How to Find Passion, Hard Questions to Test Your Passion, How to Follow Your Passion, and What If One Doesn’t Have a Passion
You can jump to the individual section right away through this Table of Content
You can jump to the individual section right away through this Table of Content
I have put my computer aside more than once to cry over an unjust email or to get my fair share in a fight with my partner or another close friend.
I have had bad days. I have sometimes taken off on those hard days. Instead of writing, I went out on a drive and bought tiger prawns or cried and slept or read Charles Darwin while drowning myself in chamomile tea.
These bouts of sulking in my misery or fighting followed by pampering and sometimes spending time with the other fighter of the duel leading to the exhilaration and then to that moment of clarity where I justified the time spent crying as just another day lived and felt that life was as clear as a night sky have sometimes lasted for an hour and up to a day or even more.
One young summer of my life, I was living in Himachal, the home of the Himalayas. While learning the flute, practicing yoga, working on my blog, and trying to stick to Vipassana meditation techniques, I didn’t realize that I had buried myself under a lot of pressure to be the perfect Bohemian. Ironically, I was on a laid-back mountain staycation.
One Friday, my abuse of self-expectations pushed me to the abysmal depths of moroseness. I didn’t even want to lift my feet to walk to the bathroom. I spent two to three days lying in bed and weeping and sleeping and avoiding everyone and then hiking to a mountain alone.
In the two days of nothingness, I ignored all work, didn’t practice the flute, and put the yoga and meditation aside for wiser people. And on the third day of the rendezvous, I hung out with my travel friends and chatted away in the sun while eating palak paneer with garlic naan.
While some people can’t focus until they have meandered around for hours and finally give in to guilt, others sit and get amazing work done by just holding the pen right: having a daily creative routine could be complicated or could come simple and natural.
What does a creative schedule even mean? A schedule that inspires creativity and helps the creators (writers, painters, entrepreneurs, designers, artists, and other creative professionals) forge their imaginations most desirably.
Also, creativity is subjective. A coder is creative when she can write a 100-line code in 10. A marketeer is creative when he can sell toothpaste such as Pepsodent to the human race.
Anyone with original ideas (in or out of their work sphere) is creative.
You don’t always have to find your passion to create an enjoyable and fulfilling career. Instead, you can follow your curiosity to build a career you will love.
In this essay I will show you how.
First and foremost.
I changed my career at 30 – quit my investment banking job and shelved a CS degree to write – so I better not be against following passions.
As much as I am a spokeswoman (and a living example) of following the ethereal path of doing what you love to do, finding a passion is hard, and pursuing it is even harder.
A software engineer by education, I was once a coder and an investment banker, but now I write full-time.
In this essay I talk about my six-year-long journey of thinking of a career change, why and how I quit my job, and finally went through a career change at 30.
If you are looking for a career change in 30s, I would recommend you read this piece for I have given an honest account of my own journey from coding to writing.
Let’s read.
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A lot of us get bored with work. But we think that it is okay to get bored at our jobs and we continue working. In this article I unfurl why we expect work to be boring, why it shouldn’t be, and how does this belief harms us.
We always say that work is supposed to be boring — because adults separate the idea of fun and work early on for us.
Since childhood, we are trained to think that work sucks. We are told that we should play all we want for we would have to work one day. We see elders going to their jobs, but they don’t seem to have fun — they say that work is something they have to do even if they get bored at work and don’t enjoy it.
No one ever mentions having a good time as part of a profession/job, and we start believing that work is a dull thing grown-ups do to earn money(the more the better) irrespective of how they feel about their profession.
Now no one can ever enjoy 100% of her work 365 days a year(I’m happy if you do) but the problem arises when we are mostly bored of work and do what we do to only get money.
We witness enough close people following the idea that work is boring.
My father opened his shop every day of the week except Tuesdays. He never complained about his business, but he never cared if he enjoyed his work or not. He was only concerned about making enough to raise his family. Our teachers, relatives, elder siblings all seemed to pursue a career to earn at their maximum potential.
Fun was never discussed in the context of work and even frowned upon. In his book Le Petite Prince, the French philosopher Antoine de Saint-Exupéry raises similar thought-provoking questions about adults keeping their matters of consequence disjoint from (and above) fun.
You want to work or all you want to do is have fun? Someone would say when we created a game out of a mathematics problem.
From our younger years to adulthood, we grow up concreting the idea that something we enjoy can’t become our career.
But this isn’t true. Let me tell you why.
One of India’s most popular writer Ruskin Bond was born in 1934 in Dehradun, in the foothills of the Himalayas. Ruskin’s parents—both British—got divorced when he was four. After a few years of the divorce, his father put him in a boarding school in Shimla for he couldn’t keep the little boy with him.
Ruskin was only eleven when his father died of the plague in the second world war in Calcutta. After his father’s death, Ruskin continued studying in the same school in Shimla and lived intermittently in Dehradun with his grandmother and mother. When Ruskin was seventeen, he went to London to get a job there and work. His mother had insisted him to build a career there.
But neither did Ruskin like London nor did he enjoy his job. He wanted to become a writer since he was a little boy.