This post is part of the Get Excited About Life Series. This post follows on from Get Excited About Your Life.

Last time in Get Excited about your Life we talked about some methods to figure out some areas and activities in your life that you are passionate about. This used a very broad approach focused at processing the tremendous amounts of data we get every day. Now that we have identified some areas that you are excited about it is time to drill down into their core and discover something even more passionate.

Start with your passionate activities/areas

You should use your whole list, for the sake of brevity I’ll use just some of mine which are:

• Teaching people
• Software engineering
• Action movies

Break them down

Break down each area into the components that make the activity. Just come up with a bunch of labels that define what the activity is about and what is involved in the activity. You don’t need to feel passionate about each label just put down whatever comes to mind. Oh yeah, write it down. Here is my breakdown:

Teaching people:

• Pass on knowledge
• Help people
• Make them smile
• Get them excited
• Give them confidence

Software engineering:

• Surmounting complex technical challenges
• Give someone what they want
• Give someone what they need
• Make stuff
• Make things faster and better than before (Improve ways of doing things)

Action movies:

• Heroes overcoming obstacles
• Heroes striving to be the best
• Heroes helping/protecting the less fortunate/weaker
• Heroes being confident in themselves
• Power

Group common elements

Look for common elements and group them together. My grouping is:

1. Help people, Give them confidence, Give someone what they need/want, heroes helping others, Pass on knowledge, Make them smile, Get them excited
2. Make stuff, Make faster and better stuff
3. Surmounting complex technical challenges, Heroes overcoming obstacles
4. Heroes striving to be the best, Heroes being confident in themselves, Power

Summarise

Look at each grouping and try to summarise it in one phrase (or use one from your list). My summary:

1. Helping people get what they want/need
2. Create stuff, particularly useful things
3. Surmounting difficult problems
4. Developing yourself to have freedom and power

Now you can put in front of each summary “I’m passionate about” and say it out loud. When you are writing these and speaking them watch yourself, does it ignite a burning desire? When I read these I feel a rush and can’t help getting excited about them. If only some of them excite you, throw out the rest.

The list defines what you want to be doing in your life. Identifying these items you now want to store them somewhere so you can look back and reflect on them.

Realise a deeper passion

The final step is to find some activity that allows you to be involved with as many of those passions at once. Sometimes this is easy, one of your activities may already encompass them all. But for most of us we don’t know how we can incorporate them into our lives daily. But rest assured now that you have clearly identified them in your mind, you will start seeing things differently and an activity will jump out at you one day. Go back to getting excited about your life and keep looking at all the activities you come across in your life. Your new view will bring new possibilities.

It took me awhile to figure out how to bring those passions together into something I can always be working on. The answer was creating this blog with its focus on helping others in self development, the most difficult problem, which offcourse helps me develop as well.

Did you find a passion?

Next post in the series is Living Your Passion