Finding Your Passion
Let’s face it – we’ve all been there before, enjoying our time hanging out with a group of well-respected peers and then the conversation goes off on a tangent about a topic we know nothing about. In just a matter of seconds you go from being a vital part of the dialogue to a wallflower because the new topic is foreign. You hope the conversation will circle back to what got you off topic, so you can continue to be a part of it. Unfortunately, the new topic has everyone completely and utterly absorbed.
However, you stick around despite not being able to contribute to the new topic because something about it has captured your attention as well. You listen closely to what everyone is saying with hopes of obtaining some elementary knowledge of the topic that you can take home or back to your office, and springboard off of into a new world of knowledge. Venturing off into unknown territory can be exhilarating! Sometimes it can be as simple as learning a new term that you look forward to cleverly slipping in the next opportunity that you have (case and point: Word of the Day Toilet Paper).
It might even go as far as to discovering a whole new concept you’ve never explored. You quickly run through all the low-hanging fruit YouTube has to offer and find yourself Googling research papers or even entire books to satisfy your thirst for knowledge. The new concept grabs hold of you and you find yourself questioning your current career path. You fantasize about jumping ship and becoming a pioneer in this newly discovered field.
There are countless stories out there of people that went from one field to a completely unrelated one because they discovered a new passion. Obviously not all of those stories end with the person becoming a rich success, but let’s not get distracted by wealth. Philanthropists regularly leave high paying jobs to pursue a passion towards changing the world at the expense of their living standards.
Reflect on Your Life
For most of us, it can take years, even decades, to find that passion we never knew we had. It’s also fascinating to see how that passion can evolve over time. It’s a great practice to take a step back and reflect on your life and think about how you ended up where you are, the crossroads you encountered, the sacrifices you might have made. If you think hard enough, there’s a good chance you can trace everything back to a conversation, a turning point that made you rethink your ultimate purpose. Were you chasing wealth? Were you trying to conform to the perceived norm? Can you trace everything back to an out-of-the-blue conversation you had with a stranger on a plane?
For me, I always thought my passion was engines. I love working with my hands to fix things. When I reflect back, my passion was not so much the engines but the systems in place. Through countless conversations, I found myself reveling in the components that made the system. That passion evolved into bigger systems, with bigger components, and trying to find ways to explain them to friends. Long story short, I ended up fascinated with the biggest systems I could find, Business Operations. Couple that with teaching others of the importance of finding your passion, and that’s where VTR was born from.
And it all started with a conversation that lost me but fascinated me at the same time.
Article written by Vaughn Pourchot
