Have others told you to find your passion?
Are you wondering what that means and how to go about doing that?
Or maybe you’re just sick of hearing that catchy phrase follow your passion and are ready to implement some new strategies.
Well, if you’re anything like me… you might not have know right out the gate what’s good for you.
But it doesn’t have to be this way! You can find exactly what works for you and learn a lot along the way because of it.
Let’s get right to it.
Below are three tips in that have helped me on my journey in finding passion and finding my dream role
1. Trust your gut: When I was a kid I wanted to be an architect. I don’t think I knew what that really was, but to me it meant I wanted to build things. I had this intrinsic understanding of what was interesting to me. Although I am not an architect today, I do believe that I still get to build things in business and life so that element of interest hasn’t changed. So, first tip is to trust your intuition.
2. Document the iterations: My first job was working as a roofing technician fixing leaks and making replacements. Not the most exciting thing in the world to say the least. But at that point, I didn’t have any particular interests or experience, let alone know anything about myself in the marketplace. Let me give you a little analogy. When a company creates a new product for heir customers, they have all these assumptions.
Like… “I think customers will like the color green, this particular design, and would be willing to pay $100.00 for it.”
Well, along the way… they begin to learn where they are right and wrong. Maybe the customers didn’t like green, but they did like the design, yet they were only willing to pay $50.00 for it. Eventually, this company takes this feedback and iterates a new product closer to what they’ve learned from their first trial.
The point I’m trying to make… look at your career and passions as a series of iterations. You have all these ideas about what you like, so go about testing them. Along the way, you’ll learn a lot about the particular role that works for you, what does not work for you, and where you think you’d like to go in the future. This whole process of discovery and iterations would be successful if you naturally tend to like a larger percentage of your waking hours in a role as your career progresses. Meaning… if you keep switching roles and companies, learning more about yourself and taking each step as a iteration, you should naturally stay longer in roles, enjoy your job more, and lean towards enjoying your professional career more!
3. Be brutal about strengths and weaknesses: this ties into #2 but the point here is to be honest about yours strengths and weaknesses. We are all created with a set of interests and natural abilities. It would only be natural for all of us to move towards the things we are good at and away from what we are bad at. If you can be brutally honest with yourself and document your strengths and weaknesses as a living document… you’ll get very far very fast.
I do this by keeping a rolling log of the roles I’ve participated in, documenting what I liked and didn’t, which ultimately feeds into a living document of my strengths and weaknesses. This document helps me make better decisions in the context of my personal abilities and my interests. When the two meet — abilities and interest — there is a magic that creates professional happiness.
In conclusion, if you’re looking to improve your life by following your passions… you must first trust what you think you like, learn and iterate along the way, and be brutally honest about your strengths and weaknesses.
The sky is the limit for those who are willing to become more valuable and align themselves with positions that allocate their abilities to their highest and best use.
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