Stop Doing This to Yourself

What’s your purpose in life?

What’s your passion?

These questions send cortisol grenades throughout your body when you think about them for too long. It’s good that people are trending towards wanting more meaning in their life, but we put ourselves under way too much pressure to find our one-true-life-defining-cure-all-magical-fairy-tale-purpose-in-life.

On top of that, the idea of “searching” for your passion or purpose seems like progress. It isn’t. The more time you spend thinking and pondering instead of doing, the further away you move from your passion.

People often take this as “don’t think about your future at all,” but it really means stop overthinking things so much.

That’s the double-edged sword of self-help. It’s useful to think about things like passion and purpose to give you the swift kick in the rear you need to develop them. But this thinking quickly turns into “mental masturbation.” You’re more focused on your fantasies than you are of doing the work because…the work is hard.

It’s easy to think about a new path you want to take in your life. It’s hard to put one foot forward, then the second, and repeat it for however long it takes.

You can’t really decide what to do with your life prior to acting. You’re making an educated guess first. The action crystallizes the vision.

The Formula for Figuring Our What to Do With Your Life

“Following your genuine intellectual curiosity is a better foundation for a career than following whatever is making money right now.”

Don’t overthink the process.

The beginning steps to figuring out what to do with your life are simple.

Follow your curiosity and find out what you’re good at.

For a detailed step by step process for finding your strengths, read this guide.

A few highlights:

• What did you enjoy doing when you were 14 years old?
• Take personality tests — they are scientifically useless, but they’re a good guide to start
• Cross-reference your strengths and personality with careers and paths

I found my passion for writing almost five years ago, but I didn’t realize it the first time I wrote a blog post. No. I wrote one post and enjoyed that. Then a second, third, fourth, etc.

I realized around post 100 or so that I really found it. Doing the work, experiencing the up and downs, and still wanting to move forward after the downs helped me realize it was meant to be.

“Your first 100 blog posts will mostly suck.

Your first 100 podcasts will mostly suck too.

Your first 100 talks will not be perfect.

Your first 100 videos will be nightmares.” — Cammi Pham

The recipe here — gauge your interest in something and do it poorly for a while.

Sucking at something doesn’t feel good. Uncertainty doesn’t feel good. Mentally, we want guarantees, certainty, safety, a sense of ease.

We don’t want to give it everything we have a fail because there’s nowhere to go from that point — it’s scary as hell.

I wish I had the answer to make you feel better about all of that but I don’t.

You will have to suck it up.

Find What You Love and Let it Kill You

The tone of this post isn’t super positive, is it?

I love what I do, a lot. But it’s far from easy.

If there’s one thing to take away from this piece it’s this — most of the good things in your life will come from discomfort.

I haven’t even spent much of this time answering the question “what should I do with my life?” because that’s the least important part of the equation.

I could read your mind, scan through your life’s database, and create a custom-tailored plan for you to follow, but it still wouldn’t matter if you weren’t willing to be uncomfortable.

You, more or less, know what do to with your life. You’re just not doing it because you’re scared.

Here’s the thing, though. If you find something you love, you have to be open to pain.

That’s what love is.

When you get married, you’re essentially giving your heart to someone else and trusting they won’t break it. We all know this deal doesn’t always work out, yet we take it anyway because the positive outweighs the negative.

It’s the same when it comes to a real life path or a real vocation.

Settling for any old career or life is equivalent to dating someone you know you’ll never marry. It feels okay, but you’re missing out on a feeling that’s orders of magnitude better.

If finding this true love is so important, why do we often choose the opposite?