When you find your passion, your life takes on a different meaning. Your passion becomes your calling, and changes the experience of life. Are you ready to find your passion?

Let us start by defining what passion means.

Your passion or your calling is what you are born to do. There are millions of types of things you can do while you are alive, but you can’t do everything. Your calling is what captures you and you cannot stop thinking about it. If you don’t know what your passion is, you may need to experiment and discover yourself. But, when you find your passion, you would know it and any other thing wouldn’t seem like the right investment for your time.

What we do is the most important part about our lives. Having a calling in life means to do work we were called to do on earth. Your calling calls you towards it, and when it does, you cannot resist the call. Your calling is what you cannot resist.

I will divide this post into two parts in order to do justice to the title. There are two promises we have made in the title. We want to help you find your calling, and also help in understanding how to get paid for it.

So, let us look at 20 ways to find your passion.

1. Your passion is what you cannot stop thinking about

When we are kids, we are naturally attracted to some things. Some kids are good at academics, a few are good a sports, a few are good at certain subjects or oratory for that matter.

You passion is what you are naturally attracted towards and cannot stop thinking about. Your passion may be to become a public speaker and you cannot just stop yourself from thinking about addressing large groups of people. Once you find your passion, you would realize that you have been obsessed about it for years.

2. Understand yourself and what you are drawn towards

Observe yourself and see what you are drawn towards. I have always found quite difficult to understand when people say they don’t know what they are drawn towards. It just takes some introspection. You need to really understand what you are drawn towards. It doesn’t have to be one thing. It could be one, two or three things.

I am still going through this process myself. For example, I love the stage, I love to write and I love comedy. I do all of them currently. However, I am also trying to understand if I can create a business at the intersection of all of these fields since I love entrepreneurship and am always reading something on entrepreneurship. So, you need to figure this for yourself.

3. Do what makes you happy

You are passionate about things that make you happy. They make commercial sense or otherwise, but you are passionate about them. So, a simple way to find your passion is to just discover what makes you happy.

Now, there is a caveat here. Eating chocolates could make you happy but what we are trying to do here is trying to find things about you that you could do professionally if you can figure out a way to eat chocolates professionally (start a YouTube channel where you eat chocolates and tell the difference between different chocolates), then you will make yourself an authority on it and would have found your calling. That’s a fucking great example, and it just came in my mind while writing. Writing is part of my calling clearly.

4.  Build self-awareness

Understand yourself more and more every day. Self-awareness would be important to find you calling since it will help you marry who you are with what you do. So, make constant time investment in building more self-awareness.

5. Try new stuff

If you don’t know what you’re calling is, make the time to try a lot of new stuff. Try pottery, drawing, and photography, whatever catches your fancy. Go and do it. It is only when you do stuff and are in the thick of it do you realize how does that feel. It therefore, makes sense for jobs to have a probation period, but the stakes are high there. Try new stuff without any risk, so you can take your time to arrive at your calling.

It is fair to say that you need to undergo a process of trial and error to find your passion. it just gets a little difficult to do, the older you grow.

6. Your calling should make the world a better place

Let’s take the example of the chocolate eater. If the chocolate eater becomes a phenomenon, would it make the world a better place? Yes, it would! It would allow people all over the world who like chocolates to tune into you and decide what kinds of chocolates should they eat. You would make them happier while doing what your calling is. It is amazing.

7. Read books or watch videos to find your passion

Read books or watch videos to find your passion. Watch what other people are doing to make a living and which ones are happy. Your job in this piece of research is to find what the people who are happy and what makes them happy. May be, what they do could be your calling as well. People who write books generally are passionate about what they write, and they leave clues on finding passion for others too.

8. Ask your family or friends

If you have a supportive set of family or friends you can trust on, ask them what they think your calling should be. May be, they have observed some spark in you that you have failed to see yourself. Your goal is to find your calling and live it. If you need help, seek it out.

9. Find what irritates you

This is an interesting one. If you also look for things that constantly irritate your about life, may be your calling lies in fixing them. You could become a problem solver and in other words, an entrepreneur.

