If you've spent years trying to figure out what your passion is and you still haven't found it, there is nothing wrong with you. We always hear this advice that you just have to magically find your passion.
But all this advice is simply wrong because passions are not found. They're built. My name is Olga. I study computation and cognitive science at the University of Pennsylvania,
and in this video, I'll show you the most important research I learned about passion
and the three step strategy to help you find yours. Since I was a child, I remember not knowing what my passion was. I knew I liked writing, I liked painting,
reading about psychology,
but none of those things brought out that intense obsessive feeling in me of like, oh, this is what I'm meant to do. This is what I was born to do. And this feeling that is often associated with passion and calling. When my friend would tell me that she's passionate about becoming a doctor, I'd be jealous of that certainty that she had. I'd think, why does she know exactly what her passion is and I don't? So I kept searching, I kept reading articles, taking personality tests,
jumping from one thing to another, hoping that the new thing is gonna be my passion.
Until I found this research from Stanford
that explained to me why most of us struggle to find our passion
and what we should do instead. So in twenty eighteen, three researchers at Stanford,
Carol Dweck, Gregory Walton, and Paul O'Keefe,
they went on to study why so many people who claim to be looking for their passion
never actually find one. And they found that finding your passion is not a discovery problem.
It is a mindset problem. Some people believe that passions are found,
that they exist fully formed, hiding deep inside you, and your job is to discover them.
But other people believe that passions are built,
which means that they believe that they're slowly developed with effort and time. This comes down to one specific belief, what researchers call a fixed theory of interest, where you believe that your interests are innate and unchangeable,
versus a growth theory of interest,
where you believe that your passions, your interests are built and developed over time through investment and effort. And researchers found that what you believe about passion
predicts whether you actually end up finding one. People who believe that passions are found
expect something that researchers call
boundless motivation.
They expect that when you find your passion,
the work in your passion is always going to be effortless.
You're never gonna have to wake up and push yourself to work on it, because that's your passion. You're not supposed to have any negative feelings with But when the initial excitement with the work fades,
when the work starts feeling difficult or dull or boring,
their brain runs this specific thought.
If this were really my passion,
it wouldn't be so difficult.
So eventually they abandon it. And people who believe that passions are built expect the opposite.
They know that any real interest, even your biggest one, is always gonna have moments of difficulty or boredom.
And they do not interpret that difficulty as a sign that they picked the wrong thing.
They know that passions are built through investment of time and energy. So essentially, the way it works is you put time into a new interest,
then you start making progress in this interest because you put time in, And then because you made progress,
you start to care about it more.
And then because you care about it more, you again, you put time in, you make progress, you care about it more, and that creates that sort of a passion loop that we can imagine. The thing is, you're not actually bad at finding your passion.
You've just been told to find something that doesn't exist. You've been told to find that idealized calling that just is never gonna be difficult. The good news is that you can still find a passion that you love most of the time. And there's a three step plan that you can literally start tonight. We're going to start experimenting.
And the first thing you have to do is you have to figure out which interests are worth experimenting with. So take a pen and paper, maybe write in your notes app, 20 interests that you have. I know it's a lot, but we have to write as many interests as we can because we have to dig past the surface and try to uncover all those interests that we're not very consciously aware of. It can be anything. It can be writing, YouTube, cinema, art,
videography,
anything that comes to mind. And here's how my own list looks like right now. And now what we want to do with the list is we want to ask ourselves two main questions.
And the first question is,
which one of these would I want to do even if nobody was paying me to do them? Not the one that sounds most impressive, not the one that your family or friends would approve of, the one that your attention keeps going back to, even if you didn't receive any sort of external reward for doing it.
So for me, it's probably making YouTube videos. I'd make YouTube videos if I didn't get any external reward.
Well, I'm actually not monetized on YouTube, so I'm not getting any sort of reward for making my YouTube videos, because AdSense is just refusing to monetize me.
And I checked everything. I'm not violating any sort of policies.
But yeah, if you if you know how to fix this problem, please let me know in the comments because I've tried everything.
But yes, first thing you have to do, figure out which of these interests, um, you would do even if nobody was paying you to do them.
Number two, and this one is harder, but it can give you amazing data. The question is,
what am I envious of? Because envy is an amazing signal. It provides you the understanding of what your genuine desires are. If you're envious of a friend who quit her job to become a full time writer,
that means that you also want that life for yourself. If you're envious of a friend who makes beautiful art, that means you wanna be an artist too. So I think that's a really good question to ask yourself. Pick the one interest that feels strongest in the moment and start experimenting with it. Step number two, run a tiny experiment.
And this is where most of the people make a mistake.
They say, I wanna become a YouTuber, I wanna become a writer, a designer,
but all of these are identity statements. And identity statements feel very big, they feel very high stakes.
So when you think of doing them, your brain essentially freezes and doesn't know how to proceed.
Instead, you're gonna do what neuroscientist Annalora Leconf calls a pact in her book Tiny Experiments that I have right here. So a pact is a commitment to do a specific action for a specific duration. A pact is not I'll become a writer and be a writer for the rest of my life. A pact is something like,
I will write a thousand words every weekend for four weeks. It has to be very very specific.
Also a pact is not like, I'll become a YouTuber. It has to be specific.
I am going to post
one video per week on my YouTube channel for an entire month. That is a pact. The rules of a good pact are very simple.
It has to be purposeful,
meaning it has to be something that you genuinely care about, not something that just sounds impressive. It has to be actionable. It has to be something that only you can control,
not become a sub stack writer with 10,000
subscribers because subscriber count on any platform is something that is outside of your control. It's not something that you can do. The pact also has to be continuous
and it has to be trackable,
which means you just have to ask yourself, did I do it today? Yes or no? Did I write a a thousand words? Yes or no? And that's how you track your pact. Step number three is you have to read the data.
So in the end of your pact, have to ask yourself these three questions.
Number one, did I keep coming back to it even when it was difficult?
Number two, did I get even slightly better at this thing that I was working on in my pact?
And number three, do I want to extend this pact for another
week? If the answer is yes, extend the pact and go deeper on it. You're going to learn more about whether something is your passion in just four weeks of doing a pact,
than in four years of thinking about potentially doing it. I think we often hear these stories of people who are really obsessed with one thing, really obsessed with one specific musical instrument over sport,
and I think it's a rarity. I think it's very rare for a person to just want to do one thing and nothing else. I think most of us are going to have multiple interests, multiple passions simultaneously
over the course of our lives, which means that this whole pressure
to have to find that one thing they're gonna be obsessed with, It's mostly fiction. Subscribe if this video helped, and let me know in the comments what your first pact is going to be. And if you already know what your passion is or you have multiple passions, I would also love to learn more about you as I read every single comment.
And I really wanna use this YouTube channel to create this big library of videos on cognitive science,
on personal growth.
So if you have any video suggestions,
I would really appreciate them as well.