Identifying Your Passion

What is your passion? Chances are, as an entrepreneur, you have been asked this question before. A LOT. You have heard the countless experts spout about how you should follow your passion in order to be successful in your business. Chase it, pursue it, put a little GPS on it and track its every movement.

Passion. You hear it so much it doesn’t even sound like a word anymore.

But how do you identify your passion?

Love vs. Passion
Your first inclination might be to gravitate towards something that you love. While subtle, there is a difference between love and passion. Love is a fondness and deep admiration for something, but passion is what keeps you going when the going gets tough.

Love is a great segway for passion, however not everything you love will get you there. In an article in The Huffington Post, the author suggests that in order to weed out the things you love that you don’t feel passionate about, imagine an activity that will build skills you can charge for surrounding the thing you love.

“Talking about cars all day, for example, won’t actually get me anywhere. However, if I chose to start a blog and write about them or become a mechanic, I am now shifting my love to passion and engaging in activities that can later turn my passion into a business.”

If imagining an activity based on the thing you love seems tedious than that’s not the passion you should be chasing.

What are you good at?
Love is a good first step in identifying what you are passionate about. Another avenue you can take is identifying your talents. You have a natural innate ability to do something better than other people can do. It’s there, under the surface somewhere even if you have to think about it a little bit. What do people compliment you on? What do others come to you for help with? That’s your talent, my friend!

Finding your talent can lead you to your passion. Maybe you’re really good at writing, you might find a passion for helping others discover their voice. If you’re good at graphic design you might find a passion for helping other people’s visions come to life. Chances are if you investigate the things you are talented in, you will find a passion at the root of it.

What lights you up?
While essentially having the same meaning as “what is your passion?”, “what lights you up?” doesn’t seem as ambiguous to me. There is something in this world that gives you joy. Something that you can talk about for hours even if the people you’re talking to about it get bored. Something that fills you with excitement and wonder and the need to know more.

That’s your passion.
We’ve all heard the saying, “When you love what you do you never have to work a day in your life” and well, it’s a saying for a reason. When you invest in something that you are passionate about, the work doesn’t feel like work. It feels like another step in the journey to your destiny.

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