How to Discover Your Passion in Life
Passion is a strong liking for or interest in something. Read on to learn about how our passions define us and motivate us to move through the world.
Passions are strong preferences, likings, or interests in activities, objects, or ideas (Vallerand, 2010). Importantly, passions usually have a strong emotional component. If you’re interested in something but don’t feel strongly about it, whether good or bad, then you’re probably not passionate about it. This emotional relationship with the object of our passions demonstrates how important we consider it to be (Vallerand, 2010).
One of the most studied varieties of passion is passionate love, or the strong desire to be as close to, or united with, another person as possible (Hatfield et al., 2012). The behaviors that we associate with being passionately in love, such as thinking regularly about the other person, wanting to do things with them, desiring physical or sexual intimacy, and putting the relationship above other priorities, are pretty good examples of passion in action.
Why Is Passion Important?
Passion is essential to our sense of self-fulfillment and personal meaning; it’s a central element in achieving self actualization, which is the most advanced need on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (Mouton & Montijo, 2017). Passion makes it easier to sustain effort, because it’s easier to keep working at something if it engages you and matters to you.
People with more passion in their lives tend to have better mental and physical well-being as well (Vallerand, 2010). Depending on the type of passion we’re talking about—more on that in a moment—passion is also associated with feeling good, being in a flow state, and feeling more alive (Curran et al., 2015).
Causes of Passion
Where does passion come from? Self-Determination Theory (Deci & Ryan, 2000) tells us that human beings have basic psychological needs for autonomy (taking personal initiative and moving toward things they want), competence (feeling effective in pursuing goals and interacting with the world), and relatedness (feeling connected to other people). We achieve self-determination by interacting with our environments to achieve these goals. Over time, we come to care about the activities that we find the most fulfilling, and thus a passion is born (Vallerand et al., 2003).
Importantly, this process may happen in a very conscious way or without our realizing it and choosing it. In this way, people develop both harmonious passions and obsessive passions (Vallerand et al., 2003). Harmonious passions are chosen freely and embraced; we do not experience any pressure to identify with the activity or engage in it. We do it because it is satisfying and because we can. By contrast, obsessive passions tend to develop because we feel some need to pursue the passion; there is a “have to” element to the passion.
Tips on Finding Your Passion
Some research suggests that it is harmonious passion, not obsessive passion, that drives the association between having passion in your life and having greater well-being (Philippe et al., 2009).
People who experience harmonious passion are more likely to experience positive emotions and get into what is called a flow state (Vallerand et al., 2003). So this leads us to a few questions: What makes you happy? What activities do you lose yourself in? What can so absorb your attention that you won’t notice the time passing? What activities or topics reliably make you feel better? In answering these questions, you might identify passions that hadn’t quite stood out to you yet.
Here's another tip for finding your passions: Identify your values first. People who take actions that align with their personal values seem to do so with passion, and one study found that this passion may be even more sustainable than passion that is driven by feelings (Jachimowicz et al., 2017). Simply listing out your values and considering how you can act in accordance with those values may give you insight into where your passions lie.
List of Passion Projects
Having projects in our lives that we are passionate about can keep us engaged at work and reduce burnout and stress (Shanafelt et al., 2009). It can also boost creativity and innovation: Google’s one-time policy of giving its engineers freedom to use a small portion of their work week on their own creative projects led to the creation of Gmail, among other tools (Schmidt & Rosenberg, 2014).
To start a passion project, reserve some time each day or each week for the project (Katrein, 2016). To ensure that you stick with it, pick something that you know you will find rewarding and motivating (Rush, 2015), but also make sure to protect your passion project time.
When it comes to actual project ideas, here are a few that come to mind:
Volunteer
If you are not sure where to start, try joining an organization with a cause you value or with responsibilities that sound exciting. Inspiration may come from getting your hands dirty.
Create something
It could be an art project, a piece of furniture, or even an event like a neighborhood block party.
Start an organization
If there is an unmet need in your community, it might be a reflection of your values to take action and address it.
Help raise money for a cause
Sometimes just getting on board with somebody else’s passion project or worthy cause can scratch the itch and get us in touch with our own passion.
Set a personal health-related goal
Set goals that do not have specific numbers, such as a weight, attached to them, but that instead reflect your values and what makes you feel good. “Learning to swing dance” might be a better goal than “finish a half-marathon in a set amount of time” or “get fit enough to see my stomach muscles.”
In Sum
Best of luck in finding and living out your harmonious passions. Bringing more passion into our lives makes them more fulfilling and meaningful, and that makes us healthier and happier people.
References
● Curran, T., Hill, A. P., Appleton, P. R., Vallerand, R. J., & Standage, M. (2015). The psychology of passion: A meta-analytical review of a decade of research on intrapersonal outcomes. Motivation and Emotion, 39, 631–655.
● Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2000). The ‘‘what’’ and ‘‘why’’ of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior. Psychological Inquiry, 11(4), 227–268.
● Hatfield, E., Bensman, L., & Rapson, R. L. (2012). A brief history of social scientists’ attempts to measure passionate love. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 29(2), 143–164.
● Katrein, J. (2016). Inquiry, engagement, passion, and grit: Dispositions for Genius Hour. The Reading Teacher, 70(2), 241.
● Mouton, A. R., & Montijo, M. N. (2017). Love, passion, and peak experience: A qualitative study on six continents. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 12(3), 263–280.
● Philippe, F. L., Vallerand, R. J., & Lavigne, G. L. (2009). Passion does make a difference in people's lives: A look at well‐being in passionate and non‐passionate individuals. Applied Psychology: Health and Well‐Being, 1(1), 3–22.
● Rush, E. B. (2015). Genius hour in the library. Teacher Librarian, 43(2), 26–30.
● Schmidt, J., & Rosenberg, J. (2014). How Google Works. Grand Central Publishing.
● Shanafelt, T. D., West, C. P., Sloan, J. A., Novotny, P. J., Poland, G. A., Menaker, R., ... & Dyrbye, L. N. (2009). Career fit and burnout among academic faculty. Archives of Internal Medicine, 169(10), 990–995.
● Vallerand, R. J. (2010). On passion for life activities: The dualistic model of passion. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Vol. 42, pp. 97–193). Academic Press.
● Vallerand, R. J., Blanchard, C. M., Mageau, G. A., Koestner, R., Ratelle, C., Léonard, M., Gagne, M., & Marsolais, J. (2003). Les passions de l’ame: On obsessive and harmonious passion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(4), 756–767.