Feeling Lost in Life? Find Your Passion But Don’t Follow It. Do This Instead

How “Follow Your Passion” Led To Standup Comedy Failure And Feeling Lost in Life

The lights on stage were blinding. No one had told me about that part. I grabbed the mic, moved the mic stand as instructed and turned to face the crowd. Blinded. The lights were so bright I couldn’t see past the first row of faces staring up at me in eager anticipation. And then it happened. Or better yet, it didn’t happen. The words that I had prepared to make these strangers laugh weren’t there. The words had vanished from existence thanks to the blinding lights. Or maybe it was because of pure fear. Or both. This was my first foray into standup comedy. Because, hey, you should follow your passion, right?

Wrong.

People had always told me that I was funny. Or was it weird? Whatever it was, I wound up following my passion for laughing, having fun and unloading heavy doses of sarcasm to anyone within earshot and followed, what seemed to me, a logical career in standup comedy. Yet, it left me feeling more lost than ever. That’s how I found out that “follow your passion” is possibly the worst advice out there.

The Mixup With Finding Your Passion, Following Your Passion And Finding Your Purpose And How It Can Leave You Feeling Lost

I see this mixup frequently in the self-help space between finding your passion, following your passion and finding your purpose. And it messed me up and left me feeling lost in my own life. Let’s hash that out right now.

What is Passion?

I mean, really, what the hell is passion anyways? Some people say they are passionate about making the perfect cup of coffee. Others are passionate about being the best parent possible. And some are passionate about knitting sweaters while on unicorns, or whatever weird things people are into these days. It’s purely subjective. You have to define what passion means to you and whatever the feeling is that you are looking for that you call passion.

Passion is an emotion. And we are wildly emotional creatures with lots of emotions so, therefore, lots of passions throughout the course of our lives. Let’s get that straight right now – you are not looking for a single passion. You might have many and you’ll need to pick a few to follow. But the problem is we are becoming increasingly more aware of all of the opportunities that we might be passionate about and we are being paralyzed by choice.

By simply realizing that it is not one single passion will make all the difference. There is a caveat of course, you can only pursue one passion at a time, but limiting people to only one passion and one purpose throughout the course of their lives is bonkers. Your curiosities, passions and purposes will change over time.

Feeling Lost? Start With Finding Your Passion

The whole premise of this article was going to be this: you don’t find your passion anywhere. That it already exists inside you or that you create it. But as I started to write, and reflect on my own recent experiences from being so utterly lost to finding things that make me feel passionate, I realized that you are, in a way, finding your passion. Here’s how.

It’s not buried beneath a pile of papers in a drawer somewhere, up on stage at a grimy comedy open mic, and it certainly isn’t under a rock. And you can’t ever find it by thinking. That’s because you have to create it, in a way. You create passion by taking the things that you already like to do or are curious about and you do more of them. Passion comes from an alchemy of actions you take (based on curiosities you have), and the unique feeling that only you get from taking those actions. Both the actions you take and the resulting feelings are influenced by your unique life experience.

If you’re looking for your passion, do what you’re curious about. Or it might be right in front of you. Learn to see yourself and listen. What you need to do is 1) get awareness in your life so you can see what the hell you are doing and why, and 2) repeat step one.

Seriously, you’re awake 16 hours a day, what the fuck do you do with your time? You’re doing something, obviously. You’re talking about something. There’s some topic or activity or idea that dominates a significant amount of your free time, your conversations, your web browsing, and it dominates them without you consciously pursuing it or looking for it.

Mark Manson

Imagine a little tiny spark that lives in your belly. It is there. It has always been there. When you do things, when you take actions, that spark starts to grow and it either ignites into a massive flame or withers into nothingness. But it is there. It has always been there. It is wired into your genetic makeup and created out of your completely unique set of life experiences. It must be. Not a single person on this planet is exactly the same as you, nor will there ever be. You can’t even find a person that looks identical to you, let alone someone that shares the same complexity of thoughts, beliefs and emotions as you. Even identical twins have differences. If we can’t even find someone that looks like us, then we will never find someone that has the exact same unique thoughts, behaviors and talents. That is your passion.

