What is your passion? A question that everyone has heard far too many times before. It brings about a feeling of anxiety when being worried about the fact that you don’t have an interesting answer. Am I a boring person? Does everyone else already have a passion? How do I find my passion?

Don’t commit to something before you know that you want it.

Having your eyes set on one goal and failing to consider other paths will cause you to have tunnel vision. You may think that you need to commit now in order to follow a straight path towards a successful future, but if you don’t consider other options, you may have a stable future, but you might not be as happy as you would have been if you had explored another option that could have been even better.

Personally, when I started to doubt my feelings about the career that I had planned for my entire life, I experimented with The Wrangler and discovered my love for sharing my ideas through writing. Had I not looked at other options, I would still be forcing myself to act like I knew what I wanted. I would have never discovered how much I like to write. Do not have tunnel vision. Do not commit to something just because it’s safe. Try something new.

Don’t look for a passion.

The first step in finding your passion is to stop looking or waiting for it. Instead, let it find you. Passion isn’t something that will appear when you need it. In fact, you don’t need it. If you have a goal, achieving that goal will plant a seed that makes success and hard work satisfying. Passion is the feeling that you get by repeatedly wanting to set and achieve goals.

Know that you are not stuck.

A common reason for wanting to have a passion is for a career. People think that if they don’t follow a straight path somewhere, they’ll get stuck in the future. But they’re already stuck. They are stuck in the mindset that they need to make a life decision now or else they will fail. Amber Han (11) says “it’s weird how we have to know what career we want to pursue after high school when we are eighteen years old and we are expected to have a life plan by the time we’re thirty.” Humans are not supposed to follow the same paths. We should be comfortable not knowing what we are going to be doing in five years.

So use your present time to experience new things and learn more about yourself. Do not commit to one thing or focus on finding another. Live your life knowing that things constantly change and that there is so much more in the world to experience than finding a passion to build your life around.