An Unconventional Way to Find Your Passion, According to Former Monk Jay Shetty
Interest is a child. Passion is a teenager. Purpose is an adult.
You can follow the usual “follow your passion” advice for the rest of your life and end up dying, having still not found your passion.
It’s time to cut the crap and find your passion without all the fairy tales and one-time magical moments you wait your entire life to experience (that never happen).
Jay Shetty gave the best advice I’ve ever seen on finding your passion in a recent online summit. Jay was a monk. Then he wasn’t a monk. Then he spread wisdom on social media and racked up a combined 7 billion views on his videos. The end.
According to Jay Shetty, this is the unconventional way you find your passion.
Rethink How Passion Starts
Jay uses a powerful analogy when describing how passion starts.
- Interest is a child.
- Passion is a teenager. Passion is for yourself.
- Purpose is an adult. Purpose is for others.
Going straight to passion or purpose causes you to look for the wrong path to where you want to go in life. You don’t wake up one day with a magical purpose and go on to inspire millions. This is the myth of social media.
Finding your passion starts with an interest. I started writing because I was interested in it. Then I kept writing because it was something that was just for me and I didn’t care about the effect on others in those early stages. Then I saw writing could be helpful and it became a purpose that transcended my own selfish desires.
Your passion starts as an interest. What are you interested in? What could you be interested in?
Wishing, Waiting and Wanting Gets You Nowhere
There isn’t a single defining moment for most people that helps them find their passion. Jay says these three steps are key:
- Practice.
- Action.
- Progress.
You can proactively follow these three steps and work out what you're interested in, which might lead you to your eventual passion. It’s a much faster approach. Why should you wait most of or your entire life to find out what you love doing that can one day help others?
The right time to find your passion is always now.
Follow Your Pain
A painful experience is a great way to find your passion. My painful experience was enduring decades of undiagnosed mental illness and not knowing what was making me sick every day.
Once this pain was cured, I wanted everybody else to know that they could do the same and experience the joy that I felt.
Maybe it’s not about finding your passion; maybe, for you, it’s about following your pain to see where it leads you.
How to Know When You’ve Found Your Passion
Many people have interests, hobbies, and things they like doing. But how do you know it’s your passion?
Jay says when you’re attracted to something and nothing can take your eyes off it, that’s how you know.
For example, if you tried to stop me blogging, I’d fight you to the death to protect my two writing days a week and to keep publishing. This is what passion looks like. You can’t not do it and you’re endlessly curious about the different experiences you can have and the new levels you can reach.
The different levels of a writing passion, for example, look like this:
- Publish on an unknown blog
- Write for a larger audience on a known blog
- Meet other writers who inspire you
- Make money to support yourself from writing
- Add a second platform to publish on (mine are Medium & LinkedIn)
- Transcend writing and move into a second medium (podcasts, videos, pictures, etc.)
- Meet a world leader because of your writing
This is what your passion can look like if you are a writer. There are many levels to your passion and when you’ve found level one, it’s hard to take your eyes off the higher levels that are open to you.
Build Real Expertise
Outside of added fulfillment, you can’t experience the other rewards that come from finding your passion unless you develop real expertise.
Loving something is not enough and finding your passion won’t sustain you in the long-term. The good news is that Jay has an easy formula to develop expertise in anything:
- Learn
- Experiment
- Perform
- Struggle
- Thrive (this happens 1% of the time)
If you follow this process you will eventually build expertise. The hardest part, from my experience, is when you struggle.
Struggle is the barrier to unlocking more of your potential.
At every level of writing, I have experienced an extreme struggle. I remember upsetting people with my writing for the first time. I remember having a group of trolls nearly stop me from writing forever. I remember being banned from LinkedIn and dealing with the pain of the experience. I remember having a famous writer dedicate an entire article to my stupidness and feeling like a loser. Each struggle hurt — but what followed was exponential growth.
Many people try to thrive with their passion by learning, experimenting and performing, and then trying to avoid the struggle part. I have found that expecting, preparing and leaning into the struggles that come from your passion is key.
Struggle helps your passion grow.
The joy of finding your passion often lies in the process. I find the process of writing addictive.
It’s important to remember that the highlights that fit into the thrive section of the process are rare — so when you experience these moments, actually celebrate and enjoy them.
Develop a High Level of Self-Awareness Towards Your Passion
Jay shares a story from a conversation between Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Woz asks Jobs “What do you even do?” “You’re not an artist; you’re not a marketer; you’re not an engineer.”
“Musicians play their instruments; I play the orchestra,” says Jobs.
Jobs understood his passion so clearly and was self-aware around his talents, that he could articulate, beautifully, what it was to anybody he encountered.
You need to be self-aware about your passion to understand and take advantage of it — and to explain it to others who will join you on your journey.
Always Be a Year Behind
Jay says he is always a year behind when it comes to finding and developing a new passion. He thinks of it like this:
- Year 1: Learn.
- Year 2: Launch.
- Year 3: Fall in love with it.
I love this approach. By dedicating the first year to learning, you take all the pressure away from following your passion. You allow yourself to understand what it is you’re going to be doing and get lost in it. Learning is addictive when it comes to finding your passion. Get addicted to learning and you’ll get addicted to your passion very early on.
The hard part is launching your new passion, and that’s left for the second year into your journey. Once you’ve launched, it’s then about falling in love with your passion. For me, it was only in year five and year six that I really started to fall in love with my passion for writing. I spent time finding ways to set my writing up to be enjoyable and help even more people.
Don’t try to find your passion, launch it, and fall in love with it all in 30 days. You’ll burn yourself out and be disappointed with the result.
One Problem That Happens When You Find Your Passion
So you thought this whole finding your passion thing was going to be rosy, and full of high-fives with monks after attending an award ceremony in your honor? Not even close.
There is one huge problem when you find your passion:
After a bit of success, we get scared by our own achievements.
You will reach a point in the journey where you become scared by your own success. You may even start to reject it.
I’ve found it hard, recently, to deal with having certain stories go viral. I sometimes think about all the critics and whether what I’m saying is completely entitled nonsense. I think about how I may never work a normal job ever again because my online presence could be a detractor to anyone who is contemplating working with me.
Succeeding at your passion can be scary but the good news is it’s okay. The moments when you get scared by your passion are where you reflect and check-in with yourself. These are the moments that prevent your ego from getting out of control and remind you why you chose your passion in the first place. I found that if you focus on the purpose that comes from your initial interest — that grows into a passion — you’ll divert your thoughts and energy into being helpful and selfless, rather than selfish.
Selfless goals destroy fear and stop you from being scared by your success. Focus outwards and your success won’t make you scared anymore.
Final Thought
There is an unconventional path to finding your passion. The typical advice is foggy and hard to follow.
Jay’s approach to finding your passion is to start with an interest, work on that interest, explore your pain as a source of potential passion, find higher levels in the pursuit of your passion, build real expertise that has plenty of struggle moments, develop self-awareness about what your passion really is, and to spend the first year of a new passion learning, followed by a second-year launch.
Then when you find your passion and have a little success, overcome how scared it’s going to make you feel by turning that passion into a purpose that serves all of us.
Your interests lead to your passion. And your passion becomes your purpose when you endure the process that will lead you to understand it’s not about “you” after all.
