You believe you’ll be happy when you find the perfect passion. Well, that’s a big fat myth.
If you have to support yourself, you had bloody well better find some way that is going to be interesting.
- Katherine Hepburn
Ever felt despair that you should have “figured it all out” by now? You know, that nail-biting stress that everyone around you has found a job they love, but you still can’t make it past the question, “Well, what do I like to do, anyway?”
It’s easy to get caught up in the idea that your passion needs to be the exact right perfect fit for you. Stressful, right?
What if we’ve all been hoodwinked, and idea of a “perfect passion” is actually big old myth we’ve mistakenly buying for years? What if we can all put down the collective baggage of needing to get it right, and instead focus on getting it interesting.
The truth is that your passion will evolve over time, because you are an interesting and awesome person, and YOU evolve over time. You try a new wine, you take up jogging, you decide yoga is for crazy stretchy people. My point is that YOU change.
Let’s do a little case-study - shall we?
Myth Buster #1:
You may know of
Gretchen Rubin, a NYTimes bestselling author who is best known for her books on happiness:
The Happiness Project and
Happier at Home. If you look at her work, you might assume that she has a passion around the study of happiness and how it applies to us day-to-day. She started as a writer, right?
Wrong! Did you also know that she started out her career as a lawyer?
And then she wrote biographies - two: one of JFK and one on Winston Churchill.
And then she took a year and experimented with Happiness, wrote a book, launched a blog, and became a sensation.
You can see where I’m going, right? The point is that her career evolved. She didn’t start out as an advocate for happiness, she started out in a very different field... which some may say is an advocate of unhappiness. However, she went after things that were interesting to her, and her career evolved because of that.
Myth Buster #2:
Let’s look at Danielle LaPorte.
She’s a famous author/speaker guru. White hot truth? You bet!
But where did she start her career? In a publishing house? As a leader of industry?
What about in a Body Shop. Yep, she started in retail. She worked her way up, left, became the Executive Director of a think tank in DC, left, started her own communications company, left, and ultimately now she runs a very successful business. She is known for truth telling in the realm of personal development.
Her career path is interesting, no?
Exactly.
The list of folks who’ve had a winding road to where they are now is long, and if you take a closer look you can see how they grow, evolve, and change over time as their passions and interests change.
So, how about we follow their lead, and take a breath and relax already.
You do have a passion in life, in fact, you have many passions. Yay! So, given that, the important thing to focus on is not getting it right, instead, it’s just doing work that you find interesting and letting the rest take care of itself.
Want to find work that makes you happy? Go to Christie’s website
here to get the fun and easy six simple steps to finding work you love. Did we mention it’s fun? There are also more shenanigans on
Facebook and
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Join us for this FREE webinar on finding your passion. Presenter: Christie Mims, founder of the Revolutionary Club, a coaching service for smart women unwilling to settle for anything less than career happiness and a Forbes Top 100 website for your career.
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