I was listening to Chase Jarvis on his podcast the other morning while out for my walk. He was talking about creativity and entrepreneurship, but for me he distilled down a whole lot of thinking around career, passion pursuits and purpose into these two questions:
What do you care about?
How can you become masterful at that?
If you stopped stressing about finding your purpose and how to make money from your calling, and instead asked yourself these two questions, what would you discover about yourself and your work in the world?
Take out all the concerns about how you could turn a passion into a vocation. Take any income out of the equation. Take out the worries about when, where, what people will say, and how on earth you can transition.
Just start by asking, what do you care about? Is it education, disrupting the system, empowering teenagers, re-homing animals, nursing, making pottery, being a general manager, starting a small business, wellness coaching, making art?
Are you passionate about publishing, jewellery, creativity, fashion, interior design, banking, how things are made, books, crystals, teaching, food, travel, photography, coffee, retail, podcasting ,child care, recruitment, people, culture, minimalism, diversity, politics, feminism, changing the world, self help, spirituality or relationships?
What do you care about? Make a list. A big list. Circle the things on that list that really light you up. Things that you would door have in your life even if no one ever noticed, cared or paid you.
Then go and do those things, or one in particular, in whatever way you can. Keep doing it. Explore it. Play with it. Ignite and reignite your passion for it. Then work out how you can become masterful at it.
The rest, the elusive purpose and profit questions, will take care of themselves when you show up and do the thing that you are most passionate about with enough curiosity, consistency and mastery.
So work out what that is. Go and do that. And let your journey unfold.