A lot of people struggle to find their purpose in life. People think it is through some sort of revelation that they discover it. Nothing can be farther from the truth. People who search for their purpose almost never discover it.
So how do we discover our purpose in life?
To answer this question we need to ask, how most people who discovered their purpose found it.
Purpose and passion are very closely interlinked. Ask anyone who claims to have found their purpose, they will almost always talk about their endeavour with deep passion. It is so closely linked that it won’t be far from truth if we say you cannot have a purpose unless you are also deeply passionate about something.
I, for one, am of the opinion that passion precedes purpose. Mark Zuckerberg was, at first passionate programmer or builder, before he discovered his purpose of connecting the world.
Purpose is just a worthy end goal where you can apply your passion. And purpose is pretty arbitrary too. Mark would have been just as good if he decided to build a company to solve some other problem.
That is to say, if we can figure out how we can be passionate about something, then it is only a matter of choosing a worthy end goal among many where our passion can be applied. And that is not as tough. In fact, it won’t much matter if we chose whatever came our way, by pure chance. Sans some obvious bad choices, if we just settle for the first options that come to our mind, we won’t be a great deal away from living our purpose. Which brings me to the point below :
You don’t discover purpose, purpose discovers you. But purpose is picky enough to discover only those who are passionate about something.
So this brings us to the next problem : How to discover our passion?
Before we can answer that, we must answer what is passion?
Passion is basically something that you love doing which is also useful for the world. Unless it is also useful for the world, it is just a hobby. Like watching movie. Or playing guitar.
A hobby can turn into passion, for sure. And the sufficient criteria is it must reach a point where you are good enough that the world starts getting the fruits of your endeavour. Like if you learn to play guitar as a hobby but then you get so good that you start creating good music. Then it is no longer a hobby, but a passion.
Not all passions start as a hobby though. Some passions start purely as accident, or by compulsion.
The only sufficient criteria for something to be called passion is :
- You must enjoy it.
- It must be useful to the world.
Passion, therefore lies at the intersection of venn diagram of all the things you enjoy and all the things the world considers useful or valuable.
It is easy to figure out what is useful for the world. Society has done that job for us by calling anything that could be useful, a skill.
That reduces our problem of finding our passion to the following statement : How do we find the skill we will enjoy ?
In order to determine what skill shall we enjoy, we must first answer what do we enjoy in general?
If we look closely, there are two classes of things we enjoy. First are passive pleasure giving things like TV, movies, music, alcohol, drugs. These things will unfortunately never fulfil the second criteria for passion (usefulness).
The second class of things we enjoy is any endeavour where we find ourselves to be good. The reason we enjoy a hobby is because we become good at it, with time.
There is something special happens when we do things we are good at. Our brain releases some combination of chemicals which lead us to feel good. It helps us take pride in our work and brings hope and desire to be even better. This mental state is commonly known as state of flow. (This is the reason Walter White loved cooking meth.)
It therefore simplifies our equation of finding our passion to finding something we can become good at.
There is a catch however. In order to be good at something, we must cross a chasm of being bad at it. One almost never wakes up one day being good at something. This is why people who search for their passion almost continue their search forever.
This chasm is where all the struggles, all the low points and “I hate doing it” happens. This chasm may trick you into thinking that what you are currently doing is not your true passion. This chasm is where most people give up. Only to start again in some other chasm. This is why a lot of people never find their passion, although they keep looking for it.
It also explains why a lot of great people discovered what they were passionate about when they were kids. Mark Zuckerberg was 11 when he discovered programming, Warren Buffett was 11 too. Bill Gates wrote his first software program when he was 13. Phelps began swimming at the age of 7. It is also why most of our hobbies get discovered as kids.
As kids, we don’t have a mechanism to identify we are in a chasm. As kids, we don’t know how to hate something because we are bad at it. We are not even self-aware to understand we are terrible at it. There is no pride involved. All our focus is on learning and getting better.
Not everyone is lucky enough to discover what they will be good at when young. And it certainly becomes harder to become good at something as adults simply because our self-awareness will try to pull us out from the chasm.
So is all hope lost once we grow old and didn’t discover our passion?
Not really. As adult our number one goal should be to do something where we will cross the chasm with relative ease and quickly. Let’s say it takes x days before we become good at something.
In other words, x = number of days we must remain in the chasm.
Our goal should be to be minimize x.
How do we minimize x?
There is inverse relationship between a thing’s x and our natural flair for the thing. In other words, anything we have a natural flair for will take less time to become good at.
Based on our genetic makeup there are a lot of things we can reasonably pursue. A few things will take a few percentage point higher than others to cross the chasm. Since there is no way of knowing which one will take the least amount, it is prudent to choose anything arbitrarily which meets our ballpark estimate. As long as we are not choosing something we don’t have a natural flair for, we are already doing a great job. Once again, what we choose is pretty arbitrary. Anything we have a natural talent for is a good choice.
It is important to choose something we have natural flair for, else x will be a very large number. That is why a lot of people hate their jobs. They chose something they can never become great at and the reason they can never become great at those things is because they don’t have natural flair for it. It was chosen for them by default, not by them. Being in the job will feel to them as being in the chasm.
It is also important to note that the sooner we choose, the sooner shall we cross the chasm. In order to reach a point where we shall find our passion, our time must be spent doing two things :
Making a choice about what to pursue. (Let’s say time we spend here is y) And crossing the chasm (x). Therefore, total time to reach there = x +y;
Most people get so busy in trying to find an activity where the x is minimum, they lose track of y. It is making the choice part which adults are very bad at. Kids don’t have that problem. Kids take whatever comes their way and try getting better at it. Adults want to minimise x so much that they forget that while might succeed in minimising it by few percentage points, it might take them forever to do so therefore making x + y a very large number.
Our goal should be minimising x + y, not just x and therefore arbitrarily picking something we have some natural flair for will be just as good, perhaps better, as working our way towards picking something where x is minimum.
One important thing to note about chasm is : Sometimes it helps when you have a strong purpose before you discover your passion. A strong purpose might push you to cross the chasm when things get really tough.
However as explained earlier, finding purpose is as arbitrary as it gets. There is no well led path to find purpose. Trust that your purpose will find you, if you first find your passion.
Be so good at something that you can’t help but love it.