Don’t know what to do with your life? Looking for a job that you’ll love? Want a fulfilling career?  The five steps listed below will give you a blueprint to achieve all of the above. 

Step 1: Identify Your Core Desires

Dr. Steven Riess used a mathematical technique called factor analysis that grouped desires into 16 core desires.  By identifying your core desires, it gives your life purpose and meaning.  If your career is not in line with your core desires, you will feel unfulfilled. The 16 core desires are listed below:

Power is the desire to influence others.

Independence is the desire for self-reliance. 

Curiosity is the desire for knowledge. 

Acceptance is the desire for inclusion. 

Order is the desire for organization. 

Saving is the desire to collect things. 

Honor is the desire to be loyal to one’s parents and heritage. 

Idealism is the desire for social justice. 

Social Contact is the desire for companionship. 

Family is the desire to raise one’s own children. 

Status is the desire for social standing.

Vengeance is the desire to get even. 

Romance is the desire for sex and beauty. 

Eating is the desire to consume food. 

Physical Activity is the desire for exercise of muscles. 

Tranquility is the desire for emotional calm.

Reiss, Steven. Who am I? (pp. 17-18). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

You can use your core desires to form a life mission. Don’t get stuck on picking a mission, you can always change it later if you need to. The important thing is to give your life a goal to focus on and to help make your work meaningful to you.

Missions are powerful because they focus your energy toward a useful goal, and this in turn maximizes your impact on your world—a crucial factor in loving what you do. People who feel like their careers truly matter are more satisfied with their working lives, and they’re also more resistant to the strain of hard work. Staying up late to save your corporate litigation client a few extra million dollars can be draining, but staying up late to help cure an ancient disease can leave you more energized than when you started—perhaps even providing the extra enthusiasm needed to start a lab volleyball team or tour with a rock band.

Newport, Cal. So Good They Can’t Ignore You (pp. 105-106). Grand Central Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Action Step For How To Find Your Passion And Purpose In Life:

Get this book and do the questionnaire to find out what your core desires are:

Step 2: Identify Valuable Skills In Line With Your Core Desires

It’s important to form a passion that has value.  Without providing value to others, you won’t be able to sustain your passion unless you keep it regulated to a hobby. The problem with many people’s passion is that they either lack value or are in a hyper-competitive field.

84 percent of the students surveyed were identified as having a passion. This sounds like good news for supporters of the passion hypothesis—that is, until you dive deeper into the details of these pursuits. Here are the top five identified passions: dance, hockey (these were Canadian students, mind you), skiing, reading, and swimming. Though dear to the hearts of the students, these passions don’t have much to offer when it comes to choosing a job. In fact, less than 4 percent of the total identified passions had any relation to work or education, with the remaining 96 percent describing hobby-style interests such as sports and art.

Newport, Cal. So Good They Can’t Ignore You (p. 23). Grand Central Publishing. Kindle Edition.

“Passion” is often born out of a problem that one had in their life. If it was a problem in your own life, then others are likely to have that problem as well, and they will likely pay well for you to solve that problem.

For example, I read somewhere (forgive me for not remembering where) a son of immigrant parents was struck by a car.  The driver offered to pay for all medical expenses if they didn’t report the accident to the police.  The father agreed but they never saw the driver again.  That boy grew up to be an attorney and helped immigrants like his parents know what rights they have under the law.

Notice that this problem could have been solved in other ways.  The boy could have grown up to be a politician to create new laws that would help immigrants, or he could have become a doctor to help boys involved in accidents such as his. But becoming an attorney was most in line with his core desire profile (see step 1), assuming it gave him meaning and fulfillment. 

With problems and suffering playing such a significant role in forming passion and purpose, I wonder if living in an affluent society produces less passion and purpose, since there are less significant problems and suffering.

I personally met a young man who loved to dance.  When I asked him what he wanted to do for a career when he was older, I fully expected to say something in regards to dance, but instead, he told me he wanted to be a heart surgeon.  When I asked him why, he said that it was because his beloved grand-mother had died of a heart attack.  

Again, this problem could have been solved in multiple ways, depending on his core desire profile. He could have become a scientist and dedicated his life to research about heart disease, or he could have started a non-profit to raise money for heart disease research or to help those who had experienced a heart attack.  But his particular desire profile guided him to want to become a heart surgeon.

