How to build an interest into a Passion

What to do if you don't know what to do

What do you want to do when you grow up?

I always struggled to answer this question.

Sure. As a teenager I had interests.

There were things which I enjoyed doing: Playing sports, working out, going on adventures.

I had stints of roller skating, skate boarding, rock climbing, surfing, kayaking, basketball, playing the piano, wilderness expeditions, to name but a few.

For a time all of these things were, what I would now call, a passion. Something which I thought about day and night. A shared obsession with my friends at the time.

So how did these interests develop?

I remember one of the last expeditions I went on before starting uni. It was part of the Duke of Edinburgh award. An extra curricular qualification specific to the UK.

We had to plot our own course across the rugged welsh hills using a map and a compass. (Yes this was before smart phones where a thing).

The whole expedition lasted three days and we had to carry everything with us. Including our food, our own shelter and medical supplies.

The weather turned during the expedition. It was one of the worst in living memory. It rained non stop. Near gale force winds. On the top of the black mountains the rain turned to driving snow.

It was wild! But also one of the best memories of my life. There’s nothing better than braving the elements in order to achieve a goal with your best friends.

…and so that is one way to develop an interest into a passion. Good friends. A shared experience. The feeling of being connected to something greater than yourself can make all the difference in the world.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

During the second evening. After we had managed to erect out tents in driving rain. The clouds parted and the sun came out. Just a normal day in Wales.

We thought, wouldn’t it be nice to eat something warm for a change and maybe dry some of our wet clothes? So we tried to light a fire.

Lighting a fire is not as easy as it looks. It is also the best analogy I have found to turn an interest into a passion.

Start with an interest. Fan the flames of curiosity and build it into a passion.

A genuine interest is a spark that when fanned with the correct focus can grow into a roaring fire. Just like building a fire your interest needs structure, space and air to catch on.

Igniting a log of wood with a naked flame doesn’t work. Especially if it is wet from 3 days of torrential rain.

What you need to start a fire is tinder and kindling. Something very lightweight, dry and easily ignitable.

Only when the tinder and kindling have caught fire can you place a larger log onto it. This is a delicate matter. If you pile on too much too fast you will smother and extinguish the fire before it has even started.

If you do not feed the fire it will die down and turn to smouldering ash.

It’s a balancing act

Rediscovering an interest and firing it up onto a full blown passion is just as delicate. Too many people get too excited too early. They pile on loads of big thick heavy logs and then wonder why the fire goes out.

Treat your interest and curiosity with respect and dignity. Manage your progress.

This is how the whole creator economy works. It’s what makes it so addictive.

• Learn a skill and deepen your knowledge.

• Share what you’ve learned with other people.

• Receive reinforcing feedback for sharing that thing.

• This increases motivation to deepen your knowledge and expertise even further.

You now find yourself in a self reinforcing virtuous cycle of learning, teaching and growth. You’ve created a passion!

This is of course not restricted to the creator economy. This is the basic human psychology behind any job or activity.

The important thing is that you have to serve yourself and others. Without either of these elements the spark will not catch on and the fire will die before it has even started.

There is a tendency to prioritise growth over skill and joy. The two are not very compatible. It is a fine balancing act.

If your focus is growth you will be forever chasing algorithms in a never ending cycle of disappointment.

More letters. More notes. More videos. More posts and inevitably more stress. This is a quick way set your dreams on fire.

As beginner creators it is our job to construct our lives in a way which nurtures our creativity. We must fan the flames of that fire inside of us so that we can continue along our unique path.

It is useful to set goals. It is also useful to set constraints. This is important for those of us who are conscientious and tend to try and keep working unless there are strong incentives to stop.

How to develop your interests

If you want to retain more you have to apply what you learn. When learning a new language memorising vocabulary is the worse way to go about it.

Without continued and sustained practice of these new words you won’t know how to use them in a sentence and you will have forgotten them by the end of the week.

Start at your current level and work you way up.

Here’s what you do to begin developing your interest into a passion:

1) Write Down 3 Specific Skills, Interests, or Topics That you want to focus on.

Take some time to work out how you want to learn or improve these skills. Self education, read books, take a course, get a coach or personal trainer, join a group or start on your own. It’s up to you there’s no one right way.

However you must experiment until you find what works for you.

Most people fail to make tangible progress because they don’t understand how to learn effectively. Learning is a lifelong habit that must be maintained no matter what.

This is not optional.

Almost every content creator starts pumping out content on a schedule. They set themselves the goal of three videos or 3 newsletters a week.

However, everyone is different. You need to ask yourself the question:

— what is my goal? —

Will pumping out content get me there or would it be more effective to spend my time networking and getting other people to share the few pieces that I do have?

Find your own pace. To keep the fire alive you need to be challenged but not overwhelmed.

2) Find joy through exploration

Initially it’s overwhleming. In case you might have forgotten. Learning something new is overwhelming. It’s normal to feel that way in the beginning. You have to give your brand time to rewire and develop new pathways.

Just like a jig-saw puzzle you don’t know where to start. But you have the image of completed puzzle, the final result, to guide you.

You start by fitting the edge pieces together and little by little step by step you make progress, gain clarity, stack skills and the speed of progress accelerates the more you get done.

That’s exciting.

3) Learn & Build – Consume, digest, create

The fastest way to learn is to implement that learning in the real world. The best way to build your passion is to share an interest with others, get reinforcing feedback on that interest, develop it further and build a community of like minded people around it.

It order to get to the stage where you can really call something a passion it has to not only serve you but also other people. It needs to be bigger than yourself.

Remember the expedition I mentioned at the beginning? If I had done that all by myself I most certainly would have given up and gone home without completing the mission.

What made it one for he best memories of my life was the shared element of the experience. The fact that I was doing it together with my best friends.

Build a community of like minded people so that you can make a meaningful contribution to the culture of your chosen topic.

The only way to bring this vision to life is to create implement and share the process and results with others.

Learning is not about abstract theories. Real learning occurs when you have skin in the game. When you experiment and fail, build and learn, solve problems and teach the solutions.

Get started right now.

If you think it’s too late you might want to check out this article here 👇