Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

Of all the topics we have here on SuN, one of the most repeated is someone asking for help to come up with an idea for a business. Ironically, another repeating topic involves people who have too many ideas, and never follow through or who have ideas but don`t know how to make them into a business. But I`m going with the first one: needing to find an idea.

The first step is everyone tells you to "find your passion." And, as a recent community member said, that`s not so easy. So how do you find your passion? What exercises or methodologies do you use, recommend, or have you talked about in the past?

For me, there seem to be two basic ones. The first is to imagine myself on my deathbed, looking back over my life. I contemplate what I "did" for most of that time that was the most fun. From there, I see if I can isolate something that`ll generate money.

A related tool is to imagine myself hearing from some doctor that I`ve got about 7 months to live. What would I miss terribly, and what would I focus all my attention on doing in those last remaining months. That`s probably closely related to my passions.

The other, more when talking with other people, is to get really detailed about hobbies and activities centering from the ages between about 8-16. Those are such formative years they usually pull together what eventually becomes one of our passions.

So what specific exercises would you recommend? What have you used to find your own passion?

Usually people don`t just fall into a passion. In rare cases, people have a paid career already doing their passion, in which case if they`re burnt out, they need a new one. Do you think passion is formed in the years I`m suggesting, or can we develop a passion that`s radically different from what we enjoyed as kids?

I`ve been an artist all my life and my passion for creating art is natural to me, so natural that I`ve always had it and didn`t have to "find" it.  So that became my career path.

But it was the major lifestyle shifts I`ve had that I caused me to discover other passions of mine.  Some of them sort of came out of the woodwork and some I actually searched for.

When I planned to leave Los Angeles and my cushy animation career for Colorado many years back, I was faced with the common question of what I should do next for a living.  I racked my brain around this, dreaming up all sorts of ideas.  This kind of forced soul-searching caused me to think up some business concepts and inventive products that I don`t think I might have otherwise.

I think one of the tricks to finding passion is weeding out the things that you are interested in from the things that really turn you on.  We all have many varied interests but not all of them are deep enough to be sustainable for business.  Sometimes you know, sometimes you can do reading and research, and sometimes it`s just trial and error.

As an example, at one point I thought about becoming a furniture maker, a small boat builder or a carver of custom wooden doors!  Why?  Because I like working with wood, I am creative and good with my hands.  But it took about two years of experimentation and woodworking classes for me to figure out that this was just a hobby and I wasn`t passionate enough to make a career out of it.

But then on a vacation one year, I saw some vintage travel posters in a tourist shop.  They were really cool and I bought a few postcards.  I had seen this kind of work before but something about these really called to me.  It spawned me to look up more vintage travel art online.  I started searching for vintage posters of some of my favorite places and I couldn`t find some.  I had the thought that I could design my own then.

Well, I think if I wasn`t in a passion-searching frame of mind, that thought would have come and gone.  But it stuck with me and I ended up turning poster design into my first business.  Yes it was creating art like I had always done, but finding a passion in something very specific was the tricky part.

My point is that being in the mindset helps you see things in different ways than you might not have otherwise.

The point is, if you enjoy doing what you do, then you`ll perservere through the rough beginings and dead-ends which almost everyone faces when starting a business venture. 

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"Vinni, Viddi, Vicci"

Great Post!!!  I think that it is really hard to find your passion.  But once you find that passion, I think it`s even harder to turn it into a business/income.  I admire those who achieved both.  Thanks!

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Natalie Berrett
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Natalie, thanks for your candid answer. :-)
What I`d like to encourage is the specific exercises people have done to find or bring out their passions. For example, Steve makes an important point, and one I`ve also observed over life: that in times of trouble, stress, and anxiety, it seems as if we become more attuned to finding what turns us on.

My brother had a wry comment on that, saying that when we`re broke and worrying about the rent, we tend to come up with all sorts of interesting ideas. We find possibilities, examine new ideas, discover what we can do, what we need, and what we only want.

Then we get some sort of job or steady money, and before long we`re fat and happy, comfortable in our growing savings account. We forget those ideas filled with fire and power we had when we were broke, and then years go by.

But life has a way of nudging us along toward our destiny and passions. Get too comfortable, and usually something comes along to knock us off the road and into a ditch, right? How many of us have experienced that, where we`re going along just fine and BLAM!...bad things happen. But looking back, we discover those "bad things" turned out to be the push we needed to get started on something.

Couldn`t we also say that one`s passion can be seen in two different ways: The one being that we`re spiritual beings and our passion descends from that spirit? The other would be that we`re just physical beings, alive and dead, with nothing more, and our passion is some sort of trend we pick up from our childhood?

I suppose we can`t "prove" what`s the absolute truth, whether we`re greater than what we know of ourselves or only what we know of ourselves. But in my opinion, it`s just more poetic, more fun, and more "elegant" to postulate that we have a larger component to ourselves---and that`s the source of our inspirations and passions.