Notice that his love of dance was one of the common passions listed in the above quote. Of course, there are those who become dancers and are paid well. But careers such as those are few and far between.  Not enough demand or too much competition can make a difficult career. Cal Newport shares some insight on the matter:

Derek thought for a moment. “I have this principle about money that overrides my other life rules,” he said. “Do what people are willing to pay for.” Derek made it clear that this is different from pursuing money for the sake of having money. Remember, this is someone who gave away $22 million and sold his possessions after his company was acquired. Instead, as he explained: “Money is a neutral indicator of value. By aiming to make money, you’re aiming to be valuable.”

Newport, Cal. So Good They Can’t Ignore You (p. 96). Grand Central Publishing. Kindle Edition.

“If you’re struggling to raise money for an idea, or are thinking that you will support your idea with unrelated work, then you need to rethink the idea.”

Newport, Cal. So Good They Can’t Ignore You (p. 96). Grand Central Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Step 3: Develop Flow & Birth Your Passion

Many assume that passion is instinctual, a calling that they must follow to be happy, but this approach has yielded poor results:

The 2010 Conference Board survey of U.S. job satisfaction found that only 45 percent of Americans describe themselves as satisfied with their jobs. This number has been steadily decreasing from the mark of 61 percent recorded in 1987, the first year of the survey. As Lynn Franco, the director of the Board’s Consumer Research Center notes, this is not just about a bad business cycle: “Through both economic boom and bust during the past two decades, our job satisfaction numbers have shown a consistent downward trend.” Among young people, the group perhaps most concerned with the role of work in their lives, 64 percent now say that they’re actively unhappy in their jobs. This is the highest level of dissatisfaction ever measured for any age group over the full two-decade history of the survey. In other words, our generation-spanning experiment with passion-centric career planning can be deemed a failure: The more we focused on loving what we do, the less we ended up loving it.

Newport, Cal. So Good They Can’t Ignore You (pp. 28-29). Grand Central Publishing. Kindle Edition.

First, when you focus only on what your work offers you, it makes you hyperaware of what you don’t like about it, leading to chronic unhappiness. This is especially true for entry-level positions, which, by definition, are not going to be filled with challenging projects and autonomy—these come later. When you enter the working world with the passion mindset, the annoying tasks you’re assigned or the frustrations of corporate bureaucracy can become too much to handle.

Newport, Cal. So Good They Can’t Ignore You (pp. 37-38). Grand Central Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Passion isn’t something hardwired from birth (but core desires are) but rather, it is birthed out of experience. If one doesn’t take control of those experiences, they may be blown about by the winds of culture and society.

That’s why it’s important to identify valuable skills in line with your core desires and then build passion around them. By focusing on what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls “Flow”, one can create their own passions.

In our studies, we found that every flow activity, whether it involved competition, chance, or any other dimension of experience, had this in common: It provided a sense of discovery, a creative feeling of transporting the person into a new reality. It pushed the person to higher levels of performance, and led to previously undreamed-of states of consciousness. In short, it transformed the self by making it more complex. In this growth of the self lies the key to flow activities.

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow (Harper Perennial Modern Classics) (p. 74). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

The traits that mark an autotelic personality are most clearly revealed by people who seem to enjoy situations that ordinary persons would find unbearable. Lost in Antarctica or confined to a prison cell, some individuals succeed in transforming their harrowing conditions into a manageable and even enjoyable struggle, whereas most others would succumb to the ordeal. Richard Logan, who has studied the accounts of many people in difficult situations, concludes that they survived by finding ways to turn the bleak objective conditions into subjectively controllable experience. They followed the blueprint of flow activities. First, they paid close attention to the most minute details of their environment, discovering in it hidden opportunities for action that matched what little they were capable of doing, given the circumstances. Then they set goals appropriate to their precarious situation, and closely monitored progress through the feedback they received. Whenever they reached their goal, they upped the ante, setting increasingly complex challenges for themselves.

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow (Harper Perennial Modern Classics) (p. 90). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

But developing flow isn’t always easy.  Cal Newport explains the difficulty of getting started in a career and the lack of flow it may bring:

Glass emphasizes that it takes time to get good at anything, recounting the many years it took him to master radio to the point where he had interesting options. “The key thing is to force yourself through the work, force the skills to come; that’s the hardest phase,” he says.

Newport, Cal. So Good They Can’t Ignore You (p. 22). Grand Central Publishing. Kindle Edition.

In order to get through that hard phase, one needs to be in alignment with their core desires as I explained in step one and then develop flow:

Flow + Core Desire = Finding your passion

Step 4: Get Really Good At Those Skills

Most passions developed in our culture today seem to be those in arts and humanities.  No longer are STEM and trade work the passions that were dominant in the 1950’s. A lucky few may develop valuable passions by chance but ,as we saw in the quote in step 2, most do not.

