Screw Finding Your Passion - Mark Manson

What the Hell Are You Doing with Your Life?

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Your Passion Is Right in Front of You

I have a friend who, for the last three years, has been trying to build an online business selling whatever. It hasn’t been working. And by not working, I mean he’s not even launching anything. Despite years of “work” and saying he’s going to do this or that, nothing actually ever gets done.

What does get done is when one of his former co-workers comes to him with a design job to create a logo or design some promotional material for an event. Holy shit, he’s all over that like flies on fresh cow shit.

And he does a great job! He stays up to 4:00 AM losing himself working on it and loving every second of it.

But then two days later it’s back to, “Man, I just don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”

I meet so many people like him. He doesn’t need to find his passion. His passion already found him. He’s just ignoring it. He just refuses to believe it’s viable. He is just afraid of giving it an honest-to-god try.

It’s like a nerdy kid walking onto a playground and saying, “Well, bugs are really cool, but NFL players make more money, so I should force myself to play football every day,” and then coming home and complaining that he doesn’t like recess.

And that’s bullshit. Everybody likes recess. The problem is that he’s arbitrarily choosing to limit himself based on some bullshitty ideas he got into his head about success and what he’s supposed to do.

Another email I get all the time is from people wanting advice on how to become a writer.

And my answer is the same: I have no fucking idea.

As a kid, I would write short stories in my room for fun. As a teenager, I would write music reviews and essays about bands I loved and then show them to nobody. Once the internet came around, I spent hours upon hours on forums writing multi-page posts about inane topics—everything from guitar pickups to the causes of the Iraq War.

I never considered writing as a potential career. I never even considered it a hobby or passion. To me, the things I wrote about were my passion: music, politics, philosophy. Writing was just something I did because I felt like it.

And when I had to go looking for a career I could fall in love with, I didn’t have to look far. In fact, I didn’t have to look at all. It chose me, in a way. It was already there. Already something I was doing every day, since I was a kid, without even thinking about it.

Because here’s another point that might make a few people salty: If you have to look for what you’re passionate about, then you’re probably not passionate about it at all.

If you’re passionate about something, it will already feel like such an ingrained part of your life that you will have to be reminded by people that it’s not normal, that other people aren’t like that.

It didn’t occur to me that writing 2,000-word posts on forums was something nobody else considered fun. It never occurred to my friend that designing a logo is something that most people don’t find easy or fun. To him, it’s so natural that he can’t even imagine it being otherwise. And that’s why it’s probably what he really should be doing.

A child does not walk onto a playground and say to herself, “How do I find fun?” She just goes and has fun.7

If you have to look for what you enjoy in life, then you’re not going to enjoy anything.

And the real truth is that you already enjoy something. You already enjoy many things. You’re just choosing to ignore them.

If you’d like some help to uncover the passion already existing in your life, I’ve got several exercises in my Finding Purpose Course in the Mark Manson Premium Subscription that can point you to what really matters and help you formulate a plan to make it happen. The Mark Manson Premium Subscription also comes with access to eight other courses and 40+ premium articles that will help you give fewer fucks in life. You’re welcome.