10. Do not settle before you find your calling

We could go on and talk about many other ways to find your calling but ideally, it is a trial and error process. For some, it comes naturally to them. For others, the process takes time. The goal is to do something that comes to naturally to you, and you enjoy the process of working on it.

Now, let us look at the second part of this post- how to get paid for what you love. Now, when we spoke about finding your calling, we spoke about it in a professional context and how to use your calling to create a career for yourself. Let us see how you can marry your calling with your work.

Here are 10 ways to get paid to do what you love. Once you have found your calling, this is your greatest challenge.

11. Experiment

Once you have found your calling, look at different possibilities of monetization. Like the chocolate example we have been following in this article, once you have created an online following through a YouTube channel or a blog, you can speak on the subject and form a community around it. People will pay you for your knowledge. You may also start a chocolate brand one day.

12. Lean into it

Keep doing what excites you and look for ways to monetize it. It’s a journey. You may find a way and if you don’t find a way, you may create one, opening opportunities for people of your kind.

13. Think about your prospective customers

Question like a businessman/woman-who may be interested in your knowledge/product/service and try make a plan to reach out to them.

14. Believe that you can make a living doing what you love

Before you are paid for what you love, you need to believe that it is possible.

We live in a pretentious world where most people live boring lives garnished with money and prestige to deny themselves the truth that their lives suck and they hate their work.

You need to believe that you can find your calling and use it to make a living, before that happens.

15. Get really good at your calling

Get really good and if you are so good, somebody would want to talk to you and ask you if you would be willing to do it for some money for them. If you are an authority on chocolates, not just consumers, but even brands that make chocolates would want to work with you, and pay you money to get them customers.

16. Don’t quit your soul sucking job too early

There is no definition of too early. You need to decide how much time it would take to make money off your calling, and if there is a precedent for it. If there is no precedent, then you are the precedent. You will need money to survive. If you want to jump in full time, you need to have some money to live while you work on translating your calling into a career.

17. Find mentors

If there is a precedent and people have made a career out of a similar passion area, you want to seek out their help so that you can ask for guidance in your journey. There is no need to reinvent a wheel when one already exists.

18. Give it time

You need to give it time since it won’t happen immediately. Being able to make a living doing what you love is one of the most difficult things in the world, and only a handful of over 7 billion people in the world are able to do it. So, you need to be patient, while you work on it. Don’t give up. EVER.

19. Be the first to do something

It is highly likely that you would be able to create a niche for yourself if you are the first mover. If you have found that your calling is music, then you could create something that is completely new in the vast field of music. If you can, find out a way to go niche and do something that nobody has ever done. There is nothing as big as a first mover advantage.

20. Craft a positioning for yourself

Define who you are for your audience. If you are known for something in the minds of your audiences, whoever they are, they are likely to pay you for that. Positioning is marketing lingo for the position you occupy in the minds of your potential customers. If you are able to do that, they will pay you for being you! That’s what you want.

Remember that it is extremely difficult to be able to find your passion and be paid for it. However, it is one of the most ambitious dreams you could chase. The society isn’t built around it.

Why don’t most people find their passion?

Schools, colleges, corporate lives make a clone of us human beings and we forget our individual identities in the process. In order to understand who we are, and find our calling is an achievement. To be able to turn that calling into a career is the greatest professional achievement in the world that only a handful of people achieve. To be able to do that is success, and happiness.

Start slowly and look for your calling. The fact that you are looking for it makes you different in a world where most people live in denial and pretence. You can only start doing what you love when you know what you love and that takes effort. Once you figure what you love, your journey of translating that into a career begins. This journey of figuring out how to get paid to pursue your calling is the most important journey of your life and I hope you take the trip.

Thank you for reading.

The purpose of this blog to help you find your happiness. Please read the other posts on the blog, and follow so that you get updates when new posts are published. Please share any posts you like with your friends so that they can also find their happiness. If you have any feedback for me, please leave it in the comments and I would be happy to work on it. If you would like to support my writing and this blog, you may please send a donation through PayPal here.

I appreciate the time you spent in reading the blog and wish you happiness.

Love,

Amarvani