It’s not that arts and humanities have no value, but the phrase “starving artist” is no accident. Being a product of a monolithic society also puts one in the same position as everyone else, creating an oversupply of particular skills, thereby dropping their value.

The value of a skill is determined by supply and demand.  You will need to work at obtaining skills that are in demand. This is typically not easy or they wouldn’t be in such high demand.  Having valuable skills also plays a key part in obtaining a career that you love:

The things that make a great job great, I discovered, are rare and valuable. If you want them in your working life, you need something rare and valuable to offer in return. In other words, you need to be good at something before you can expect a good job.

Newport, Cal. So Good They Can’t Ignore You (pp. 13-14). Grand Central Publishing. Kindle Edition.

In order to get really good at something, you’ll have to do more than being in a state of flow. 

As Ericsson explains, “Most individuals who start as active professionals… change their behavior and increase their performance for a limited time until they reach an acceptable level. Beyond this point, however, further improvements appear to be unpredictable and the number of years of work… is a poor predictor of attained performance.” Put another way, if you just show up and work hard, you’ll soon hit a performance plateau beyond which you fail to get any better.

Newport, Cal. So Good They Can’t Ignore You (p. 65). Grand Central Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Newport explains that one needs “deliberate practice” to get the high value skills needed for a rewarding career.  This requires you to push yourself to the edge of your ability:

This focus on stretching your ability and receiving immediate feedback provides the core of a more universal principle—one that I increasingly came to believe provides the key to successfully acquiring career capital in almost any field.

Newport, Cal. So Good They Can’t Ignore You (p. 61). Grand Central Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Flow is enjoyable but deliberate practice is not:

Doing things we know how to do well is enjoyable, and that’s exactly the opposite of what deliberate practice demands…. Deliberate practice is above all an effort of focus and concentration. That is what makes it “deliberate,” as distinct from the mindless playing of scales or hitting of tennis balls that most people engage in.

Newport, Cal. So Good They Can’t Ignore You (p. 72). Grand Central Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Again, being in alignment with your core desires described in step 1 can help you get through the process of deliberate practice.  

Newport refers to the mindset needed for continual improvement as the “craftsman mindset”.  However, some environments are not conducive to the craftsman mindset, and if your job has any of the disqualifiers, you should look to move on:

THREE DISQUALIFIERS FOR APPLYING THE CRAFTSMAN MINDSET 

• The job presents few opportunities to distinguish yourself by developing relevant skills that are rare and valuable. 
• The job focuses on something you think is useless or perhaps even actively bad for the world. 
• The job forces you to work with people you really dislike.

Newport, Cal. So Good They Can’t Ignore You (p. 48). Grand Central Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Step 5: Build Career Capital & Create Your Dream Job Wherever You Go 

You can use valuable skills as career capital to use as leverage to create a job that you love:

THE CAREER CAPITAL THEORY OF GREAT WORK

• The traits that define great work are rare and valuable. 
• Supply and demand says that if you want these traits you need rare and valuable skills to offer in return. Think of these rare and valuable skills you can offer as your career capital. 
• The craftsman mindset, with its relentless focus on becoming “so good they can’t ignore you,” is a strategy well suited for acquiring career capital. This is why it trumps the passion mindset if your goal is to create work you love.

Newport, Cal. So Good They Can’t Ignore You (p. 43). Grand Central Publishing. Kindle Edition.

With enough career capital in hand, you can begin demanding the three elements that make for a great job:

Autonomy: the feeling that you have control over your day, and that your actions are important 

Competence: the feeling that you are good at what you do 

Relatedness: the feeling of connection to other people

Newport, Cal. So Good They Can’t Ignore You (p. 25). Grand Central Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Notice that those three elements relate to the other steps that we discussed above:

Autonomy allows you to be in alignment with your core desires and to focus on doing work where you can experience flow or build career capital.

Competence allows you to focus on work where you experience flow

Relatedness may not be that important to some, especially if “social contact” is not one of their core desires.

How to find your passion and make it your job

To summarize, you need to identify your core desires, develop flow (which will create passion in your work), identify valuable skills, get really good at those skills and build Career Capital. If you do those things, you’ll be well on your way to achieving the fulfilling career that you’ve always dreamed of! Struggling to get motivated to do those things? Check out my post on how motivation works.