The problem is how to get in touch with that "something" else. It`d be nice if there were some solid, concrete information and communication every so often, wouldn`t it! :-D

Stan,
I think you`ve highlighted exactly what many people believe is the genesis of passion. Without having to resort to reincarnation, spiritual forces, and other difficult to examine things, we can look at a person`s history.

Children certainly try to please the adults around them, and especially their parents. Whatever children encounter in their new life, that`s what they learn to call "love." Additionally, children are pretty much wide open to all experiences, learning, as they are, what it means to survive in life.

When you combine an adult`s interest in something with the adult sharing that interest, I think that`s where you have the origins of passion. When that shared interest is done in happy communion, it becomes a creative and constructive passion. When the shared interest is more dark and painful, it leads to pathological obsessions.

In other words, children associate love and activity with the basic caregivers in their life, and integrate that activity into a passion (or obsession).

My father would come home from work, and considered it part of his family obligation and duty to help in raising us children. So he always would haul out a game of some sort, and we`d play before dinner. It would be Monopoly, Stratego, Checkers, or whatever other board games were appropriate to our age.

We`d eat dinner, and everyone was encouraged to talk about anything interesting during the meal. We kids were treated with the same respect as adults, proportionate to our capacity to form an underestandable statement. Then, after we`d gotten ready for bed, we always had some reading.

Again, based on age and comprehension, my father would read something. It could be fairy tales, adventures, novels, myths, or whatever else might be interesting. The result was that combination of a shared interest coming from the adult, and the sense of pleasant interaction.

As an adult, my passions include reading, problem solving, gamesmanship, and home-building projects, from my father. From my mother I got the same interaction with cooking, conversation, analytic logic, and surreal humor. All have become passions.

I will agree.  Based on this discussion, I can trace many of my passions to my childhood.

The best example I can think of is my passion for outdoor activity and recreation.  I love hiking, cycling, camping, snowshoeing, etc.  My parents were and are not active people, in the sense of exercise and outdoor adventure.  I grew up in Chicago`s suburbs, not exactly a hotbed of the outdoor lifestyle like where I am now in Colorado.

However, one set of my grandparents were into camping/RVing.  At least once a summer, my dad and I (and sometimes my sister) would go on a camping trip.  It was such a special time for me as a kid and I really relish those memories.  I was also part of the Cub Scouts and did a few group camping trips.

But as a kid, it wasn`t a big part of my life.  I went to college in the south and then moved to Los Angeles.  It wasn`t until after a year or so of living in L.A. that a friend invited me camping in Yosemite.  I now call that weekend one of my life epiphanies.  We camped, hiked to the top of a waterfall, did a little amateur mountain biking, etc.  I had discovered a PASSION for the outdoors that I didn`t know I had and it has continued to grow over the years.

My point is that I can actually trace that back to my childhood.  Those special camping trips were instrumental to who I am as an adult.  But for many years, that passion sat dormant until I discovered it!  Now I have a whole business concept based on a camping product.  It`s on the back burner for now but it is a real goal and passion of mine.  However at one point in my life, it would have sounded absurd that I would have invented a camping product.

Perhaps if I knew before Yosemite that I could look deeper into my childhood, I would have more easily discovered a love of the outdoors.

I`m not so sure one can find their passion, I think their passion finds them. It is the wise person that pursues that passion once it has found them.

Well, I suppose we should acknowledge that there are two fundamental approaches to life: the active and the passive. Much of Eastern philosophy rests on the passive approach, where one strives to live in the moment, reacting to events.

It`s certainly one way to go through life, but Western philosophy tends to be based on the active approach, reaching out to modify the world around us. If you follow the passive approach, carrying that logic all the way to its end, you have a split in humanity as the fore-ordained result.

One portion of humanity ends up with a passion, working at things they love to do, and living a life of enjoyment. The other portion---the group whose passion somehow doesn`t find them in time---ends up drones, surviving only, and wondering what life is supposed to be about.

It depends on your "style," and how you choose to go through life. Many people believe you have no choice; you can only accept the conditions in which you find yourself and do the best you can. In that system of thought, it`s pure luck whether or not a passion shows up and makes its presence known.

From a psychological perspective, the past three centuries have proposed that many people are so split between their conscious and unconscious mind that information seems to come from outside themselves. For such people, it would appear as if the passion "finds them" only because they don`t have a direct pipeline to their own intuitions, subconscious, and inspirations.

The solution is to learn how to "listen" better to those other areas of the psyche. It`s partly what became the field of psychotherapy, meditation, and other systems for uncovering the inner landscape. However; in a global, passive outlook, people would say that it can`t be done and isn`t useful to spend that time inwardly directed. So it ends up a self-fulfilling prophecy---not ever encountering their passion.