Your passion lives inside you somewhere – it is an amalgam of your uniqueness and your life experiences. You haven’t found it because you need to create a bigger “passion flame”. You do this by doing things that you are curious about until that flame ignites or extinguishes. Simple, right?

But you’re scared to try all the things that you are curious about because you have no clue how to start or what to do. I get it. I really do. I was there recently. Very recently. You are just lost. You haven’t found any meaning in your life or your job and you feel like there is something more. You don’t know it yet, but it is quite easy to just start doing something new.

Follow Your Passion and It’ll Leave You Feeling Lost

Let’s assume you’ve tried a million (or slightly fewer) things and you’ve found your passion – something that feels good while you’re doing it and you want to put time and effort into improving.

When most people ask if they should follow their passion they are really asking, “Can I make enough money doing this thing that I enjoy doing and have a good life?”

And the answer is, who knows? The only way to really find out is to follow your passion for a while and pursue mastery.

The problem with the advice to follow you passion is that humans are inherently emotional creatures and our emotions are literally out of control. You cannot tell me exactly how you will feel tomorrow at 4:37pm. You might be able to take a guess, but chances are, you’d be wrong. Because nobody knows, not even you, and you are the one person that should know. As Daniel Gilbert outlined in Stumbling on Happiness we have no clue what we want or how we will feel in the future. The truth is, you don’t really know what you want or how you’re going to feel in the future. Or even what is important. But, you still need to do something.

A better question to ask is, “Would I continue to do this without money, reward or acclaim? Just for the sake of getting really good?”

But remember, you might wind up standing in front of a crowd of shadowy faces that are waiting for you to tell them jokes with sweat running down your forehead and a little pee trickling down your leg. But sure, follow your passion all the same.

Depending on what you deem as important, having pee trickle down your leg five nights a week for the next decade might make you less passionate about what you thought you were passionate about.

All too often we think that if we start something and pursue mastery that we can’t back out, and that’s why we start overthinking.

We fear that doing the thing won’t be as great as we thought it might be, or even worse, that we might not be as good as we had expected. We fear that if we start it and we don’t love it or it doesn’t work out, then we will be a failure.

Then we recoil back to what is safe.

You might be thinking, “Hey Scott, if you shouldn’t follow your passion, what should you follow?”

Follow your curiosities.

Follow what makes you feel fulfilled and adds value to the world.

This doesn’t just mean follow what feels good for the sake of feeling good. If you are an adult, which I’m assuming you are if you’ve read this far, then you follow what feels good and provides something meaningful and useful to the world – a purpose.

Finding Your Purpose And Not Feeling Lost

Purpose is where we move from “Can I make enough money doing this thing that I enjoy doing and have a good life?” to “Is this important enough for me to do for the rest of my time here on Earth?”

And the answer is, well, it’s complicated.

I’m not going to say something like you don’t find it, it finds you.

That’s nonsense.

You need to go out into the world and live a life where you do things you are actually passionate about and watch how the world responds. Then, you decide what has meaning. Maybe it is being a parent, saving the rainforests, or riding tricycles around bears at the zoo. Whatever it is, you choose.

You need to know one thing: you choose your purpose.

The thing is, and this is the main problem, is you have to choose what gives your life meaning, and therefore, purpose. You have to decide, and that’s daunting because it feels like a “forever” thing. People are terrible at deciding, especially when they think they have an unlimited number of choices and that if they are wrong they will be stuck.

“Late at night, our faces lit by the blue glow of our smartphones, we wonder, Who am I? and What am I doing with my life? The dark side of all this freedom and endless choice is the crippling fear that we’ll screw up our lifelong pursuit of happiness. If we’re in charge, then we have only ourselves to blame. We could fail, and then it would be our fault.”

