Finding your passion in your 20’s can feel like trying to find gold medallions on the beach without one of those sexy metal detectors.
After college, I felt like God buried my passion deep in the sand and was getting a heavenly-kick watching me down on my knees trying to dig it up.
As I write in my upcoming book All Groan Up: Searching for Self, Faith, and a Freaking Job!:
My search for a job after college was more a search for identity than a paycheck, more for passion than prestige. Heck, I’d have been happy if my fellow employees were required to call me Monkey Boy and throw banana peels at me whenever they passed my desk, if it meant I was working toward my dream. I have nothing against hard work; what I have a problem with is hard work in a field you don’t really care for, to be promoted to a job you never wanted.
8 Questions to Find Your Passion
In the previous post, I wrote about the first four questions that will help you begin to sniff your passion. Here’s the next four nuggets that if you’re willing to dig up, you’ll be stumbling upon a geyser of passion before you can shout “Geyser-o-passion I have just discovered. Hark, everyone cometh to behold!”
1. What’s Your Top Strengths?
Where are you most confident, competent, and crazy locked in? No clue? Taking the StrengthsFinder is a good place to start.
Basically, where do you kick the most ass? Think about what you consider your three greatest successes. What were you doing? Were you leading? Communicating? Designing? Analyzing? Your strengths are a direct shot to your passion. Follow that arrow Robin Hood.
2. What’s your Dream?
What’s your BHAG? Your Big, Hairy, Audacious, Goal, as author of Life After College Jenny Blake explained in a guest post on All Groan Up.
Feel like your BHAG is alluding you like Big Foot on a Vespa? Do this simple exercise. Envision your life 20 years from now in the year 2032. Where are you waking up? What’s your morning routine? What are you wearing for work? Where’s work? Home? 115 story skyscraper in the city? What do you do there? Map out your whole day. Don’t think what’s possible. Think big. Your BHAG is at the door waiting to be let in for dinner.
3. Is There a Need?
Where is this world leaking that you feel like needs to be plugged? As Fredrick Buechner wrote:
“Vocation is where our greatest passion meets the world’s greatest need”
4. Are You Willing to Pursue Greatness Without Ever Being Great?
Now picture your big dream, but it takes fifteen years longer to happen. Now instead of impacting the world, let’s say you change a neighborhood street. What if you never become great when pursuing your passion. Would it still be worth it?
Passion Evolves
There you have it — the eight questions to discover your passion. Remember though, this is not a one-time, catch-all answer. Our passion will change as we do. I was once passionate about wearing a different color pair of sweatpants for every day of school. We grow up and so does our passion.
So let’s say you, are you beginning to stumble upon your passion? Or are you getting hung up? Please share in the comments below and I promise one commenter will be awarded a *lifetime supply of passion, courtesy of *All Groan Up.
Photo Credit: Ecstaticist – Creative Commons
*All Groan Up is not necessarily lying. It could happen.
I am locking onto my passions and not letting them go. Can’t narrow them down to one, but they are inescapable themes in my life: innovation, discovery, communicating, the preservation and transmission of knowledge, & creative acts. I have assembled these ingredients into dozens of different potential careers. But every new concoction turns out better, because the ingredients are better.
In fact, I’ve been playing to my strengths so long, lately I’ve had to consciously turn to strengthening my weaknesses so they don’t hold me back: time, money, numbers, consistency, follow-through. These are kind of like the gluten in the pastry of my life – may not add to the taste but it will never rise to the lofty heights I aspire to without them.
Well said Lydia! Love your mix of passions. Keep cooking with those ingredients and you’ll for sure make some incredible meals.
I don’t even know where to start. I feel like everything I’m doing is out of obligation and out of fear. I don’t feel like myself… just bogged down by anxiety and chained up by others’ expectations. This bubble of a city I live in just screams, “achieve!” all day long. I need to get out of here! In 20 years I won’t be living in this city, that’s for sure.
-Hung Up
Completely agree Emily, you hit the nail on the head, 100% You’re not alone.
“I don’t feel like myself”
Emily, I can’t remember how many times I uttered this exact same phrase. Well said. Wish I had some easy answers…
Emily, I completely agree! After 3 degrees, working abroad, owning my own small business, and then moving and shutting down my own small business to be closer to my fiance, I feel like my 25 years have been an exercise in futility. I am wracked with student loans from the lofty private school I attended to be trained by the world’s best at what I do. My strengths are there, my resume is good, and I manage a sandwich shop. I love management, but I feel like my life is paused.. waiting for money, inspiration, a lightening strike, talent discovery, who knows? I hope your situation improves, but for now just know that you are not the only quarter-life crisis head case around.
Carla — well said. You’re definitely not alone. “Feel like my life is paused” such a true, stellar observation that I know so many can relate too
BHAG – that’s hilarious! I’m going to put that one into practice and ask my friends what their bhag is – can’t wait to see their faces.
As I am struggling with deciding what my Passion is and struggling with the details of my future, I find your writing to be so inspirational. I thank God for speaking to me through your work and I thank you for letting God use you! Can’t wait to get my hands on that book!
Thanks Avery! That means a lot to me.
I just emigrated to another continent. From Cape Town, South Africa to Cork City, Ireland and it sucks. It sucks in a way I could never imagine and then somehow I downloaded your 101 book and came to the blog and after 9 years and 357 days of living in my 20’s blindly thinking I was somehow going in the right direction even though sometimes it felt like I was actually backtracking more than moving forward, I’m starting to formulate the thought that it’s okay. This feeling of being stranded in cluelessville is normal. I just have to figure it out. You’re helping. Alot.
Amazing to hear Cindy. Thank you for sharing your story and the kind words!