Camp Creek Blog

This post is part of my Monday series on PBH for Grown-ups — you can see all of the posts here.

Your passion is not your meaningful work. It is only one component. Your meaningful work is the combination of your passion and your purpose.

What is your purpose? It’s what you are designed to do. It's a mix of your talent, your skills, your abilities, and your temperament.

This series is not all about your passion. It's about walking a path toward finding your own meaningful work. It’s about figuring out your deep interests, but it’s also about figuring out what you’re good at and what you have to give. It’s about increasing your knowledge and your skills. This is project-based homeschooling.

As human beings, we are motivated to share our passion and we are motivated to fill a need in the world — where those two things come together, we’ll find our meaningful work.

But today we’re talking about passion.

What is your passion? It's probably one of three things:

- Something that deeply interests you.

It gets you excited. It holds your attention. It puts you in the flow. You will natter on about it to anyone who’s willing to listen. You stay interested in it over a long period of time.

- Something that riles you up.

You care so deeply about it, you want more than anything to make people understand. It infuriates you. You will climb up on a soapbox and preach about it to whoever will listen. If you were given a million dollars to donate, this is where you would invest.

- Something that you are great at.

It feels good to rock at something. People ask you for advice, and you know how to give it. You have mastered something difficult — or it comes so naturally to you, it feels like play. Preferably both: it comes naturally and you press on to the harder stuff. People admire and respect you, and that feels really good. You know you have something to contribute.

Your passion could be any one of these or a combination. The important thing is that it affects you in a deep way. It penetrates the humdrum surface of life and touches you emotionally. It wakes you up. It makes you feel more strongly. It gives you energy.

Passions give you a reason to develop your skills and abilities. They make you want to be your best self.

Finding your passion isn’t like finding the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. It isn’t a once-in-a-lifetime event. You might have a lifelong passion, but you might have a passion that eventually fades. You might have more than one deep interest, and they might overlap in interesting ways. One deep interest might lead you on to a brand new passion. This is project-based homeschooling: a road of interest and inquiry that takes you to new places.

If you don't already know what your passion is, how do you find it?

I say this all the time: children can only work with the raw material they’ve been given. If you give them a chaotic life with a lot of distractions and transitions, TV blaring, video games 24/7, they are highly unlikely to spontaneously begin writing poetry and building a solar-operated windmill. If the physical materials they have available amount to broken crayons and cheap paper, they are unlikely to build a model of the Eiffel Tower. And so on.

So we focus on giving them great raw materials. We make sure they have what they need to build the life we envision for them. We focus on helping them experience a balanced, whole life. We prioritize our values. And we try to live that life ourselves, because the best way to encourage them to walk a certain path is to walk it ourselves.

Now think about the raw materials you’ve given yourself. If you looked at an ordinary week, what’s in there?

Think about the things you care about most. (Go look at your pinterest boards.) Then think about how much of that is in your ordinary week.

How much of what you care about most exists in your daily life?

Think about how you silently define yourself inside your own head and heart. “I love the outdoors.” “I love literature.” “I am an artist.” Then think about how you feed those interests during your ordinary week. How often are you outdoors? How often are you reading literature? How often are you creating?

If you care about something and you’re not prioritizing it, that’s a good place for you to start.

I can already hear some of you saying, “but...” — Stop. This is part of why you can’t get going. There is no need for you to start applying the brakes before we’re even out of the driveway. Yes, your life is full of things over which you have no control. Yes, it is highly unlikely that you will be the next poet laureate. That’s okay. It doesn’t matter. Shut those thoughts down. Banish them. Because pursuing what speaks to you, no matter WHAT it is, is the path in the right direction. Get on it. Start walking. It doesn’t necessarily lead in the direction you’re anticipating. But it definitely leads somewhere.

