How to Find Your Passion? This Is What I Learned 10 Years After Creating a Blog

You close the door behind you and take a deep breath. Today was a heavy day at the office. Dozens of emails you said you’d answer today race through your head, but you still haven’t gotten around to looking at them. Suddenly, questions begin invading your mind. Am I passionate about what I do today? How can I know if I’ve already discovered my passion or that thing I want to dedicate the rest of my life to? If I work at something I’m not passionate about, can I be happy?

It’s happened to me. It’s happened to everyone. In July 2008, I went through an existential crisis of that kind. I wasn’t working, but in the middle of university vacation with no known extracurricular activities, I questioned a lot about what I was really interested in doing with my life. Just like that, one afternoon I decided to open my own music blog: La Caja de Pandora. Why? At 17 years old with all of adolescence on top of me, I honestly wasn’t very clear.

With lots of doubts and some fear, I launched into writing my first music recommendation and from then on I didn’t stop. Unintentionally, this decision led me ten years later to manage the website of one of Peru’s most important banks and to feel motivated by my daily work. Although none of this was planned, these days I’ve reflected a lot on how these two events connect and on those lessons this long but also exciting journey of finding my passion left me. In the following lines I’ll seek to share some of these learnings and explain how you can apply them in your lives.

Without problems, there’s no happiness

I swear that when I finished writing my first blog article I felt something incredible. It was 2008, and I could say I had something that resembled my own web page. I told my friends and family, but they all looked at me with completely confused faces. What’s a blog? What’s it for? I tried different explanations and while not everyone seemed to understand, I was still happy. “Very soon I’ll be famous, I’ll have millions of visits and I’ll be able to make a lot of money doing this,” was what I kept telling myself the first few days.

However, as weeks passed I realized this blog thing wouldn’t be so easy: visits weren’t growing and money wasn’t coming. That’s when I asked myself: why bother creating and maintaining a project when everyone else doesn’t trouble themselves? My first attempts to abandon the project were starting to become evident, and behind these thoughts was the idea of happiness. I was right: we all only have one life and we deserve to be happy. But perhaps I didn’t have much notion about the best way to achieve it.

Today’s society has led us to believe that happiness comes hand in hand with a life without complications and a handful of filtered photos we share on social media. However, at the same time it seems we’ve all ignored a key fact behind these achievements and milestones: happiness is found in all those problems we choose to face daily to achieve what we want.

Mark Manson makes it clearer in the always relevant book The Subtle Art Of Not Giving a F*ck (1): “Problems are a constant in life: they don’t stop, they’re only exchanged or improved. Happiness comes from solving problems. If you’re avoiding problems or feel you don’t have any, then you’re going to feel miserable. True happiness only occurs when you find the problems you enjoy having or solving. Happiness then is a task in constant development.”

Indeed, the idea of success and happiness I posed to myself the same day I started the blog project never became reality. Despite this, all this time I was happy confronting different problems I found along the way like: learning to create multimedia notes from scratch, understanding my page’s HTML code to modify its design, and creating a Facebook fan page for the blog to expand the reach of my publications.

Considering then that it’s very unlikely to achieve happiness without first overcoming some obstacles, I invite you to question some ideas you might take for granted today. Are the problems you face at work the ones you enjoy solving? Are they perhaps difficulties someone else has imposed on you or that don’t belong to you? How committed are you to solving them?

Practice makes perfect

Once I’d resolved the blog’s design and content, I began to feel curious about the people visiting the site. How many people read the complete articles? Where were they from? How did they access the website? Soon I understood I needed to learn about Google Analytics and it wouldn’t be an easy task.

As months passed and after several hours of learning, I discovered that some users from Latin America and Spain were accessing my music reviews. I also found that Facebook and Google were my main traffic channels. However, beyond these first findings, what I ended up developing during this time was a special discipline for maintaining long internet search sessions. In short, this consistency is what would allow me to acquire skill in the analytics field and later even land my first job at a digital marketing consultancy.

The learning here isn’t new, but we do tend to ignore its importance: to achieve excellence in executing a complex task we require a minimum of training hours. This fact has been studied so many times by scientists that there’s even a rule everyone agrees on: you need 10,000 hours of practice in any specific field of knowledge to match the mastery of a world-class expert (2).

Precisely, Malcolm Gladwell dedicates an entire chapter to this theory in the book Outliers (3) and backs up its validity by sharing numerous examples. So, for example, the author comments on how Mozart wouldn’t compose his first masterpiece until age 21, long after he started writing music for the first time at age 6. Bobby Fischer, chess grandmaster, experienced something similar—he could only acquire a great level of mastery in the science sport after 9 years of intense practice. The same would happen with The Beatles, who by the time they achieved their first success in 1964 had already played live no less than 12,000 times in just a two-year span.

I’m sure very few of those reading me now will acquire as much skill in a specific area of knowledge as happened with Mozart, Fischer or The Beatles. I don’t think I’m close to that level of genius either. However, the lesson Gladwell gives us is invaluable: without perseverance, any potential goal, dream or glimpse of passion can never be discovered. Now it’s your turn to reflect. Have you dedicated enough practice time to that topic that causes you curiosity today? How easily do you give up when you realize the problem in front of you is going to take time to resolve?

Experiment with Small Bets

Throughout these 10 years, I think the only thing that’s remained constant in my blog has been this sort of experiment laboratory I’ve built on it. One morning I woke up with the idea that La Caja de Pandora could have the region’s most popular independent music podcast. I got myself a high-quality microphone, learned basic rules for editing audio and launched an online show. I ended up publishing two programs and shortly after, due to little impact shown, I canceled the initiative to focus my time on other formats.

