How to Figure Out What Your Passionate About

Finding fulfillment and success through micro-motives.

I don’t like the word passion.

The word engenders a fiery, unyielding love for something — usually a career, or personal pursuit in one's life, but it’s a feeling that I believe few of us rarely achieve. Linkedin and Instagram posts would have you believe that passion is free to come by if you just find it as if finding it is a matter of going to the grocery store and selecting it from a shelf. From the number of posts exclaiming people’s excitement for their “life-changing” opportunity or humble-bragging their job awesomeness, it feels like passion is free to come by.

I’m passionate about my wife and kids, and my free time — but in terms of work or personal pursuits I’m more passionless. I’m interested in a lot of stuff, but not overly excited, and I get bored extremely fast. Along with writing business and analytics blog posts here on Medium, I host a podcast about videogames, sometimes I stream, I’m interested about fitness and weightlifting, I’m into business strategy and innovation, and I like analytics and machine learning, but I’m not really passionate about any of those things. My interests wane from topic to topic — one week putting all my focus into podcasting and videogames and another week studying a new business or analytics book. If I’m passionate about anything it’s a passion for finding my passion. I’ve been known to ask my wife “What’s your passion?” several times in a week…