If you are drawing a complete blank right now because you have no interests, nothing riles you up, and you’re not great at anything, that’s okay. I have good news for you. The world is an endlessly fascinating place full of interesting things to think about and do, full of wonderful stuff other people want to show you and tell you about, and chock full of stuff that needs to be done. This is what project-based homeschooling demonstrates to kids, and you can demonstrate it to yourself. You’re just out of practice (or you never had any experience) interacting with the world with interest, engagement, and curiosity. But you can learn (or relearn) how to do it.

Think back to what I said about raw material. If you’re passionless, then you have an empty bucket. We need to throw some stuff in there.

“Wait. I just want to know what my passion is. I don’t want to do things.”

I love you, you kidder. You know you’re going to have to “do things” to change your life, right? Don’t start freaking out — it’s not that bad.

Let’s go back to the bucket. Peer into it. What raw materials are you working with? Are you doing the same sorts of things and exposing yourself to the same sorts of things (I’m thinking books, magazines, TV shows, not diseases) and going the same sorts of places and talking to the same sorts of people? Well, you see where that’s gotten you. You’re feeling a little listless and uninspired. You’ve lost the thread of the plot. You need to break out of your old patterns to see things in a fresh way.

- Read something different.

Go to the new nonfiction section at the library and bring home three books on any subject. Don't just randomly pull books off the shelf; read the titles and pick three books that look interesting. You’re not committing to anything; don’t panic. You’re just browsing. You don't have to read them front to back. Just skim through them and read whatever you want. Do this every week and in a month you will have read through a dozen books on various topics. Just picking which books interest you more will wake up that part of your brain that knows what you like. And reading new information and ideas will wake up the part of your brain that has opinions.

- Go new places.

I guarantee there’s someplace in your community you’ve never been before, no matter how small your town is. Find it. Go there.

Look at a map of your area and pick a place to go. It could be a museum. It could be a college campus. It could be a pocket of prairie, a new walking path, or a nature center. It could be a new area of town with a library branch you’ve never visited and a cafe where you’ve never eaten.

You might think (guiltily) that you haven’t really plumbed the depths of the places you *do* go. That’s okay. You can still do that. But right now we’re focusing on breaking free from old patterns. We’re like a little fishing boat stuck in the ice sheet. We’re going to pick-axe our way out so we can float free again.

- Talk to new people.

If you suffer from crippling shyness, this is obviously going to be more difficult. But you could do it online as well as in person. Strike up a conversation with someone on twitter. Write comments on blogs you always lurk on.

If you don’t suffer from crippling shyness, start saying hello to people. An easy way to break into chatting with strangers: say thank you. Say thank you to the people who do things for you all the time, like your librarian, the person who bags your groceries, your garbage collector. Say thank you to the person who serves your food. Look someone in the face and say thank you or have a nice day.

When you’re standing around at tae kwon do or ballet, introduce yourself to one of the other parents. As long as you’re doing this, say hello to the parent you would normally never talk to.

The people closest to you, even if they’re perfectly lovely, form a sort of climate that you live in. (If they’re not perfectly lovely, it might be a stormy climate.) Put yourself in touch with some new people — online and in real life. It’s not about making new friends. It’s just about changing your usual perspective.

- Say yes to something you’d ordinarily say no to.

Just like exercise builds muscle by tearing muscle, you can grow by stressing yourself out a little. You’ve already seen everything that exists inside your comfort zone. I’m not saying you have to leap right to public speaking or kidney donation, but maybe go to a social event you would normally invent an excuse to avoid. Maybe when someone asks for volunteers, raise your hand. When your neighbor asks if you want to go along to her book club, say yes. When you see a flyer at the library for an interesting class or seminar you would normally consider and dismiss, actually sign up. Get a babysitter and go.

- Change your routine.

This is the easiest of all. You don’t even have to leave the house. Just take your regular routine and shake it up. Go to bed 15 minutes later or 15 minutes earlier. Get up 15 minutes earlier. (I know you can’t get up 15 minutes later, right?) Go outside and walk around the house three times after lunch. Always go to the library in the afternoon? Go in the morning. Always go to the grocery store on Saturday morning? Go on Wednesday afternoon. And so on.

