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Are you in a stage of loving your life so much that you would pay money to live it? If not? What can you do about it? A common question asked is, “I really want to feel that way, but I’m just not passionate about anything. How do I find passion?”

A friend of mine asked me that question a few weeks ago. He has a high paying job and what appears to lead a full and fulfilling life, complete with volunteering and interesting hobbies. But he felt that something was still missing. He was looking for his purpose and genuinely wanted to find his passion. “I like a lot of things, but I don’t have any passions. How can I find passion, Tina?” This is a great question, and one that got me pondering about the topic. This article specifically looks at finding passion in your job.

This is part two of my notes from Professor Srikumar Rao’s google talk, along with my personal thoughts on the topic. You can find part one here: How to Make Profound and Lasting Change.

The Problem

Most of us make the mistake of assuming that our ideal job is out there somewhere, and we have to go out and find it. We tell ourselves that our lives will be great, just as soon as we find it. As a result, we end up defining our ideal job using a widely accepted, but arbitrary, set of parameters. How much the job pays, job title on your business card, type of person our boss is, size of our office, how much we get to travel. We say in our minds, once I can find that, then I can be passionate about my job. Chances are, that job probably doesn’t exist. Assuming that it did exist and we were put into that situation, within a few months, we will probably be back in the same state we are now. Unsatisfied.

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What can addiction teach us about personal development?

A lot. There is much wisdom to be learned by the addict’s journey from addiction to recovery.

I realize that many of you reading this now are probably not drug addicts and alcoholics. That’s fine – but you stand to gain great insight from the experience of those who have fought and overcome a serious addiction. There are several parallels between recovery and personal development. Many would argue that their paths are actually one and the same.

As a recovering drug addict and alcoholic with over 7 years clean and sober, one of my passions is exploring the process of overcoming addiction. While there are many different recovery programs, most of them share many of the same characteristics, so people who find success in recovery do so by following a similar path.

Here are some of the things that lead to long term sobriety, while also having practical application for personal development:

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We have one single chance to live our lives - just one. Why should we waste even a single moment heading down a path that isn’t what we truly desire?

For much of my life, I’ve been so preoccupied with just making ends meet, that I haven’t had a lot of leftover energy to spend on creating a life that is truly amazing. Can you relate? Now that I make a comfortable living and I’m not stressing out over money constantly, the time has come to challenge myself to take things to the next level.

Money itself does not create an amazing life. Like Tim Ferriss said in his book The 4-Hour Workweek, he was making $70,000 per month but was miserable because he had no time to actually live.

That’s kind of where my life has headed. I’m comfortable, but I don’t have the time I want to live the life I want. As part of the Freelance Smackdown, I challenged Dave Navarro’s time management coaching programs to help me find a few more hours in my day that I could devote to creating passive income streams. After talking to Dave, I got really excited about what I could do with more time. Ultimately, I don’t want more time so that I can work even more. I want more time so that I can live more.

I guess I always thought that somehow this great life would just “happen,” that somewhere along the way things would just fall into place. But now I’m 32 years old and I’m realizing that there is no waiting for something to happen and that creating an amazing life doesn’t happen without a highly concentrated effort.

Have you ever stopped for a moment in time and wondered… “How did this become my life?” If we’re not careful, we can drive ourselves right into a life that bears no resemblance to what we really desire. Is it really possible to break free of an existence we don’t feel passionate about? Do the people living our dream lives have some sort of special quality that gives them a ticket to live an incredible life - or are they just making different choices?

I think it is absolutely possible. I managed to escape one unfullfilling existence (cubicle) in exchange for a new life (freelancing), where I now have a lot more freedom and flexibility. Now, my goal is to take what I learned during that process

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This is the first of a seven-part series on the Secrets of Wellbeing. The reason I’m launching into this series is because I’m excited about what is happening in the field of psychology and how new research supports ancient teachings.

A new direction called Positive Psychology has started to take centre stage. Instead of looking at problems and how to fix them, Positive Psychology investigates what allows us to experience life at its best. In this series I’ll discuss what we can learn from this research.

What is happiness?

This question is important for each of us because our view of happiness determines how we live our life.

