Author: Bharati Puthran, Manager – M&G Plc
How can one find their passion?
Today most youngsters will have this question at the start of their career.
The thing about finding your passion is not straight forward even for people with money and degrees. In a scenario when you have a job that pays you enough to cover your basic needs, your bills and plus save more, the assumption would be that you are happy or fulfilled. But in reality you will always be looking for something more. Most people assume that you can follow your passion only when you have enough money or when you are ready to retire because there is a notion that looking inward and finding the things that gives us pleasure and fulfillment is a luxury that only the rich can enjoy or a pleasure that only the retired can indulge in. For many of us its been led to believe that life is a race to survive and we have been conditioned to see ourselves as survivors.
In India we have been nurtured to go through school, college & then higher studies only in the hope that to get a job and if you get it you stick to it no matter how much it sucks until you get a better offer or asked to retire. Education system in India and most part of the world is designed with pre-selected options that young people are expected to fit in or risk becoming misfits. So when you are part of such an education system you are forced to think in a straight line and stay within the straight line. This led to killing of many creative minds as people don’t want to venture into unknown area and risk their career.
So coming to the question, What is passion?
Is it a collection of your life experiences that gives you the deepest sense of fulfillment?
Is it something you need to look inward to find it?
Most people don’t find it even when they reach their death bed but does that mean they have not led a fulfilled life?
To start with, you can ask yourself this two questions:
If I have all the time and money in the world, how and what would I do to spend my time?
Or
What makes you happy?
Think and reflect and the answer you feel deeply about is your passion.
Some people have immediate answer to these questions as they have looked inward and felt deeply about something. It could be love for music, felt deeply about child education, women empowerment, love for acting, being a scientist, astronaut or any other social cause etc which gives a sense of fulfilment.
It’s interesting to note that many people have no idea what makes them happy as they have been busy in their routine life and never looked inward. Does that mean they are a total failure? No infact its otherwise.
Let’s first understand that passion alone cannot guarantee success and not every passion can become a career. For passion to become a career it should be coupled with the right set of skills, conditioning and positioning. So when you plan to work on your passion to make it your career option you need to work on your skills or check if you have the right skills to get benefit out of it in a marketplace.
Look around and see if the career path you chose has demand in market, if there is no demand or need then it can’t be a career its just a hobby. Many people are turning their burning desires into profitable business are not only following their passion but are also solving creating jobs and societal challenges.
Now the thing of looking inward and it can be scary especially if you are doing it for the first time, but you never start living until you dive inward. And in unlocking potential one needs to look inward to identify the things that gives deep sense of fulfilment and then weave them into the patterns of daily routines. In doing that we cease to work and start to live. And the thing about living is that you never have to retire or resign, you excel and you become unstoppable.
Now let’s look at the second category of people who are not able to find their passion. The society or our culture promotes the idea of destiny or one true calling and imagine you have to find that one true calling and devote your life to it. It’s a relief that not every one is wired this way.
You may be interested in lot of different subject and might be interested in doing lot of different things. People in this category may feel alone or feel that they don’t have any purpose. These are the type of people who gets anxiety or feel misfit when someone ask them about their passion or aspiration. The problem with this category of people is not that they don’t have any interest, it’s that they have too many.
Suppose, in school, you may have had interest to become an actor; by the time you reached college, your interest changed to be a model; by the end of the college, it changed to becoming a guitarist in a cool band, and by the time you are out of college you want to probably become a singer.
Remember there is nothing wrong with you. It’s a pattern where one becomes interested in an area for a certain duration of time, dive in and get all consumed and then reaches a point of boredom.
Some people try to stick to it as time, energy and money is invested, but at one point it’s not challenging any more and they eventually let it go. They find another interest and reach a point they let it go again and they keep repeating it. This creates a lot of anxiety as it would be difficult to pick one passion and deny other choices and make a career out of it.
So is something wrong with this category of people? The answer is NO!
These people are termed as “Multipotentialite“. A Multipotentialite is someone with many interests and creative pursuits. One may not realise that there is tremendous strength in being this way. These people have immense knowledge in various fields and can intersect knowledge of two or more fields and create something new at the intersection.
Imagine two such people in this category coming together they could either innovate or identify any possible damage in business. Another strength that they have is rapid learning. When a multipotentialite take interest in something they go hard on getting to the root of a subject and since they have been beginners so many times in the past they are not afraid to start something new or step out of comfort zones. People miss to see that the skills or knowledge acquired in the process are transferable or can be applied to other fields and these people bring everything they have learned to every new area they pursue. It means that they are rarely starting from scratch. Another superpower they have is adaptability, these people can easily adapt and thrive in career as their mind can switch easily between fields. If such people are pressurized to narrow their focus they will loose these skills.
The economic world is changing so quickly and unpredictably that its people and organization who has to look at the need of the market in order to thrive. The world will always have many new complex problems and right now we need people with creative and out of the box thinkers to tackle them. With this we can easily say that we can build best teams by teaming up both these category of people as specialists can dive deep and implement ideas, multipotentialite brings a fresh knowledge on the table. It becomes a beautiful partnership.
Sadly, our society or our culture encourages destiny or true calling and deny other possibilities.
So the takeway is to embrace yourself the way you are, embrace your many passions or one passion, follow the curiosity to get that sense of fulfilment.
In life we may or may not find a purpose but in the journey while walking hand-in-hand with other human beings knowingly or unknowingly we might build or help them find a purpose to live which is an achievement in itself. So value yourself.