Prove to yourself that you can change your life, even if it’s in small, random ways. Pry yourself out of that rut.

You can see how this works. If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always gotten. To get something different, we have to do something different. To have new ideas and information to work with, we have to toss some new stuff in our bucket. To think of ourselves in new ways, we have to show ourselves that we can be different people.

You don’t have to keep this up forever. But if you’re devoid of ideas about what interests you, breaking free from your old patterns of living will inject some new energy into your life. And you need new energy. You need to stick new ideas in your brain. You need to look at the world with new eyes. If nothing interests you, nothing riles you up, and you’re not great at anything, you need to shake things up. There’s nothing wrong with you, and there’s nothing wrong with the world. You’ve just been interacting in a way that’s not working for you.

Pay attention to those voices in your head saying “no, no, no, no, no” — they’re telling you something. Pay attention to when they start clamoring. Because that’s interesting. What are they so worried about? Listen to what they say and consider whether it’s the truth. “NO, you cannot be interested in mime. You will have no friends.” “NO, it can’t be knitting — everyone knits. It’t not different enough.” “NO, not politics. The family will be upset.” And so on. If you’ve gotten this far in life and you’re still wrestling with what interests you, then it’s possible you’ve picked up signals from someone that what you care about isn’t okay for some reason. It’s dorky or inconsequential or not important enough or too new-agey, insignificant, or childish. And we already know, when we pick up on these signals, we tend to take over broadcasting them to ourselves. We take our interests and push them down or throw them away or stuff them in the back of the closet because they’re dumb or embarrassing or not worth anyone’s time or not spiritual enough or whatever.

“Finding your passion” works if your passion is something you misplaced in the house, maybe in the couch cushions. But we’re probably going to have to work harder than that. It might take real effort to discover our deep interests. We have to go places we’ve never gone, talk to new people, read new books, think about new ideas. We might have to fight our own inner cranks. So we’re stalking our passion like the elusive prey that it is. Your old patterns didn't teach you enough about yourself. So we’re going to change those patterns.

People get stuck — because they don’t know what they like. Because they don’t want to waste time doing the wrong thing.

But if you don’t get started, you stay at square one. You don’t get anywhere. Doing ANYTHING at all gets you data. You are finding out more about what you like, what the world needs, and what you can do.

Everything you do matters. The doing matters. Thinking about it? Not so much. You can’t learn anything by thinking hard about what you want to do, even if you do it for weeks, months, or years. You can learn a lot by doing absolutely anything. And what you learn you can take with you as you find your way toward your own meaningful work.

You are working on becoming your most authentic self. You are discovering things about yourself and about the world. You are learning to enjoy learning. You are learning to dig for the interesting parts of whatever you’re doing. You are learning to talk to people and find out what they know or what they need or what they care about. You are acquiring knowledge, skills, habits, and attitudes that you will carry with you into your future.

You can’t give up when you try a few things and they don’t resonate. “I GUESS THAT’S JUST IT FOR ME. I DON’T HAVE A PASSION.” Maybe your passion hasn’t been invented yet. Maybe you’re still a little too close to shore. Maybe your passion is going to be a unique mash-up of two things you haven’t tried yet.

Here is your consolation prize: Even if you haven’t found that passionate interest yet, just looking for it can be a great life. If you have no idea of what you want to do, it doesn't matter. You focus instead on becoming a better version of yourself — a version of yourself that is more likely to discover deep interests. Being interested, seeking knowledge, meeting people and asking them deep questions. Having new experiences. Constantly connecting with people to learn new skills or help someone else master the first steps of a new skill. This is a life worth living. This is a person who at the very least has found one passion: Seeking an authentic life.

People in the PBH forum are sharing their baby steps and their small wins. Need encouragement? Come join in.

Outtakes from PBH found in my writing journal:

If you get hung up on the superficial, you can’t make progress on what’s deep and meaningful.