How to Not Die Alone – Logan Ury

Your real problem is not passion or purpose. It is choice. For the first time in history, more of us are given an unparalleled number of passions and purposes to pursue. Not long ago, your path to a career, and therefore your choices, passions, and purposes, was limited.

If you’re like me, which you probably are, you like many things. And you have the potential to like many more things. The truth is, we are all capable of enjoying many things and even making careers out of them. We can have many passions and many purposes throughout our lifetimes.

Your purpose is the thing you do that has meaning. The activity. Something that is outside of your selfish desires. Passion is the activity. Purpose is taking that activity and making is useful for the world outside of yourself. Purpose involves helping people, solving problems, or both, and that makes humans happy.

That’s it.

We don’t just have one purpose in life. That’s bonkers. However, we all need to believe that we have one purpose in life, otherwise we will drive ourselves batshit crazy from indecision and the overwhelming number of choices.

Follow Your Purpose So You’re Not Feeling Lost

You create and find your passion. You create and find your purpose as well. That is the beautiful part: passion and purpose are not some magical things that jump up and bite you in the ass. So here is what you need to do.

1. You create passion around whatever you want by following your unique curiosities and the many things that energize you.
2. Do something for the simple reason that you want to get good at that something – not for any other reason.
3. Choose how to use that passion to be useful and meaningful for the world – purpose. This can be any number of things and it just might change over time.

What happens is, you try things out in the world that seem interesting to you and that take you out of your comfort zone. You try to gain mastery; not just try it once and quit. After a while you feel whether you like it, or not. If you like it, you keep doing it. Over time you will get better at it. And guess what humans like. Yep, you guessed it (maybe), we love things we can improve and that help us improve. Once you learn that you can do hard things, you will learn to love the challenge.

The advice is truly simple. Go do things that you are curious about. Continue to do things that allow you to improve. If you don’t feel like putting in effort to get better, stop. Go follow another curiosity. Rinse and repeat. That little spark of passion that lives inside you will eventually get flamed by something. If you say it won’t, then you clearly are not taking enough focused action. Once your passion is burning hot, point it in the direction of something meaningful and useful in the world that helps people and solves problems. That’s following your purpose.

Passion and Purpose Equals Happiness

When it comes how to find your passion and how to find your purpose, people feel happy by giving meaning to their lives and what they are doing. We can find meaning in a few ways: 1) We help others, 2) We solve problems, 3) We are in control of what we are doing, and 4) We are able to pursue mastery and improve over time.

The biggest problem of all is that people believe passion and purpose comes before action. It doesn’t. Action comes first.

Passion begets purpose. And to find passion you simply do shit that fascinates you and that you are curious about. Then you take one of the many possible passions that emerge and point it toward something meaningful and useful in the world – your purpose. That’s it. There is no complicated formula. You don’t need some course with some coach or guru to tell you what you want to do with your life. Guess who you need? Yep, just you.

You’re Going To Die Someday

Listen, this is a dark way to end this one, but the more I overpower my overthinking brain and take actions to follow my curiosities while simultaneously overcoming my fears, I remind myself of this one thing: we are all going to die someday. Truly. Stop running from that fact and start living like your time is running out, because it is. Not in a bad way, just in a – Hey, we don’t have a ton of time here and what we do is insignificant in the bigger picture and will be forgotten someday so do what you enjoy…and oh yea, we are spinning on a giant rock that is flying through outer space – kind of way.

What I’m trying to say is don’t overthink what your passion and purpose are in life.

This might be the most important point right here: even after you’ve found your passion and purpose, suffering is still a part of the equation. In fact, one might argue that the very pursuit of a passion or purpose is the cause of all of your suffering in the first place. Either way, suffering is woven into the very fabric of our lives, so setting out on the noble crusade of living a life of passion and purpose only gives meaning to the suffering. You’re not going to feel like doing what you love everyday. Some days are still going to suck.

Everyone is looking for some secret answer to finding their passion and purpose. I know I was.

There is no secret.

Or maybe there is.

Don’t think. Do.

Always do.

That’s the only secret.

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