Simplify and Take Action

Editor note: This is a guest post from Henri Junttila of Wake Up Cloud.

With the launch of my blog I have been doing a lot of commenting on blogs, communicating in forums and through email. One thing I am seeing over and over again is the amount of complexity in people’s lives.

A good example is finding your passion. You do not have to make it a five-page essay when you’re explaining what your passion is. If you can’t tell people what you are passionate about in one or two sentences, then you probably need to reconsider.

Learning how to simplify your life is simple, if you let it. It’s easy to analyze, scrutinize and pick apart every thought, that’s how the brain works, but it is not what gets results. If you want results, you have to use your brain just enough, take action and recalibrate.

Passion

A big problem today is that most people do not know what their passion is. The mere thought of thinking about finding your passion can overwhelm you, I know it certainly did for me in the past. I used to be extremely analytic, trying to figure everything out and have everything planned before I started anything.

Needless to say, this did not work well and things didn’t start to pick off for me until I gave up the mind masturbation habit. If you don’t know what your passion is, then your best bet is to start doing stuff and seeing what you don’t like. Writing down what you love to do, as long as you get in the ballpark of what it might be is awesome.

If you don’t have a clue about what to do, just do something and see how it feels. We have been learning how to neglect our feelings for a long time. After all, they aren’t that important? Or are they? Sitting at home trying to think things out doesn’t work. You didn’t choose to be born so you could sit and think, you chose to be born so you could experience.

Labels

Stepping out of the box and letting go of your imaginary prison is hard, because it’s hard to realize that you’re in a prison in the first place. I’ve been trying to find my passion for about a year, but the problem has always been that I was comfortable doing what I wanted to do, so I didn’t really want to find my passion. It was just a way of feeling good, telling myself that I couldn’t find my passion, so it was okay that I was doing something I hated.

Once you become serious, the universe provides you with all the tools you need. You have to take action if you want to get somewhere. I got serious about finding my passion a few months ago, which was around the same time I started feeling like something was missing in my life. I don’t know the exact dates, so don’t yell at me if you find me contradicting myself, I’m not a huge fan of time.

Enjoy

There’s a distinction between being serious and being serious. The seriousness I talked about above is accompanied by clarity and knowing. The other seriousness is accompanied by frustration, blame, why me and all those feelings that bring you down.

When you’ve truly found your passion, you’ll know because you aren’t asking yourself when am I going to make money and why is nothing happening. It’s easy to confuse passion with something else. It’s a learning process and we’re all at different places on the path.

No part of the path is better than another. We can all share our experiences and learn. Learning how to be ridiculous and playful is a huge relief. You do not have to be so serious (the bad serious) about being right all the time. Let yourself fail and learn.

Fail

In order to find what you truly love, you have to fail, a lot. The faster you fail, the faster you’ll get to where you want to be. Look at some of the famous failures, such as Thomas Edison, Abraham Lincoln and Michael Jordan. They failed a lot, but they kept going.

It doesn’t matter if you don’t know your passion right away. Failing is human. When we look at successful people we only see how well they are doing, but we often do not see the tough times where they worked their face off and failed over and over again.

Practicality

You don’t have to quit your job in order to do what you love. There is no reason for you to put an amazing amount of pressure on yourself to quit your job. If you work from 9-5, then you have plenty of time after your job to do what you love.

It’s up to you to take responsibility for your life. If you come home, take a beer, watch TV and sleep, then you have no one but yourself to blame. If you truly want to change your life, you have to take action and work hard.

Work at your job and do what you love. When your passion is making enough money to sustain you, you can think about quitting, but let’s be practical, please.

Paralysis

There’s no need to analyze every part of what you are going to do. If you think your passion is gardening, then start doing it. Your brain is not meant to know how things are going to happen. Have you noticed that when you’re trying to control the future, it leads to nothing but stress and anxiety? It’s not a coincidence.

Identify what you can do, then do it. You will never figure out what your passion is by analyzing it to death. You are responsible for the life you create. What makes you feel good when you do it? I’m not talking about something that could make you money. If money didn’t exist, what would you do?

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That’s what I have to say, what about you? What’s your biggest obstacle to finding your passion?

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Posted on December 28 2009

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