Let’s do some app searching to figure out our passions

When I joined my first job, I shared a great camaraderie with my then boss, and we would often have long conversations and discussions about a wide range of topics. He once asked “What’s your passion” and though it’s a very generic question, I found myself speechless – I just could not come up with an answer.

From then on, I frequently find myself pondering over the big question – “what is my passion”?

To be honest, I feel it’s very common for a lot of us to struggle to come up with a response –  probably we haven’t really given it too much thought. We might think and rather confuse our fantasies for our passions. But fantasies die soon enough, and there are so many along the way.

Dwelling a bit more to segregate the fantasy from the passion actually requires giving a shot at the fantasy – and its only then that one realizes whether it was the pure glamour of the job that enticed us or whether it runs a bit more deep.

From wanting to be a management consultant, to a sales hot shot to a photographer, I have had some sense of the drill. Pseudo selling in my pre-sales role led me to believe I might enjoy sales, and well, I took a shot at it. It didn’t go down well – but I learnt that to sell you need to understand and be able to sell the product to yourself before you pitch it to the world. Straightforwardness may not get you that order – a lot of tact may. While growing up, hacking seemed so cool and probably its cool quotient made me take up computer science as my engineering major , but when it came down to writing code, it wasn’t cool anymore. I did well at designing or structuring the project but never too well at coding. To be good at something you have to start from the bottom – doing the dirtiest and the smallest tasks associated with the bigger picture, and if you can’t do that, or rather enjoy doing that, then it’s probably the glamour that pulled you in the first place. There are multiple more examples where I tried my hand at my fantasies just to realize that it was only at a superficial level. They were good lessons along the way, and having learnt from those, I now try to look at things more objectively.

I would like to draw from an article by Mark Manson, where he essentially says that finding our passion has been blown out of proportion, and we just need to really seek what we enjoy doing. Growing up in India, I, like every other kid loved playing cricket, and every evening would look forward to getting on the field. I loved fast bowling and it didn’t matter if it was 45 or 5 degrees outside, the zeal to get out there and uproot the batsmen’s stumps remained the same. Did I as kid wonder about the temperature? And that I think is the great question we need to ask ourselves when we look at something as our passion. Do the hardships or the not so favorable environment matter? Also, a great thing I read was, when you love or enjoy something, you would always want to know more about it, read up the history around it. At that point in time I could answer any cricket trivia, as I read around it, watched it, and fiercely played the game.

If we can identify something similar, I think it’s a great discovery.

Nowadays all of us seem to be so engrossed in our mobile devices. We all use apps on our phones for a lot more than mere talking, social networking and gaming. Let’s try and maybe focus on what we do with these other apps? We may have a good starting point towards this discovery of finding our passions. We may use Quora and read or maybe even write a lot on it. We may use Flipboard or another news feed app as our primary source of information around topics we care about. Aren’t these great starting points – what and whom do I follow on Quora, what topics? Aren’t these that interest us most – architecture maybe? Interiors perhaps – maybe we have a sense when we look at interiors on Pinterest and visualize a picture of it in a particular setting,  improve that, replicate that? Perhaps that’s who we want to be. Who do we follow on Instagram  – a photo journalist? A travel blogger? Make-up artist? You have to look for what comes naturally to you and what you enjoy doing when you have time for yourself – none of this forced upon nor is it something to conform with – its what you enjoy.

I believe these apps and our activities on these apps are a great way to look inwards and draw some real inspiration. If google and the internet can use our browsing history and web patterns to sell us something, I think all of us can definitely make use of these patterns more effectively to identify and answer one of the biggest questions of our lives.