First, something really really important; finding your passion or purpose is a PROCESS! I know you might have some friends who had some aggravatingly simple ‘voice from heaven’ experience because they read a dumb Buzzfeed article on ‘5 Steps to Find Your Passion Today’, and now they are doing and loving their best work, and you’ve been trying to find your passion for months or even years and seem like you’re no closer. I’ve come to believe this is normal! I think the people who ‘magically’ find their passion after searching for 5 minutes are the outliers. I mean, more power to them, but I think the majority of people will need to invest time and energy into this. Thankfully it’s totally worth it!
I’ve been searching and exploring the mission of finding my passion and purpose for over 3 years, and it’s not done! I’ve had some amazing experiences, and it’s been fantastic, and thankfully I have a LOT more clarity now. But I’m by no means ‘there’ yet! I also believe that finding your passion is something that’s never really ‘finished’ either. I think it’s something that we should strive to explore and seek frequently to make absolutely sure we’re working on the most important and impactful projects.
The other thing to consider is that the reason to find your passion isn’t for the past since that already happened, it’s about doing better work in the future, although very likely keys to finding your passion are in the past. Sure, understanding why you did certain things in the past might be interesting. But, the important reason to find your passion and purpose is for the FUTURE, not the present! It’s to help you understand not what you have done in the past or present, but what you should do in the future to create the most value.
So, that being said, the things I’m going to mention are largely in two parts:
1. Materials to help you understand more of frameworks, yourself, and the world around you (aka things that Expand Your Consciousness)
2. Activities that will help you get data to plug into the frameworks so that you can have the most important outcome: do work you love that matters!
Materials
Book: The Go Giver – Bob Burg and John David Mann
Book: Secrets of the Millionaire Mind – Harv Eker
Book: The Passion Test – Janet Attwood and Chris Attwood
Book: Finding Your Element – Ken Robinson
Book: Linchpin – Seth Godin
Book: Inner Voice – Russ Whitney
Book: Managing Oneself – Peter Drucker
Book: PAiLS by Chris Brady
Article: Your Eularian Destiny by Ayodeji Awosika
Video: How to Know Your Life Purpose – Adam Leipzig
Video: Discovering Your 10x Purpose – Dan Sullivan
Activities
Exercise: Personal Personality Profile – create a new document or use a sheet of paper, and start collecting everything you know about yourself, as much as possible! The more information and knowledge you can add here, the better. I would highly recommend putting the results to all the tests below in it. And I would also recommend putting things you’re passionate about or have an interest in, and then start looking for combinations or cross-overs of those things.
Test: 16 Personalities – Myers-Briggs test based on Carl Jung’s writing to help you determine your type, this can be helpful in understanding some of the nuances of how you like to work and who you should be working with etc.
Test: Genius U – adding more nuance to your type and understand what part of a process or business you might be best suited for
Test: Dan Pink Assessment – helps add more data to where you’re leaning on the introverted or extroverted spectrum
Test: Imperative – a brilliant test to help you understand more about your personality and develop some stronger knowledge about your personal mission statement
Test: How To Fascinate – (use the free code “NMorgan”) a fantastic test to understand how other people see you, whereas most of these tests are how you see the world, this is the opposite
Test: Strengths Finder – a great test that can help you identity some of the most important attributes that will give you a great “edge” in your professional, and possibly even in your personal life. Click the “Visit StrengthsFinder 2.0 website” link, and then purchase the book NEW, be absolutely positive you have a clean code that you can redeem to take the test, otherwise you might need to purchase the book again.
Test: Free Strengths Test – a good free alternative to the previous recommendation, it’s not the same, but it’s good as well, there are some paid upgrades offered.
Test: DISC – an excellent in depth test to help you uncover some specific work place dynamics, very implementable suggestions in the downloadable report.
Test: Talentoday – a free scientifically designed assessment that creates a “personality radar”
Test: Learning Styles – a 20 question test to help you understand your primary learning style (and how you rank on the other 2). This is extremely important! Peter Drucker talks about this in Tai Lopez‘s favorite book: Managing Oneself.
Test: Life Values Self-Assessment Test – this primarily gives you insight to help you understand where your real priorities are, and where you might want to improve your prioritization.
Test: Bosi DNA – A simple and short test to add some more detail to your unique character (especially entrepreneurially).
Test: Wheel of Life Identity Test – this great short test quickly runs through a couple of the “primary focuses of life” like fitness, finance, and meaning. It helps you analyze where you are and therefore where you want to go, created by Tony Robbins.
Exercise: 1 minute activity journaling – every hour or so set a timer to alert you to pause for a moment and write down 1. what you’re doing, 2. how you feel about it, and 3. why you feel that way. This was a really powerful exercise because it gave me a lot of data points to use to see what I was doing on a daily basis and how I felt about the different activities, and most importantly why I feel that way. This has led to many many excellent insights into things I should do more of in the future.
This article is a work in progress, as is the pursuit of my passion, but I hope that these materials and activities are helpful in showing you how to find your passion!