Follow Your Hate, not your Passion

"Follow your passion" has been discussed in length before on multiple occasions, Deep Work and So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion In The Quest For Work You Love by Cal Newport touch on it.

It basically boils down to "at first you don't love anything" and that "the better you get at something the more you will love it".

Mastery itself requires no specific arena to improve your life.

All you need is to feel the improvement. A bodybuilder feels the same benefits of mastery than a writer, or a programmer, designer, painter, actor, movie director.

Mastery is something that is achievable and it requires deep and long moments of discomfort.

So instead of looking around at what you love, instead try to look into what you hate instead. Certainly, everyone hates something. Maybe you hate your job, your college major, a specific discipline you're studying.

Look into it. Try to understand why is it that you hate it.

Maybe you never got into math, or literature. Or maybe it feels like it doesn't match what you expected at first.

Here's the challenge I have for you.

After you get hyper-specific about why you hate something, ask yourself, "would my hate for it be solved by me being better at it?"

Maybe you hate to play the piano. But if you were VERY good at it, would you think you'd still hate it? If the answer is "maybe" I really urge you to be better at it.

Being good in something fixes most of the problems "I don't have any passion" people have.

It helps you stay grounded in life and not be aimless.