More recently, it occurred to me that interviews with local bands were a type of content I hadn’t fully exploited yet, and that could help me position the blog’s brand more easily. So I decided I’d contact some national groups and record the material on the blog. Fortunately for me, all these publications had a significant amount of traffic and broad reach on social media. Today I want to give continuity to this initiative.

As you can see, the content route La Caja de Pandora has followed has been itinerant and the experiments I’ve conducted haven’t necessarily always been successful. However, they’ve all yielded learning. These “small bets,” as Cal Newport calls them in the book So Good They Can’t Ignore You (4), are useful for exploring interests and are a key part of the author’s manifesto: “people don’t have a preexisting passion, it emerges and grows in the long process in which they become competent in the jobs they develop.”

Indeed, to achieve this evolution of competencies, Newport explains, it’s necessary to undertake small projects that allow you to discover little by little what you’re good at. “What’s important about small bets is that they are indeed small in scope. You try one and it can take at least a few months. The bet can turn out a success or fail, but either way you’ll get important feedback to guide your next steps […] This approach is opposite to the idea that you must put together a big plan from the start and make a big bet on its success,” the author comments.

Indeed, you might feel stuck today doing the same thing, and be turning over in your head the big decision that will allow you to completely turn your career around. However, perhaps it’s better to undertake something small, but not tomorrow or next month, but today. In Mark Manson’s words: “if you lack motivation to make a major change in your life, do something, anything, and then leverage the emotional reaction to that action as a way to start motivating yourself. […] Action is not just the effect of motivation, it’s also the cause that originates it.”

So it doesn’t matter much what the final stop is, what matters is that you experiment with “small bets” today. Now it’s your turn to ask yourself, how much do you risk leaving your comfort zone to try something new? Do you usually execute the plans you have in mind or do they only stay in your imagination?

Embrace Boredom

I’d already mentioned it. It was 2008 and I didn’t have a known hobby. Like any other teenager who had just entered university, I also played video games in my spare time, watched cable movies and was very active on Facebook. However, one day I got so bored that I left all those activities for a few days and soon after I had the idea to start writing on the blog.

Now you’ll ask yourself: How do new ideas suddenly come to mind? How do I know where to start if I don’t have a known hobby either? Here the key factor is boredom. Manoush Zomorodi, author of the revealing book Bored And Brilliant (5), interviewed a group of cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists to understand what happens in our brains when we go through episodes of boredom. According to Zomorodi, when we get bored our brain enters a “default mode” in which “we connect disparate ideas, solve some of our most persistent problems. […] We look back on our lives, take note of the big moments, create a personal narrative and then define the goals and steps we need to take to achieve them.”

The reality we face daily, however, seems not to allow us much space for boredom. We need to be connected to our smartphone notifications. We need to act on every email we receive. We need to update our social media. And we have to do all this while we have to get to work quickly in the morning, resolve our work pending items all day and even study something more at night.

We live in the middle of the attention economy and the leaders of important technology platforms know it. At the end of 2017, Sean Parker, former founder of Facebook, admitted that this social network was created to exploit a vulnerability in human psychology and that it was developed with the goal of “consuming as much time and conscious attention from users as possible.” Earlier that same year Reed Hastings, general manager of Netflix, admitted that the streaming video platform’s main competitor was its users’ biological need to sleep.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I’m not trying to get you to return to the caveman era. Technology gives us considerable benefits in terms of productivity, but perhaps it’s time we start being more conscious and selective with the time we dedicate to it. Have you asked yourself then, when was the last time you consciously got bored? What are you doing today to manage your attention?

Passion as a Lifestyle

I never thought I’d work in the banking sector and much less in its digital business division. Although I never fully planned it, the problems I chose to solve, prolonged practice in a specific area of knowledge, execution of small bets and confronting boredom were some of the factors that allowed me to find my passion on this long road.

In my experience, if you ask me today how long on average it will take you to find your passion, my answer won’t be ten years but I also can’t assure you it will be quick. The process of finding passion in your daily work certainly won’t be as easy as giving a like to a motivational phrase shared on social media. However, if you commit to following from today some of the learnings I share, perhaps you’ll still be in time to find pleasure in what you do in the future.

In my opinion, one never finishes discovering what they’re passionate about. What you might consider as your life’s passion or purpose constantly mutates over the years and isn’t something you should cling to “as soon as you discover it.” Finding your passion is rather a lifestyle to adopt, a relentless search. So if today you keep asking yourself if you’re passionate about what you do daily, I invite you to embrace this discomfort and question yourself even more. Don’t ask yourself anymore what your passion is. On the contrary, tell me what you’ll do today to find yours.

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Notes:

(1) The Subtle Art Of Not Giving a F*ck (2016) by Mark Manson is a wonderful New York Times bestseller that challenges the idea of happiness we’re accustomed to considering these days.

(2) Other recent studies argue that it doesn’t really matter how much time you dedicate to an area of knowledge, what’s important is how effective the practice performed during this time is. From my point of view, both viewpoints are relevant.

(3) Outliers: The Story Of Success (2008) by Malcolm Gladwell is a fascinating book that does a historical review to understand those critical factors that allowed the brightest and most famous people in the world to become high-performance subjects.

(4) So Good They Can’t Ignore You (2012) by Cal Newport is one of the most interesting books I’ve read in the last three years. A very well-crafted argument about what discovering your passion really entails.

(5) Bored and Brilliant (2017) by Manoush Zomorodi is a book I don’t yet have the pleasure of owning, but is definitely high on my to-do list. I’m sure you’ll also be convinced of its importance when you watch this presentation she gave at a famous TED talk.