For five years in my past life as an accountant, I was good at my job.
I was technically competent. Passing exams. Hitting targets. Doing everything the script said to do. But I felt nothing. Not burnt out, not miserable in a dramatic way. Just flat. Like I was running a programme that belonged to someone else.
The advice I kept getting was some version of “find your passion and the rest will follow.” So I looked. And looked. And couldn’t find it, which made me feel like something was wrong with me rather than with the advice.
Turns out the advice was wrong.
Today in 4 minutes or less, you’ll learn:
✔️ Why “find your passion” keeps people stuck – and what to do instead
✔️ The three-variable formula that actually creates satisfaction
✔️ The smallest possible first move when you don’t know where to start
Doable ideas 💭
Pick one thing you’re mildly curious about – not passionate about, just curious – and find the smallest possible experiment to run this week.
Not a career change. Not a six-month course. Just something that costs you an afternoon.
Shadow someone for a day. Take a one-session taster class. Watch three hours of YouTube on a skill you’ve half-wanted to try. Read the first chapter of a book on a topic adjacent to what you do now.
Before I committed to music therapy, I did a short introductory course and shadowed a music therapist for one day. One day. That was enough to know the feeling was different that something in me responded to the work in a way accounting never triggered.
You’re not betting your life on it. You’re just checking whether the feeling shows up when you get closer. If it doesn’t, that’s useful data. It narrows the search.
Run the experiment. See what the data says.
Reflections 🪞
Is there something you’ve been curious about but haven’t tested yet – and what’s the smallest experiment that would tell you whether it’s worth going further?
Mindfulness 🧘🏻♀️
Cal Newport wrote something that reframed how I think about this entirely.
In “So Good They Can’t Ignore You”, he argues that passion doesn’t precede skill – it follows it. You don’t find your passion and then get good at it. You get good at something, and the satisfaction that comes from genuine competence is what most people are mislabelling as passion.
It’s a clean reversal of the cultural script. And mostly, I think he’s right.
But my own story complicates it slightly. Because I was good at accounting. Genuinely competent. And I still felt nothing.
So competence alone isn’t the whole equation.
Here’s what I think is actually going on. Satisfaction – the feeling people are chasing when they say they want passion – doesn’t come from competence alone. It comes from three things overlapping at once.
Competence. You’re genuinely good at it, or getting there. The skill is real.
Meaning. What you’re doing feels useful to someone in a way that matters to you. In a specific way. You can see the impact.
Energy return. The work gives you something back. Not every day, not every session, but on balance, doing this leaves you with more than it costs you.
Accounting gave me competence. That was it. One out of three. And one out of three, no matter how developed, doesn’t create satisfaction. It creates a very well-executed emptiness.
Music therapy gave me all three at once. Not on day one – competence took years to build. But the meaning was there from the first shadowing day. The energy return showed up early. And as the competence grew, something that felt like passion emerged behind it.
That’s not passion as a feeling I discovered. That’s alignment I built – slowly, experimentally, one small test at a time.
So if you’re waiting to feel something before you start, you might be waiting for the wrong signal. The feeling doesn’t come first. It comes after you’ve gotten close enough to something to find out whether your three variables are in play.
Stop asking: what am I passionate about?
Start asking: what could I get genuinely good at, that feels useful to someone, that gives me more energy than it takes?
That’s a question you can actually act on today. And the answer doesn’t require a leap. It just requires the smallest possible experiment – and the honesty to pay attention to what the data tells you.
Ideas Worth Pondering 🧠
Being kind to others is mostly about your actions. Being kind to yourself is mostly about your thoughts.
– James Clear
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