guilt involved. There was no arguing or debate. You either liked it, or you didn’t.
There was no second-level analysis of, “Well, is looking for bugs really what I should be doing with my time as a child? Nobody else wants to color, does that mean there’s something wrong with me? How will coloring affect my future?”
There was no bulls--t. If you liked something, you just did it.
We all have this need to find what our passion is, to find something that makes us excited to jump out of bed in the morning. We need to have a definite answer so we can spend years studying it in college and plan our life out at 18. But this isn’t realistic, life is all about not knowing, and then doing something anyway.
Stop looking! You’ve already found it, you’re just ignoring it. Seriously, you’re awake more then 12 hours a day, what do you do with your time? You’re doing something, obviously. You’re talking about something. There’s some topic or activity or idea that dominates a significant amount of your free time, your conversations, your web browsing, and it dominates them without you consciously pursuing it or looking for it.
The problem is not a lack of passion for something. The problem is productivity and perception.
The problem is the, “Oh, well that’s just not a realistic option,” or “you can’t buy a BMW with the money you make doing that.”
The problem isn’t passion. It’s priorities.
Since when does everyone feel entitled to love every second of their job? Every job sucks sometimes, and every career isn’t going to make you a millionaire.
I didn’t become a designer to get rich, I became a designer because it was what I liked doing and I was going to do regardless if it was my job or if it was a hobby I did every night because there was no other time to spend at my computer.
When I had to pick something to spend the next four years studying, I didn’t have to think that much. It chose me. It was already there, I just opened my eyes to the fact that I can’t wait to sit at my computer and drawing logos for hours and make a poster for my friend’s band or just looking up different typefaces till 2am because I could.
If you have to look for what you’re passionate about, then you’re probably not passionate about it at all. If you’re passionate about something, it will already feel like such an ingrained part of your life.
If you have to look for what you enjoy in life, then you’re not going to enjoy anything.
