Stop trying to find your passion

By Gaby Salazar | Copy Editor

As I approached high school graduation, I felt a looming, heavy burden getting closer that consistently made me anxious about the future. I feared graduating from high school and having the world at my feet without a plan.

I looked at my friends who were talented musically and artistically. I thought this is what passion was, and I envied my friends who just seemed to have everything figured out. I thought I had one singular job and that was to find my passion, but for some reason, it just wasn’t happening for me.

It wasn’t until college when I began to understand what passion really was through various guest speakers that came to my classes at Baylor. The speakers made me feel inspired and I took detailed notes, mainly because I was desperate to find some sort of magic formula for passion.

After years of searching for something so elusive, I realized that passion is nothing more than a feeling. It is anything that only has your attention for the moment, so why was I chasing something that would ultimately change over time?

Throughout my college career, I’ve changed my major several times (I’m just thankful I experimented in community college). I spend a lot of time waiting for inspiration to fall on my lap. I believed that passion was synonymous to purpose and all my life I was told how important it was to find it. How could I decide what my purpose was when I already struggled deciding what to watch on Netflix?

Life is full of opportunities and if something even remotely interests you, have the courage to try it out. I’ve spent years feeling anxious about what I was going to do with my life, and it saddens me to think that so many still do. When you try new things, I won’t promise that you’ll find your passion, but you’ll at least know if your interest runs deeper than an emotion.

Take the time to think about what it is you’re good at and begin to share your skills with others. I know it’s tempting to follow whatever makes you feel great. I thought my feelings about various interests would never go away. When they eventually faded, It made me think I was doing something wrong, like I simply couldn’t stick to anything.

Personally, I didn’t put much thought into figuring out what I was good at, but once I did, it greatly narrowed down what I could see myself doing as a career. Like most people, I love helping others and I knew that no matter what career I chose, I wanted to be doing just that.

I learned to abandon the way I used to think about finding my passion and started to think about an actionable plan. I learned that there are specific places where you’re more likely to run into your passion. The magic intersection can be found between what you’re really good at and where you are needed.

You’re in college to learn skills that someone will one day pay you for. If you’re really good at something, it’s probably because you like doing it and you dedicated time to mastering it. When you share that with others, you’re adding value to people’s lives and that’s pretty significant.

Passion is supposed to inspire you. It’s amazing when it lights a fire in you. However, don’t think that everything you do is supposed to follow this passion margin. Focus on what fuels passion: success, which means you better be prepared to fail a lot to find it.