As Martin Seligman - the founder of Positive Psychology - points out, there are three main ways how people view happiness. Read on to find out which one of these three ways describes the way you see happiness.

The Pleasant Life or the ‘life of enjoyment’:

In this way of life we seek out pleasures and try to avoid pain. The great thing about this way of life is that we truly taste and enjoy the special moments. Like starting a powder run on a snowboard or sharing a laugh with your partner.

But there are some problems with this view of happiness. One is that pain is inevitable in life: relationships end, health can be precarious, and death is certain. This means that if we expect to gain happiness only from pleasure, we are ill equipped to deal with suffering.

The other problem is that the sum of our actual experiences, and how we judge those experiences in retrospect can be radically different. Seligman gives the following example:

When asked about a vacation - so he explains - you might answer, “It was great!”, even though the flow of experiences at the time may have been a series of unpleasant moments, such as sunburn, mosquito bites, upset stomach, scary situations, and a fear of blowing your budget.

I think the same goes for pleasant experiences. I don’t know how it is for you, but after about a week of lying about on a tropical beach I tend to get restless. I miss being creative and productive. So, even though there may be a constant flow of pleasant moments, my overall experience is that of feeling unfulfilled…

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Beliefs are formed and adopted by recognizing patterns through a series of events, even if the events have nothing to do with our own personal experience. Why is this important? Everything we experience in our lives is centered on our beliefs about life.

All beliefs effect experience, yet not all beliefs are part of our reality. There are main beliefs and core beliefs. Main beliefs are the beliefs we have about life that match our reality. These are the beliefs that are developed through observing our everyday life and determining that life is this way because we perceive it to be. Having a core belief means believing in something even though we do not experience it as reality in our everyday lives.

You might say main beliefs are the strongest since they are the beliefs that effect our lives on a continuous basis, but core beliefs are strong too since you can have a core belief all your life and never experience it as reality because you have too many main beliefs blocking your core belief.

For example, one of my core beliefs is that anyone can make a living doing what they passionately love, yet I did not always experience this as my reality because I was perceiving/ experiencing life with main limiting beliefs, I did not understand the relationship between consciousness verse reality, and I did not live my passion as a career from moment to moment…

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The New Year draws rapidly closer; people are starting to set their goals and resolutions – they’re looking for something, and very often this involves what we call success.

But the strange thing is: For many, the definition of success relies on the failure of other people.

Is this true for you? Please read on.

Competition and Comparison

“Wealth - any income that is at least one hundred dollars more a year than the income of one’s wife’s sister’s husband.”
~ H.L. Mencken.

This is how many minds operate: constantly comparing and judging others. How are they doing? Are they prettier, are their biceps bigger, are they richer, is their car bigger?

This mindset is a bottomless pit – we can never find satisfaction in it. Our income increases by $20,000; it might make us ecstatic. But soon, we see Fred from across the street – his car is still bigger! He has what we have, but he got it all at a younger age! And so we resume our struggle. It never ends; we move from thousandaire to millionaire; and then shortly after, we think that’s not enough; now we want to be a billionaire.

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I went looking for a single, unchanging truth—something to buffer my mind and spirit from the harsh realities of life. Many popular paths were sampled. Despite their undeniable benefits for so many others, I was not able to achieve a similar satisfaction. I never doubted the value of the practices I sampled, but merely accepted they were not right for me at that time. A key does not cease to be a key because it does not fit the lock in hand.

In time, I collected tools of insight, from here and there, that promised to be helpful. I was determined to construct a custom truth, catering exactly to my unique ‘lock’. Once my compilation had come to some initial stopping point, I realized that some basic concepts within the items from the varied sources were repeated. So, I started to trim out the duplicates and those issues that seemed to possess the least power for me—what I deemed as not vital to my personal definition of reality…Occam’s razor, if you will.

Having felt successful in my collection, I was inspired to condense this compilation to its most basic form. Surely, such a simple answer as I sought did not require a tome to store its meaning. Maybe there could be a mere handful of insights that I could carry about through life. From those few, all other needed knowledge could blossom, as—and only when—needed…

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