I have been researching and speaking on passion and how to find your real passion for the past few years and it lights my heart on fire. I want to explain passion a little bit before I dive into the process of finding your passion. I think that there are a lot of people who look at the word PASSION and get scared. Society has come to believe that PASSION is a finite idea meaning that once you find your passion, this will be your passion for the rest of your life. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines passion as a strong liking or desire for or devotion to some activity, object, or concept. Nowhere in this definition does it say, the one thing you have to do for the rest of your life, so why do we believe that? Having passion or having a passion is simply the act of doing something you enjoy but it may surprise you that many people don’t do that.You have to be in class for 8 hours a day, you probably work a job for 2-4 hours on a weekday, and then you will have 2-4 hours of homework and then you have to sleep for 7 hours so where could you possibly have time to do something you love.There are MANY students who play a sport after school, or many who take classes that both meet the requirements for graduation AND in topics that they enjoy, some will find a job that they enjoy like becoming a teacher’s assistant, or working at a bike shop, or becoming a nanny. Regardless of what it is, there are plenty of ways to fit your passion into your life right now. But, you may be reading this and asking yourself, what exactly is your passion? What is the thing you LOVE to do? What do you get excited about?If you can’t find that answer right now, that’s okay. That is the exact feeling I had when I went through this same process I will share with you right now.
Find something that makes you happy right now
You do things all of the time. Some of these things are required and some of these things are activities or events that bring you happiness, and you HAVE FUN doing it. Think about what you do in your day, week, or month that brings you the MOST happiness.For me, I have been working at my synagogue since I was 13 years old and a few years ago, I realized how much I LOVED being there and how much I LOVED teaching Jewish history and Hebrew to younger kids, so I decided to explore this. I left my childhood dream of becoming a public school teacher because that no longer brought me happiness (passions change as I will talk about later) and started to explore becoming a Jewish educator. I spent four months at the beginning of my junior year studying abroad in my favorite place in the entire world, Jerusalem, Israel. I was able to study 4.000 years of Jewish History and the basics of the ancient Hebrew language. I was able to travel everywhere from the tip of the North of Israel to the tip of the South and explored the Holocaust curriculum through a week all throughout Poland. THIS CHANGED EVERYTHING. I was more enlightened and I realized how much joy I experienced in this place and how much more committed I was to spreading the knowledge of this history and spreading my love for the place I call home. When I came back, I realized that when I was at work, teaching kids topics that I was truly passionate about made me the happiest I could have been at the time. And you can too. The moral of this story is that I found what in my day at the time made me happy.Now I want you to take out a piece of paper. Ready?I want you to reflect on your typical day or your typical week and pull out and write down different thing(s) where you experience happiness greater than the rest of your day. Now look at your list and think about what you can turn into a major, what can you turn into a career. I truly believe that your passion can change, you see it in my story here but I want you and teens or adults just like you to find happiness in your day and realize and pursue a passion that you have right now.
Realize that this is your passion currently.
Passion is a feeling of intense enthusiasm towards or compelling desire for someone or something. You do not just develop a passion later in life, in fact, while you are reading this, you do have a passion. You just may not know about it. No one ever said that at a certain age is when you experience your passion. No one has ever said that you have to wait until 27 or 37 or even 47 in order to start your business or start your teaching career or start your road to becoming a professional sports player.I emphasize the word currently because you may not have the same drive for a specific something for the rest of your life. You may not enjoy playing soccer or baseball or football in 10 years, you may not enjoy teaching younger kids or even older kids in 20 years and that is okay. I thought that I wanted to become a teacher at a Jewish private school in America, and then I thought I wanted to be an English teacher in Israel, and then I thought that my passion for Judaism could be my side hustle so I wanted to become a public school teacher once again, and then I wanted to be a psychologist, then I wanted to be a school counselor, and then I wanted to be a life coach, and then I got frustrated and then magic happened.
Run with it.
My favorite step. When you find a passion at whatever age it may be, go into full force. Make an intense plan and run so fast towards your dreams. Take MASSIVE ACTION. Run so fast that you are unable to stop and you start to feel like you are flying. When you discover your passion, there will be a fire ignited inside of you, you will want to get up every morning, you will want to head to work and the grind, the hustle that once felt like a drag or was exhausting will be no more and the hustle and the grind will feel like fuel and fire.Go ALL in and don’t ever stop. When you feel like its taking too long to achieve those dreams and achieve those goals that you have set, be PATIENT because I can tell you right now that your BIGGEST dreams will be achieved. You just have to keep putting in the work and the motivation and keep chugging along. Make sure that EVERY SINGLE DAY, you are putting your best effort into these goals and aspirations for YOU because YOU are the most important person in your life and YOU are SO WORTHY of these dreams that you have. You have plenty of time. Of course, we have obligations we have to attend to but what about the rest of that time? What about the time from 4-7 am or the time from 8-11 pm. What do you do then? What can you take out of your day that is not bringing you joy when you could be focusing on one of your passion projects or one of your dreams? What is holding you back?To wrap up, I just want to end with a calling to you. I urge you to seek your passion, I urge you to dive into your passion because I do believe following your passion is a key to living out your dreams and isn’t that what we all want? My goal for this blog post was to create a simple way to help those who feel lost in their schooling or in their current jobs. I believe that this world is such a special place to pursue so much and that when you follow your wildest dreams, you are able to achieve this.
