“If you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.”
We’ve all heard that quote. I think it’s generalizing life far too much. You’ll never know what you love without doing a lot of different things. By trying new things you might discover stuff you hate. You also might discover stuff you like. You might stumble upon passion projects that you obsess over for days, weeks, months or years.
As someone who just started his fifth job in five years, I can tell you I’m always looking for the thing I love. But I am also cognisant of things I hate or don’t like very much. I try to avoid the latter but sometimes I get roped into them without prior knowledge.
The biggest thing that’s helped me keep my passion up and continue unlocking new doors is by following my infatuations.
As a kid, I remember becoming obsessed with a baseball card game. My friend and I would spend days playing a simple game with a deck of cards, completely driven by luck. But we would track every statistic imagineable. Then, I’d gather all our sheets of data and enter them into Excel. I was far too young to know what I was doing, but I’d find it fun to see which team was statiscally the best, again, based on luck.
Today, I work almost entirely in Excel. I love it. It’s the way I can see how a business operates. A way to make sense out of an over abundance of numbers. A way to teach myself advanced Excel language and find exactly the solution for my problem.
I’ve always been infatuated with data, especially trackable data sets. There’s something about it that makes me come alive. I don’t look it as work but as a following of passions.
My point is, I don’t think you find your passion by asking the question “what job will make me come alive?” Instead, you find the perfect job for yourself by trying new things and sticking to stuff you’ve been infatuated with for a while. It might be something little, a weird hobby or quirk, or it might be a question you’ve always wanted to answer. No matter what, there’s something out there for you to do. You just need to be aware of the things that make you come alive.