Let go of your ego about what your child’s progress/results/products look like to others. It stands in the way of true understanding.

If YOU really understand what your child is doing/what they have accomplished, you will be able to show it to others and help them understand — and hopefully it will lessen your need for their approval.

You want your child to be self-confident and be discerning about whose opinion they respect. Embody that value in your own life.

Let your children have their own ideas, recognize their own possibilities, find their own way, measure their own progress. If they don’t learn these skills now, when will they learn them?

Let’s see what we got up to on facebook this week!

There are (as usual) a few posts pondering the purpose of education…

“[C]ollege students enjoying a four-year paid vacation courtesy of their parents are merely a symptom of a larger problem. … [A] university degree unaccompanied by a gain in knowledge or skills is an empty achievement indeed. For students (parentally funded or not) who have been coasting through college — and for American universities that have been demanding less work, offering more goodies and charging higher tuition — the party may soon be over.” — Does College Put Kids on a ‘Party Pathway’?

“Less than three years ago, I graduated high school. I was a driven student who scored a 100 per cent average, served as the students’ council president and class valedictorian, earned over 16 scholarships/awards, etc. The bottom line is that I was a high achiever, but I mistakenly defined achievement in a way most do: with my GPA. It was only until a couple of years ago, when I began to question my own educational career, that I realized something profound: The academic portion of my high school life was spent in the wrong way, with cloudy motivations. I treated schooling and education synonymously.” — An A+ Student Regrets His Grades

See my post earlier in the week with its long excerpt from The Trouble with Bright Kids and the quotes in last week’s round-up about the scourge of college admissions. All of these are saying the same basic thing: Our kids are only racing for the prize. They’re not in it for the learning. They’re looking at their education in the shallowest way possible and that’s our fault, because we only care about the grade, the prize, the degree.

Something needs to change. But which parent is going to be brave enough to say, forget about that — just learn something you care about?

That last article reminded me of my own post about why I don’t worry about my kids’ screen time — because “what they consume, they produce.”

Loved this article about Dan Pink’s new book:

“We have a lot of learned behavior of compliance, and hunger for external rewards and no real engagement.”

Oops, that harkens back to what we were just talking about. And more:

“I defy you to find a two year old who is not engaged.”

“Even a fifth-grader has the wherewithal to say, ‘This is what I want to learn; this is what I want to accomplish; this is what I want to get better at.’”

Love that last one. I don’t know if it’s true, though. Sadly, we may be causing them to lose that knowledge by fifth grade.

Okay, cheer up. Loved this article by Lisa about bucking the popular trends and doing what’s right for your kid:

“So many folks, related or not, feel the need to challenge your child, educational and parenting choices if they don’t match their expectations. Kind of like unwanted pregnancy advice.” — Tip #6 for Raising a Potential Thiel Fellow: Go Against the Grain

Amy shared her thoughts on the PBH for Grown-Ups series in a post that includes photos of her making spaces and her own destructive self-talk:

I admitted my personal big negative self-talk hurdle: “If my passion/interest/project isn't earning any income, it’s not worth the investment of money or time taken from the family.” This is something I deal with as the at-home non-wage-earning parent. It’s completely self-generated. I don’t hear it from anyone but myself. But always, in the back of my mind, is the constant circular mumble: Is there a way to make money from this but I don’t want to figure out an at-home business it would kill my joy I don’t have time for that I’m working quite a bit as it is but why take a class just for fun it doesn’t benefit anyone but me that’s so selfish is there a way to make money from this? — Grown-Up Projects @ Salamander Dreams

Sylvia shared beautiful photos of her space and the changes she made after reading the post about creating a supportive environment:

“i realized, i needed a space. just as lori's post encouraged me to, a space that works for me in this season of my life right now. so i got to work.” — the writer’s space @ artsyants

Are you still with me? Then you deserve a couple of purely happy links:

Alan Watts’ wonderful essay about doing what you love turned into a cartoon:

“Better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing than a long life spent in a miserable way.” — What If Money Was No Object? by Alan Watts

And a wonderful short video about picture book writer and artist Oliver Jeffers:

“I feel a sense of responsibility to enjoy it as much as I can.” — Oliver Jeffers Author Film 2013

The sensation of seeing all these facebook posts at once (and I won’t lie to you, there are a couple more I didn’t even include here) is like having all the ice in your supersize cup suddenly avalanche into your face. If you would rather sip it daintily all week, follow me on facebook. Unless you like the ice slam, in which case — enjoy!

