Follow Your Passion? Instead, This Intersection is Your Best-Friend.

You hear of someone who accomplished greatness.

Next, you hear their advice for how they accomplished greatness.

Most often you hear: “I followed my passion!!!”

Be careful. Survivorship bias is a bias indeed.

Instead, this article offers practical and effective lines of thoughts to keep in mind as you decide your path and in a sense find your passion.

First and foremost, the authors Dr. from Design Your Life, mention that passion is a consequence of effort, not a cause. You develop your passion, not follow it. Don’t wait until you feel positive to move forward. Act your way into feeling good. Passion comes after action. A desk is a dangerous place to see the world. Examples of small actions yet giant leaps include writing/journaling, trying Toastmasters, scanning Eventbrite, volunteering, reading, and learning on Udemy. I recently performed a webinar on this topic sponsored by Colonial Group International. View the recording.

Secondly, the advice to follow your passion can actually reflect a fixed mindset. This is because the advice assumes your interests are stable and that novel technology doesn’t keep entering our lives on an annual, and sometimes monthly, basis. Before Tiger Woods won the 2019 Masters Golf Tournament, he last won The Masters in 2005, which was before the first iPhone was even released. In 2019 Apple brought us the iPhone XS. #ThingsCanChange.

Remember, pliability is the definition of strength. Pivoting is okay! (see below). Progress requires you to be self-aware. Learning almost inevitably leads to pivots. Don’t fall in love with your ideas. Adapting to change is a skill.

Next, the third section of this article is about practicality for the special sauce of how you can choose to move forward in your life.

Courtesy of The Consulting Bible, the above diagram caters to building a business or a brand, but also applies to building your career/self-awareness. Your successful journey forward lies at the intersection of market need, passion, AND competency.

Market Need — Are others looking for what you are offering? Is there a business or industry in the area? Is it a blue ocean (versus the red ocean of competition)?

Passion — What do you do for joy? What is it you are doing when you feel like you are playing?

Competency — Are you ‘good’? Is there a sense of mastery? Quality does matter.

Side note — an interesting connection is the resemblance of these factors to what food to put into your body, in which we want food at the the intersection of: nutritious, convenient, and affordable.

As your embark towards the intersection of market need, passion, AND competency, as James Altucher says: focus on process, rather than outcome. Don’t quit on a bad day. Let the score take care of itself. As Ryan Holiday and his Stoicism content emphasizes, focus on what is WITHIN your circle of control. Your keystone habits are your game-changers. My keystone habits are reading, coffee chats, personal hygiene, and comfortable/novel/sharp clothing.

Luck = Hard Work + Opportunity (don’t forget about the process of hard work).

Our fourth and final section of this article offers two phrases to help with your clarity.

The first phrase is from Sam Ovens’ recent email marketing: find (a) simple solutions (b) to overlooked problems © that actually need to be solved, and (d) deliver them as informally as possible, (e) starting with a scrappy version 1, then (f) iterating rapidly.

Each (letter) is your puzzle piece. Create something you are proud of. It will feel good at the wedding or dinner party when someone asks you ‘What Do You Do for a Living?’ and your answer is genuinely something interesting.

The second phrase about seeking clarity:

Focus on four things: self, social, skills, and service.

Self: how do you want to describe your ideal self?
Social: how do you want to behave socially?
Skills: what skills do you want to develop and demonstrate?
Service: what service do you want to provide?

Speaking of service, Zig Ziglar said: “you can have everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want.”

Perhaps at the end of the day, following your passion isn’t the question, but rather the question is, what can I do to help/serve others? #PracticalandEffective. I heard Gary Vaynerchuk mention in a podcast a phrase along the lines of: if you have a peace of mind and self-love, you have a moral duty to help others find their peace of mind and establish self-love.

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Nathan Kolar, www.reachworldwide.ca