12 Oct 2009, Posted by christie in Misc Bytes, 30 Comments

How to find your inner passion

This is a guest post by Stefan Nilsson, the blogger at Ducedo, where he blogs about The Art of Making Money Online.

I have been making money online for a few years now with different methods, including blogging, but it was not until this summer I decided to begin writing in English and it has been great to being able to develop my English writing. My blog Ducedo is now three months old and I thought it would be a great idea to take the next step by writing a guest post. I contacted Christie who kindly approved the idea and here I am. Many thanks, Christie.

I will take this opportunity to talk about my background and draw parallels to what I love to do today. This post ended up a bit longer then I had expected, but bare with me, when you are done reading it you will have the material to find your inner passion.

Our passion comes from our childhood

In high school I began studying psychology and learned more about the famous psychologist Sigmund Freud. If I remember correctly Freud insisted that almost any feeling could be traced back to our childhood. Even though I would love to be able to blame a few things on my parents instead of myself I understand that their influence shaped me into who I am today.

Think about your best friend who loves football. In my case one of my friends started to cheer for Liverpool FC since his brother cheered for them. And to go further his brother cheered for them because their father did it. To mention another less positive feeling my father hates dogs. Well, hate is not the right word to use but he is a bit afraid of them since he got bit as a kid. In return I ended up being afraid for dogs even though I have not had one single bad encounter with one. Today I have managed to conquer this feeling and actually love dogs and I will most certainly get one when it is time for me to settle down, but I still give a jump when a dog barks unexpectedly.

The point I’m trying to make is that feelings you get in your childhood stays with you for a long time. This also includes passions and thanks to this our childhood is a great resource when we decide to choose a niche or decided for what we want to work with.

How I found my passion

I have tried a lot of things in my life which has resulted in me jumping from one activity to another. Now I can see how much time my parents spent on me, driving me to swimming practice, football practice, football matches, golf, scouting and a lot more. Today I have given up on most of them but I still play football and golf a few times every week.

When I began creating websites a few years ago I did the same thing all over again. I started out with football, cameras, piracy, TV and several other niches. After just a few weeks in a niche I got bored and found a new one. Today I still own websites in several different niches but I have hired people to manage the websites for me.

One evening when I got bored, again, I sat down and started to think about my childhood to find out what I really love to do. Thanks to a method I will explain better in the next section I found out that my true passion is not cameras or TV, but to find different methods to make money.

The first memory I have about making money is from long before I even started kindergarten. I knew we always had a package of gum in one of our kitchen cupboards, so I convinced my neighbour (she was the same age as me) to go with me and we ended up walking street up and street down to sell gums to people. It took a few minutes before we met our first potential customer and she ended up convincing us to follow her home to get paid. She went in while we stood outside waiting for her to come out again and a few minutes later our parents showed up. Apparently she understood something was wrong and called them directly. But yes, we did get the money as well…

This memory combined with several similar stories convinced me to create a Swedish blog about making money online and as I told you above, this summer I expanded by starting to write in English. Now I can say without hesitation, this is my true passion.

How to find your passion

This post ended up a bit longer then I would have expected but now it is time to share my method which you can use to find your inner passion.

1. Start with a piece of paper – I know how tempting it is to just skip through and do this exercise without writing anything down, but I promise you it will become much more useful.

2. Draw a line – Put the paper straight in front of you and draw a line from one and to another. Write a 0 in the beginning and your current age at the end. Then you mark every third or fifth year from the beginning to the end of this line.

3. Think of happy memories – Now begin at the span from 0 to 3 and think of every happy memory you have back then. Continue and work your way forward to present time. I know it might be difficult in the beginning when you have few memories, but they might be as important as the memories you have from your last week.

4. Draw parallels – Now you should have a bunch of happy memories, depending on how old you are. If you only have a few, redo the last task since I am sure you will find more. When this is done you should try to find something that combines two memories. If you loved to play football and loved to take photos, could it be a football photographer? Try to combine as many memories as possible and find out what the perfect niche would be.

If you have followed the above tasks you should now have one or several ideas to what your true passion could be. Unfortunately I can’t give you a simple answer to which one of them you should go for, but I can recommend you to try them all before deciding for a niche.

Discussion

Now I would love to hear your personal story. Have you found your true passion? If yes, how did you find it and what have you done since then to take advantage of it?

Photo credit: jim68000