The happiest people are those who are passionate for a range of enjoyable and meaningful pursuits, cites one of the research studies (Link). Similarly, there are multiple studies and research citing a positive correlation between passion and happiness as well as well-being.
If this is so obvious, why are we getting distant from our passion? What makes us forget our passion? Is there a way to rekindle our passion through certain ideas and steps? There is always a possibility to get back to what you love doing and get back to your passion.
Here is an attempt to help anyone get back to their passion and joyful endeavors. Its worked for me for many years, so, who knows, you might benefit from this.
Early Childhood. We pick up a discipline around arts or sports through the guidance of our parents or choose what we believe to be our calling by chance. We end up spending hours of effort fine tuning our craft, eventually becoming better at it, dreaming that this is what we will be great at and then kaboom! We let it go. We are not
able to pursue the craft and rise higher either due to lack of time, effort and mentorship or we just find that the craft is not for us. We give up what we thought was our passion. Other chores and life priorities take over. Life Happens!
We enter our teens, the same set of steps repeat with varying degree of duration and efforts. Most of the times, the end result is the only constant. We pursue things, we pour our hearts into it, and then later realize that there are a bunch of things higher on priority that demand our attention and effort, in order to move forward with our lives.
We keep trying out our luck in youth and then in mid-life, with little or no success towards embracing our passion and sticking to it. There are numerous research findings that associate personal achievement, growth and happiness in terms of our propensity to stick with our passion. With my limited personal experience and some of the work that I have read around this topic, I’ve come up with a curated list of 6 pointers that have helped me to continue engaging with my passion, and who knows, these pointers might be able to help you to continue the craft that is passionate for you:
- To each his own (It’s an individual thing!): When we are following our passion and continuously putting our efforts into the craft, we start with a pool of individuals or begin in groups. To that end, we feel that there is a social circle that can be constructed that can be established with our passion. Unfortunately, we are not looking for the joy and fun through our craft, rather, it’s the people and their appreciation that we are after. This can be detrimental when it comes to having a life long passion vs a craft followed just for the sake of acknowledgement and association with people. You need to understand that this is your own craft, your own journey and people might come and go. You need to stick with this because it is what helps you move forward and go where you want to go in life.
- Confusing goals with checkpoints: We are so determined in our lives across different spheres like studies, profession and careers that we have an everlasting feeling of setting up goals and striving towards achieving it. Gradually, due to other priorities or the lack of skill, we feel that there is no goal that we are able to achieve and this leads to backing off from our passion or the craft that gives us joy. There is no goal to be achieved here with the pursuit of passion. Progress can only be measured in terms of checkpoints, where we reach to a certain point and then keep going forwards from there on. With passion, there is no goal to be achieved. It’s just the checkpoints and our movement along with it. No need to worry if we don’t achieve what we aimed for, just course correct and persevere
- Not accepting the Hard way: Whenever there are things which are higher in priority for us, owing to life’s circumstances, we have a natural tendency to not to be able to dedicate time and focus around what is not so important. In this constant prioritization exercise, we do away with our passion, we miss the joy and we forget why we took the craft in the first place. We often say that it is hard to balance our craft with what life is throwing at us at that moment in time. This is the exact reason why we need to make a push for our passion. Hard choices, Easy life and Easy choices, Hard Life. Life is giving us a chance to choose our hard in terms of what we really like or used to like for that matter. Embrace the Hard, dedicate some amount of effort towards it. We never know, how engaging in a passionate craft might make some other thing or situation a bit easy
- Not accepting that Passion is just supposed to be “Passion”: We try very hard to monetize our passion or try to create a profession of our passion. We even want to associate our passion with some external reward. We end up not realizing the value or the outcome that we wished so hard we would get by putting hours of effort around our craft. Sometimes, we need to accept that Passion brings us joy and many intangibles, which cannot be measured directly in terms of what we wished for. The money we thought will wait for us, the fame we craved in the near future, those are all our creations and imaginations. We should not allow these imaginary tangibles to come into our way of engaging with our passion. We need to remember that the joy and the fun that we get through the endeavor of our passion, is sufficient to help us realize the tangibles that we crave for
- Comparing with people and our old self: We need to live in the moment. We often find ourselves comparing our craft to an older version of ourselves or with other people around us. We are not aware of other people’s efforts and continuity. We compare ourselves with our past performance which was a result of continuity, frequent engagement and constant effort towards our passion. We need to treat our endeavors in an isolated manner and enjoy being in the moment. Progress is a function of different variables and we need to remember that we are in the process of finding our joy. Getting irritated or fixated with a sense of underachievement is common, its just that we need to trust the process and delve deeper towards the fulfilment that we achieve through engaging in our passion
- Getting too Busy with Life: This is the most common reason that we tell to ourselves. We do not have the need to engage into our craft, as we are already busy enough in our lives. This is the most important reason to pause, and consider engaging with our passion. We all need a break. We are not machines or computers programmed to perform specific tasks and provide certain output. While we are busy with our lives, engaging with our passion has the potential to provide a fresh perspective or zoom out a bit and reconsider what can be done better. Engaging with our passion can be the dose of meditation or therapy that we all are looking in extrinsic factors. Embrace the pause, zoom out and we never know how our “Busy” schedule might accommodate even more and we might be able to Do more with Less.
Be passionate. Persevere with your passion. There are limitless avenues that can be opened just by engaging with what we love. We don’t need to let others be accountable for the joy in our lives. We just need to find and stick with what brings joy in our lives.
I would conclude with the thoughts of Jon Bon Jovi “Nothing is as important as passion. No matter what you want to do with your life, be passionate.”