Don’t Wait to Find Your Passion

• It ignores the market. Unless you have a trust fund waiting for you, you’ll have to feed yourself and others. 
• It will turn a passion into a job. 

1. Identify real needs in the market that are currently not being well met. 
2. Assess your strengths: Whatever is easy for you that most others have a harder time with, that’s a worthy option.
3. Match up these two in a constantly iterative process: This process takes many years if not decades.

While some people have a clear calling from an early age, many spend their whole careers without having ever discovered their passion.

The most basic foundation of passion is an intense interest in what you're doing.

These mindsets determine how we face challenges: We either give up when we are faced with difficulties or we persevere knowing that we will improve over time.

• Prioritize the tasks with the highest value addition and impact, while being in your 'high passion' list.
• Tolerate tasks that may be important but stress you out, as they may be part of the deal. It is also good to push yourself out of the comfort zone.
• Elevate tasks that others don't see as important, but you are extremely motivated about. 
• Delegate all procedural, low-value and low-energy tasks to someone else. If that is not possible, try to minimize or eliminate such work.

Take ownership and reclaim your time, choosing where you can best spend your time and energy.

You can analyze your last month's calendar and flag or grade your work and in which quadrant you have been working. This will help you plan in a more informed way to use the finite resources of time and energy.

21–35% of our life is spent at work, making it a crucial part of our lives to spend at something we find meaning in.

Meaningful work should be:

• Motivating and purposeful.
• Should be coherent and make some sense.
• Should be significant.

Meaningful work is when we feel a genuine connection with what we do for a living and our larger spectrum of life.

It is motivating, creates deep relationships and helps others.

• Intimacy: Emotional closeness, communication, feeling that no one knows you better or has your back more strongly than your mate.
• Thrill: Excitement, attraction, adventure.
• Sensuality: The entire spectrum from kissing goodnight to holding hands, from making tender love to raw passion.

Most mornings, commit to spending five minutes with your partner. Think of a relationship intention, then share it. "Today, I intend to be careful with my tone of voice when I feel impatient."

Commit spending two minutes at the end of the day reviewing your progress and ways to improve it.

Let’s say that your passion is playing the guitar. What void can you fill in that marketplace? For example, if you can repair guitars and realize that there isn’t a repair shop anywhere else around, that could be a business opportunity.

You also need to ask yourself how you can make the industry better.

Think of all the various ways that you can actually make money off your passion. This may include:

• Selling an actual product.
• Sharing your knowledge about your passion by blogging, writing books or filming videos. 
• Offering advice as a consultant in anything from accounting to gardening.
• Becoming an investor in an idea that you’re willing to financially support.
• Inventing a gadget or software that makes life easier for people. 
• Building an event around your passion, such as a festival or community organization.

In order to be able to be happy, one should do what he or she likes as work. However, not always what we are drawn to can bring us money.

If you are willing to pursue your hobby and make profit out of it, you should first make sure that doing what you like can actually help you live a decent life. Therefore, if you do have a hobby, you might want to consider checking out if there is a real market for it. For almost everything that is well presented there can be a market. So go on and take your chance!

Once you have committed to turning your passion into something profitable, the next step is to carefully research the options: check if there is a real demand for your offer, have a a look at what competition has to offer, etc.

Furthermore, maybe the most important is to find ways to innovate. This way, you will develop your competitive spirit and gain clients while learning to become better in the chosen field.

Creating a morning routine is a game-changer for your passion project.

With a clear, distraction-free mind, you can work on your passion for 30 to 60 minutes in the morning, maybe just one step of work, providing you with a great start of the day.

While we normally would allot a day or a weekend for our passion project, we end up not moving forward in spite of the time set aside.

If we can spare a few minutes to work on our passion project, in increments, we start to build something, with consistency.

• When choosing for ourselves, we focus more on a granular level, something we describe as a cautious mindset.
• When it came to deciding for others, we look more at the array of options and focus on their overall impression. We are bolder when we're operating from an adventurous mindset.

We should work to distance ourselves from our own problems by adopting a fly-on-the-wall perspective and act as our own advisors.

Another distancing technique is to pretend that our decision is someone else's and visualize it from his or her perspective. By imagining how someone else would tackle your problem, people may unwittingly help themselves.