Two Questions to Identify Your Passion

We have all heard the advice to “follow your passion and the money will follow”. In fact, the only career advice my father would give me growing up was to “follow your bliss”. But how do you identify what you’re passionate about and turn it into your career? Or how do you find a career that incorporates your passions?

One way that has been helpful to me is to think about it in the following ways:

• What are you so interested in that you could spend your free time learning more about it, for fun? For me, it’s anything relating to business — the front page of the Wall Street Journal, the latest startup news, reading books about entrepreneurs, listening to podcasts, etc. It gets my heart beating faster and my mind racing.

• What hurts your heart and makes you upset about the world? What does that boil down to? For me, I feel physically ill or hurt in my gut when I see an injustice or lack of access to opportunity because of circumstances you were born into. Thus, I am interested in international development, access to education, entrepreneurship, and immigrants rights.

These two questions can start to point you in the direction of a potential passion or career route that you might be interested in. It is definitely true that having the luxury of working in a field that you are truly passionate about can make you extra engaged and successful in your career. But first, you must do some introspection to see where that passion points you!