This post is part of my Monday series on PBH for Grown-ups — you can see all of the posts here.

When you decide to move forward and start, you will have to overcome a series of obstacles. Most of them will be very low barriers — about curb height. But they stop nearly everyone. You will have to step over these low barriers in order to make any progress.

The very first barrier is you. You are the first person who will get in your own way and prevent you from doing your meaningful work.

One of the ways you do this is by anticipating what other people are going to say and jumping in to say it yourself first. It’s a real time-saver!

- I don’t have any talent.

- It’s wrong to be ambitious.

- I should focus on my family.

- My house is a mess; that should come first.

- I shouldn’t spend time/energy/money on myself.

- There’s no time anyway.

- The kids deserve my time while they’re little/this age/in their teens.

- I’m too tired and I never exercise. My health should come first.

- I’m being selfish.

- I don’t even know what I want to do. I don’t have a passion.

- I shouldn‘t do this for myself until I have everything else working right: the house, the kids...

Inertia works like this: A body at rest tends to stay at rest. A body in motion tends to stay in motion. If you’re sitting still, you’re going to have to push a little harder at the beginning to get going. Once you get going, it’ll be easier.

This defeating self-talk is one way to save a lot of time and just quit before you ever start.

Let’s remember why we’re doing this in the first place:

- Because we want to live a life of purpose and meaning.

- Because we want to make a contribution.

- Because we want to set an example for our children.

Is it selfish to invest time/money/space/energy in yourself?

I could go down your personal list of self-defeating talk and address each item one at a time. Your family is a garden and you are the soil from which they grow. If you don’t feed the soil, it gets leached of its essential nutrients. What you try to grow there gets weaker and scrawnier and more prone to disease. And so on.

But we need to just shortcut this whole process. Every time you start talking this self-defeating crap to yourself, imagine that your child is saying it to you about himself. If you don’t have children, imagine that someone you love is saying it about herself. If someone you loved talked this way, you would leap to their defense. Why? Because they matter. And because the reason we’re on this earth is to figure out what we have to offer and how to give it.

You matter. The world needs what you have to give.

Perfection is impossible. If you’re going to wait until your house, your life, your weight, and your children’s lives are perfect, go find a comfy seat, because you’re never going to start. You may as well put your feet up.

You are helping your children live a life of purpose and meaning by striving to live a life of purpose and meaning yourself.

When this drumbeat of negativity starts in your head, stand up, stretch, take a few deep breaths, and then tell yourself: It’s okay. I matter, too. The world needs me, too. I forge the path my children will walk. I don’t have to be perfect; I just have to be willing.

And know this: When you begin to live a life with more meaning and more purpose — when you begin to do your own meaningful work — you will have more energy. You will feel better about yourself. You will be happier. You will have more to offer your children, and your advice to them will be predicated on your actual experience. Instead of taking away from your life, this work will add to your life. Because you feel better about yourself, and about life in general, you may find yourself on an upward spiral. You are reframing your life. You are nudging your priorities into line. You are focusing on what matters, and that will change your life.

But before you even begin, you have to give yourself permission. Permission to care. Permission to try. Permission to fail. Permission to be imperfect. Permission to care about yourself as well as the people you love, so you can do more, be more, and give more. Permission to be whole, flawed, real, and embarrassingly out here where people can see you.

It’s not going to be easy. But it is doable, and that is all we require.

The whole problem with people is … they know what matters, but they don’t choose it … The hardest thing on earth is choosing what matters. — Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees