Find your passion, and you’ll never work a day in your life!

Don’t you hate when people give that advice? For most of us, our passion is hardly profitable. I mean, how can I possibly make money cooking, eating, traveling, and hanging out with friends?

Yeah, yeah… I know that’s what they always say. I also know that it’s true. If you love what you do, it makes the work more fun, and it’s easier to get through the bad stuff. Finding your passion is great if you get lucky and happen to love what you chose to do.

But what do you do when your dream career turns out to be nothing like you expected?

Growing up many of us learned that working hard and achieving was the key to success and happiness. No one ever told us to follow our passions. If we had, instead of becoming dentists, we may have ended up as artists, pilots, or athletes. Our parents taught us we needed to be practical and sensible, steering us away from our dreams. We invested everything– our time, money, even our whole identity– into pursuing stability. We thought noble values such as simply helping people would give us the satisfaction we needed to thrive in this career. For some of us, connecting with people was our passion, and dentistry was the perfect vehicle for that.

Now that we’ve arrived, we realize that the rewards don’t outweigh the stress and anxiety. We find ourselves unhappy, and the weirdest thing is happening… now the experts tell us to find our passion!

Well, which is it?

While it’s all great advice and may even be true, what do you do when you don’t even know what you like?

That’s the problem with this advice. Many of us don’t have a passion.

You’ve probably committed to pouring everything into your life as a dentist, and now you realize it’s not bringing you the satisfaction you thought it would. Unfortunately with dentistry, you can’t know what it is really like until you have gone through years of investment into this career and your identity.

Many of us chose this profession because while we didn’t know if dentistry itself would be our passion, we thought it might be. We were passionate about helping people, and we wanted to have concrete solutions to problems. We chose it for the right reasons.

As the years passed by, and we put all of our eggs in one career basket, we stopped learning and exploring who we are.

That’s what I did.

When I found myself here, depressed and defeated because I hated my days, I couldn’t imagine ever finding a passion.

I obsessively searched for a career that would make me happy. I listened to all the gurus… Find your passion. Do what you love. Find your why.

While the dream can be inspiring at times, the practicalities and pressure to find your passion can be very deflating. Those expectations left me paralyzed.

Since I couldn’t figure out how to make money cooking, eating, or traveling, I felt like a failure. This expectation to find my passion AND make money from it seemed impossible.

You may be wondering the same thing right now.

What do you do if you don’t have a passion?

Screw finding your passion!

Instead, get curious. Explore. We often forget that passion is something that we obsess over. We pour ourselves into passion as if nothing else matters. But curiosity allows us to dabble, to play, to avoid commitment.

This is exactly what worked for me. Once I got out of my own way and stopped taking my career change so seriously, that’s when the magic happened. I took the pressure off of myself to find the next perfect thing. That allowed me to explore and play. It took a while, and one door kept opening another, and eventually I began to discover what I loved.

Believe me. I tried it all. Over the years, I experimented with brewing gluten free beer, making a line of dry spice rubs, selling skin care products, blogging about dentistry, and weight loss coaching. I took my basic interests and threw everything at it to see what would stick. Most of it was a failure. I know when you look at me now, it looks like I was fearless, but actually, it was really difficult.

I was totally afraid.

Getting curious instead of passionate is exactly what allowed me to reason with the fear. It allowed me to have more fun in the process and always have an escape route if I changed my mind.

If you don’t have a passion, let go of that unattainable expectation. Instead, get curious. There is no commitment in getting curious. If you dabble in something, there is no consequence if you decide you don’t like it.

It’s really the only way to find your passion. Bonus: you may just discover your passion in the process.