Personal Growth Success in Business Success in Life
How to Kickstart Your Passion Focused Career in 21 Days
Have you known what your passion is for a long time, but struggled figuring out what to do or how to get started?
Do you have a number of passions but can’t figure out whether you should pursue a couple of them to make sure you find something that’ll keep your interest?
Regardless of where you’re at in the process, the most important thing for you to do is to simply GET STARTED! Think about all the times you’ve said, “Some day I’m going to _________!” Have you realized that that “some day” never comes? The reason most people don’t do anything to improve their situation is because their either scared of failing, or they legitimately don’t know where to begin.
The only way for you to achieve the greatest successes in life is to experience an amazing amount of failure. The tension created by failure is one of the only things that forces us to back up … re-evaluate the situations … choose a different direction and move forward again. Stopping when you meet the first bit of resistance is like resigning your life to that of little happiness and will eventually lead to many regrets!
I’d encourage you to change the way you position the prospect of failing in your mind. Realize that the reward you’ll receive for many failures is much success. So instead of being afraid of failure … embrace it! The pain of regret you’ll experience by not taking steps to achieve happiness by pursuing your passion, will be far greater than not succeeding the first, second, or tenth time!
If you’re in a position where you simply don’t know where to begin, I can help! The following are the steps you should follow if you’d like to either test something you believe is your passion, or to begin to build a strong foundation for your passion focused business in just 21 days.
The first step is for you to make a commitment to spend one hour each day, for 21 straight days, focusing on your passion.
You should be very intentional about scheduling this time and stick to your schedule. I’d encourage you to set a timer and keep your head down and your complete focus on your work. When you’re doing something new and uncomfortable, you’ll most likely have an internal struggle that will lead you to find things that distract you. If you set a timer you’ll eventually lose the urge to repeatedly check the time to see if you’ve reached the end of your hour for that day.
The following is a list of the activities you should be doing for your one, life changing, hour each day:
Write about your passion. You should start a brand new journal and work on filling it up. Write about what you like about your passion, what comes easy to you, and where you’d like to improve your skills. Spending this time alone getting these thoughts out of your head will allow you to begin to identify your strengths and eventually will help you identify opportunities to transform those strengths into a passion focused career.
Research others who are effectively using your passion in their lives. The Internet is a wonderful thing, and if the person you identify is actively using social media you may have the opportunity to get a good look inside their days and begin to translate that knowledge into your own plan. Success leaves clues, so make sure you pay attention to everything you can find on this person so you can make your path easier. There’s no reason to create a new path if there is already a nicely manicured path for you to follow.
Teach your passion to someone else. I don’t know about you, but I’m the type of person who loves to share the experiences, good or bad, with other people. Whether it was a trip that I took and had a phenomenal time, or if I find a shortcut that helps reduce the amount of time necessary to complete a tedious task. You’ll find that as you continue to focus on your passion, you’ll find it very difficult to not want to share it with people you come in contact with. During this 21 day period, keep your eyes open for people with similar interests and try to identify opportunities to share your knowledge with them, and see if you can gain additional information in the process. The best way to master something is to teach it.
Read about your passion. Today we have a tremendous opportunity to gain unlimited information on any topic online. It doesn’t matter how obscure you think your passion may be, there is a good number of people who share that passion and those people are actively creating new content on the topic every single day. Sure there are some passion areas that will have less content than others, but this is where opportunity lies! If your area of passion is sparse in content, you can take steps to position yourself as the leading expert in that area. Do your best to consume as much of this content as possible over these 21 days and you’ll get an excellent view of how crowded your passion area is. You’ll also gain an excellent understanding of what the hottest topics of discussion are and what information isn’t being covered very well.
Study different methods of participating within your passion area. This will help you identify different opportunities to pursue your passion as a career. Is there a non-profit organization you could work with? Can you find speaking opportunities to share your knowledge with other people who share your passion? Are there opportunities to create an information product that you sell online? Spending time focusing on this will surely help you identify ways to operate within your passion area so you should have multiple options.
Create a vision board of what your life will look like when you’re only pursuing your passion. You may be looking at this task and think that it sounds extremely cheesy. I can’t blame you because it certainly wasn’t comfortable for me the first time I did it. I firmly believe that people find this cheesy because they are afraid they’d never be able to achieve it, or it could be any one of the other reasons I mentioned in my last post 8 Reasons Why It’s Difficult to Find Your Passion. It really doesn’t matter what the reason is. The benefits you’ll receive from doing this will be amazing and it has the potential to transform your life. I could get into all the psychological reasons on how this works, but I’ll save that for a later post. 🙂
If you’re ready to make the commitment for the next 21 days and spend one full hour each day doing ONLY these tasks, I can assure you that you’ll have a firm foundation and an excellent idea of the direction you’ll want to go in. For the sake of accountability … If you accept this challenge, and you’re serious about investigating the opportunities to pursue your passion as a career, please let me know by leaving a comment below. I truly hope you accept the challenge, and want you to know I’ll do whatever I can to help you stay true to your commitment! 🙂
Bryan
Pete. Well done. The only thing I would add is Step Zero: Know the Difference between Passion and Drive. Most successful people have both – but do they know the difference? The clearest explanation I have found was in the book “The Monk and The Riddle” by Randy Komisar. While the book is just OK, this single insight made it worthwhile. Randy explains that passion and drive are very different –although both can make us money, move our career, and build a business or power us toward a goal. However, Passion is internal. Passion pulls you to it. Passion is something you would choose to do for the rest of your life – even if you know that isn’t likely. Drive is often external. You may be driven to get good grade, be the top sales person , and work long hours – but not because those things in and of themselves fuel your fire. We do them in hopes of using that activity or action as a means to “some day” live the life that pulls us. A delayed life. The book makes the case that the “delayed life” plan is no plan at all. It was an epiphany for me.