We hear it all the time. If you want to be happy in life all you need to do is follow your passion.
Or if you want to build a business, simply build one that’s centered around your passion.
However, in a world where we tend to go through the motions more than we would like, we often look around and ask ourselves what is our passion?
The answer is usually simple. You just have to think about what you love doing and imagine a world where time and money weren’t an object. What would you want to do?
But here’s the thing, just because you love doing something, doesn’t mean you should spend your entire life doing it, or even worse create a business around it.
Instead, I love to ask myself one simple question.
What Will I Regret It If I Never Take the Chance?
Life isn’t about having one passion. It’s about exploring and venturing down the paths that interest us, to help drive the answers to ‘what is next.’
I love to bake, and you could definitely call baking a passion of mine. I even came up with a pretty interesting concept for a new type of bakery. I added it to my lists of things I wanted to do and then started to think about what I would need to learn to achieve this goal.
One of those things was to get better at decorating. So I signed up for a class, and in my spare time, I entrenched myself into the baking world. I learned how bakers ran their businesses and got involved in a few Facebook Groups.
What I then discovered was just because I loved baking, I had no desire to own a bakery.
I was able to scratch this passion off my list of potential businesses and move on from this dream. Will I regret it, if I die tomorrow and never own a bakery? The answer is no. I won’t. Before I started exploring and learning more about the industry, I might have, but I learned that this wasn’t a passion I wanted to pursue.
Life is about trying new things that excite us. It’s about pursuing new ideas and determining if it’s something we want to make a bigger part of our lives. It’s running with ideas that simply come to us, and for most of us, that won’t revolve around one thing.
And when we find that one thing we love, we then have to determine if we will live with regret if we do nothing about it.
Life Becomes About Leaning Into Fear and Understanding What We Yearn Most
The questions no longer should solely revolve around passion. Passion should only be the start as we determine where we want to focus more of our time and energy.
You may be passionate about something, but to make a living doing it, might not be your thing. I always love to use my father as an example when it comes to hunting. He loves hunting with every ounce of his soul, but there’s no way he would ever want to create a business out of it.
Does it make him less passionate about hunting?
Absolutely not.
It just means he’s going to set up his life a bit differently, where he can create the free time to hunt more, but he won’t set up the business behind it to make it become his life.
So don’t get so focused on finding a passion in order to live a fulfilled life.
Find something you love to do, and if you’re being called to pursue more within it, then go. If you want to continue exploring further and further down the path, then keep going. But don’t feel like you have to. It’s okay to know your limits.
But just lean into the question of regret. Understanding what you really want to do, and that may 100% align with a passion or it may not.
Just make sure you’re leaving no regrets on the table.