What Do You Want to Do With Your Life?

"I don’t know what I want to do in life. All I know is that it isn’t this."

That was the sentiment a friend reflected back to me. She’s in her mid-twenties, smart, savvy, and hard-working. But she is still stuck working jobs that don’t pay much beyond the minimum wage. Every year, she tells me that she applies to universities but never goes through with it. Why? because she can’t answer that question.

Passion Evolves

I worry a lot of people fall into the same trap. The trap of believing that they need to make big life decisions before they can start doing anything. The trap is that you need to be born with a passion. And the lie is that being able to combine your interests with a profession is easy.

When people ask me what I’m going to be doing in five or ten years, I usually tell them I’m going to be an entrepreneur. "Oh. What’s your business going to be? " I have reason to believe this internet business could be it. Between revenues and freelance work, I’m expecting to make about ten thousand dollars this year. Concentrated effort for the next four or five years could definitely make this a livable income.

But I don’t usually say that. Because it isn’t the point. In all honesty, I have no idea where I am going to be in a decade. My track record shows that my passions have evolved considerably, even over the last couple years.

In the book My Start-Up Life: How Ben Casnocha, the 19-year old CEO of Comcate, shows how his passion didn’t start with a flash of insight,

It didn’t start with a dream. It didn’t start in a garage. It didn’t even start with an innovative epiphany, which is perhaps entrepreneurs’ most overplayed recollections. " He continues, relating the story of Jerry Kaplan’s epiphany moment in Kaplan’s book, Start Up. To which Ben adds, "I wish my epiphany were as primal." It wasn’t, and most aren't. " [emphasis mine]

As Ben shares his story of being a teenage CEO, it becomes clear that his passion evolved. There was an interest in entrepreneurship and making a difference. But from these interests, he made smaller steps, each building a passion. I don’t believe his journey ever started with deciding what he wanted to do with his life.

Replace the word decision with curiosity.

Instead of making definite decisions about a career path, I believe you should get curious. Get curious about the way the world works. Notice your own interests and find small ways you can exercise passion for something. even if you can’t find a way to make money off of it yet.

The bridge from passion to money-maker can’t be made hastily. Interests often get discarded because they cannot be immediately relayed into a source of income. and therefore aren’t as important as the work that does.

Blogging is a great example. I know many bloggers who want to go pro. They want to take the interest they have and turn it into a passionate source of income. But blogging isn’t easy. Even the most rapid successes I’ve seen took over a year before the author could claim blogging as more than a hobby. And those were due to writing talent, luck, and an incredible amount of work.

Patience is a necessary ingredient in evolving a passion. But even more, you need to be open to other possibilities.

Interest to Income Isn’t a Straight Path

80% of new businesses fail in the first five years. But more interesting is that of the 20% that succeeded, most didn’t do so in the way they had expected to.

Before setting up his immensely popular website, Steve Pavlina believed he would make most of his revenue through products and workshops. But close to five years later, he still makes all of it from advertising and affiliate sales. He downplayed this revenue possibility in his business plan.

Similarly, I don’t believe that most people’s passions follow a straight path. Scott Adams began with a degree in economics and a position in a bank, and now he is a successful cartoonist who created Dilbert.

Seven Steps to Evolving a Passion... and Making it Work.

Step One – Gather Curiosity Sparks

Don’t have an inferno of passion driving your actions yet? Don’t worry about it. Most people I know don’t. And if you are under thirty, you are probably in the overwhelming majority.

The first step is to simply invest your energy in whims. Those little sparks of interest where you don’t know enough to make them a passion. Ben Casnocha calls this seeking randomness. For me, it has been a process of finding my intuition and using it to make small investments in things that are potentially interesting.

This means reading different books, taking on different activities and meeting different people. Broad associations give a lot of chances to stumble on a passion that can work.

Step Two: Fan the Flames of Interest

After exposing yourself to a lot of randomness, you need to cultivate the successes. Build upon the little sparks of interest that come into your life. If you read a book about physics and like the subject, try taking a physics class. If you enjoy some basic programming, try a small software project.

Step 3: Remove Distractions

Cultivating whims and exploring new passions requires time. One of the reasons I’ve placed such an emphasis on productivity with myself is that without it I couldn’t explore these options.

If your interests are genuine and worth exploring, it shouldn’t be too difficult to eliminate the non-essentials. Distractions such as television, excess internet usage and video games only take a bit of conditioning to free up. The hard part is allocating time you don’t believe is yours.

Step Four: Live Simply

If you already have a job you aren’t passionate about, work only as much as you need to keep going. Valid passions need time to grow into income-generating skills.

I don’t suggest becoming a starving artist and racking up huge debts. But avoid expanding your life to fit a bigger and bigger paycheck if you aren’t living your passion. Otherwise, you simply trap yourself into a life that is comfortable, but otherwise dead.

Leo Babauta, author of ZenHabits, is a great example of this. With six kids, freelancing work and another job to help support his family, he found ways to cut expenses and focus on his passion. His website has quickly grown to become incredibly popular, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a stable source of income for him in a few years. Live minimally and avoid getting trapped in a comfortable but unsatisfying life.

Step 5: Develop a Value-Creating Passion

If you have a skill that creates social value, you can make money through almost any medium. Monetizing a passion takes skill, as any entrepreneur can tell you, but without providing legitimate value it is impossible.

You need to transform your developing passions into a skill that can fill human needs. Some passions are easy to translate. An interest in computers could allow you to become a software designer. Others are more difficult. A passion for poetry may be more difficult to meet a specific human need.

Step Six: Determine How to Monetize That Value

Once you have the ability to create social value, you need to turn that into a repeatable process for gaining income. This could be in the form of a job. As a programmer, you could get hired by Google. Or, it could lead to becoming a freelancer or an entrepreneur.

Monetizing value isn’t easy. It requires that you learn how to market, sell yourself, and find ways to connect with human needs. Whether you intend to work in a job or own a business, it makes no difference. You are the CEO of your life, so you need to know how to connect your passions with serving other people.

Step Seven: Go Back to Step One

Defining this process in steps is misleading. It implies that there is a destination. There is no destination. The process of following whims, cultivating passions, turning them into valuable skills, and then finally earning revenue from them is lifelong. I have some passions that are in steps one and two. This blog is in the midst of step six. In ten years, I may have gone through them all with a completely different passion.

Not all your passions will or can finish the sixth step. But as persistent as the myth that you need to decide what you want to do with your life is, is the myth that you can only have one passion. I’m at a point where cultivating passions has meant I have too many options. There are too many possible paths that could lead to enjoyable and fulfilling careers. Don’t obsess over one failed attempt.

What do you want to do with your life?

Your life doesn’t need to go through a predictable story arc. It doesn’t have to start with a dream, follow through with hard work and end up in a nice home with four bedrooms. Instead, it can twist and travel. You don’t have to know the final answer; you just need to act on the next step.