I don't understand passion
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I have a confession. I don't really understand passion. People talk about passion as though everyone has one particular thing buried somewhere inside them and our job is to find it. Find your passion. Follow your passion. Build a career around your passion. Monetize your passion. Okay, but what exactly is it? I have things I enjoy, things I am good at, things I care about and things I can spend hours doing without noticing the time. Which one of those is passion? Is accounting my passion? Business analysis? Finance? Not exactly. Do I enjoy understanding money, solving problems, building things and creating structure? Very much. So here is what I would tell someone trying to figure out what they are meant to do. I would not tell them to find their passion. I would tell them to start somewhere much more practical. Find something you are good at or interested in. It does not have to be your life's calling. You do not even have to know whether you love it yet. Interest is enough to start. Get good at it. Learn, practice, ask questions and do the work. Develop skills that help you solve real problems. Understand how the business works. This part matters because being good at the work and understanding how the business of the work operates are two different things. I am learning this as we build Auxera. Building an app is one part of it. Understanding who needs it, what problem matters enough for them to pay for a solution and what it costs us to deliver it is another. There is also something I think we underestimate: distribution. People have to know you exist. You can build something wonderful, develop an incredible skill or have genuinely useful knowledge, but if nobody knows about it, your opportunities are limited. Distribution can be applying for the role, building relationships, starting the YouTube channel or simply telling people what you do. It is giving your work somewhere to go. So maybe I don't understand passion, but I understand this: Find something you are good at or interested in Then keep paying attention to where it leads. Maybe somewhere along the way you discover your passion. Maybe you discover something you are exceptionally good at. Maybe one opportunity leads to another and you end up somewhere you could not have planned from the beginning. So no, I still don't understand passion, but I don't think you need to understand it to get started. If you're still trying to figure out your passion too, that's okay. What are you interested in enough to start? Hit reply and tell me. See you next Thursday 🤎 Roseline Was this forwarded to you? Subscribe here to get the next one. |
Roseline Ekenimoh
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