Identifying Your Passions

Many years ago I was asked what my passions were.  I did not know how to answer that question, I liked skiing, hiking, playing beach volleyball, but those were not really passions – at least not related to my current job anyway.

Jonathan Fields in Career Renegade makes it sound so simple.  Ask yourself 2 questions:

1. What activity would you do for free, purely out of a sense of passion?
2. Imagine that you just won the lottery, but there was a catch – you had to continue to work, and you could not use the money to fund any professional endeavor.  What would you do?

From GapingVoid.com

These are not easy questions to answer.

First off, you need life experience to answer these questions.  The only way to answer these questions and identify your passions are to learn, experiment, put your hand up, and try new things.  Something will stand out, you might not know it at the time, but you will keep coming back to it, you will dream about it, you will find justification to work it into your daily routine.

Four years ago I found David Gurteen’s website (www.gurteen.com).  I have been hooked on Knowledge Management and Social Media ever since.

I am extremely passionate about the efficiencies and networks that social media tools can cultivate, and I try to be an evangelist and promote these ideas every chance I get.  Every once in awhile I get a small win that keeps me going.  More than anything, social media is about change, and people don’t like change, they resist it.  Being an engineer, and being a master at solving technical problems, the human side of the change process is not a technical problem that I can solve.  Now that is a challenge!

I started this blog to share my experiences and knowledge about Social Media, and I find that it is helping me further identify and refine my passion.  If you are really lucky, you will immediately know the answers to the two questions asked above.   As for me, I am still working on those answers.

So, what are you passionate about?