Don’t Follow Your Passion, Do This Instead

I recently found myself saying something I never thought I’d say. Now listen, if you have kids, you know this is a thing. You probably often find yourself saying things you never thought you’d say. Like when my kids were younger and I found myself saying, “Stop licking the dog”. Never thought I’d say that. This was different though. Here’s what I said-

“Follow your passion” is bad advice.

I know.

It’s crazy to me too.

It’s a phrase we hear all the time. If you want to live a fulfilling life, just follow your passion! Don’t know what you want to be when you grow up? Follow your passion! On the surface this sounds like fantastic advice. Wise, even. But here’s my beef-

What if you have no idea what your passion is? Or you plain old don’t have one? Or maybe you have more than one? Or maybe your passion is just not going to pay the bills and these kids expect us to feed them every. single. day. and serving them up a plate of “passion” for lunch is not going to cut it.  Realistically, how many of us actually have the privilege to be able to follow our passion? I’d venture to guess it’s not a lot. I remember when I was home with a one-year-old and a four-year-old just trying to make it to dinnertime when my husband got home so I could have a moment’s peace. In that season I certainly didn’t have the time to follow my passion, let alone the energy! There are tons of reasons why this advice doesn’t always work. More than that, it can be downright hurtful to people who fall into any of these camps leaving them to wonder if there’s something wrong with them. (Hint: There’s not.)

Now, before you get too mad at me, please know that there are times when following your passion is absolutely the right thing to do. I’m not saying that there’s not a time and place for it or that we should never follow our passion. Some of us are born knowing what we want to do with our lives and that’s amazing! I’m just saying that more often than not it’s not that simple and I think there may be a better way.

What if instead of trying to figure out what our passion is, we decided to be passionate about life? Our life. The big things and small, the exciting and mundane, the day to day and the once in a lifetime. What if we decided to love passionately, work passionately, learn passionately, passionately care for ourselves and others? LIVE OUR FREAKIN’ LIVES with passion? What if we instead decide to bring a little bit of passion to everything we do and followed our curiosity?

Friends, curiosity is everything. Curiosity keeps us humble. Curiosity opens us up to new experiences and ideas and makes our world so much bigger. Take a few moments to consider, what am I curious about? What rabbit holes do I tend to find myself going down? What’s something I’ve always wanted to try but never found the time to do? There’s truly no wrong answers here. And once you begin to follow your curiosity, you may just find that you have talents, skills, and abilities you didn’t know you had and discover hobbies that bring you joy.  And you also just might stumble upon your passion in the process.

Or just end up with a really cool scarf.