Finding One’s True Passion

There is always this ques­tion among the youth, espe­cial­ly stu­dents: How do I find my true pas­sion?. From my expe­ri­ence I can say that it evolves. Ini­tial­ly, a cer­tain inter­est might rub off on you with some­one you have inter­act­ed with. If you inter­act with a hun­dred peo­ple, there will be hun­dred dif­fer­ent kinds of rub offs, espe­cial­ly if you inter­act with inter­est­ing peo­ple. Friends you inter­act with in reg­u­lar day to day life are dif­fer­ent, I am not talk­ing about them, but if you inter­act with inter­est­ing peo­ple — and the more num­ber of inter­est­ing peo­ple you inter­act with, the more the rub-off is. The you will start feel­ing “Hey, this is for me, this is for me, this is for me.” But, if you pur­sue that rub off to some extent, you will feel “This is not for me.” And then you come to a point. So it is a tri­al and error method, by rub­bing off with suf­fi­cient inter­est­ing peo­ple. Say if you are a small town per­son — it so hap­pened with me, I was from Thuthuko­di, I came to a big town, and then I saw that the num­ber of inter­est­ing peo­ple expo­nen­tial­ly grew! Then every­thing becomes inter­est­ing! Ini­tial­ly every­thing is inter­est­ing, and after some time you come to your own nor­mal. And your nor­mal increas­es, because you have shift­ed from a small­er town to a big­ger town. And that is called expo­sure. Your expo­sure grows and then you find your own nor­mal. You should not decide upon your pas­sion before that — if you decide upon your pas­sion, what will hap­pen is it will break. Then you will feel dis­ap­point­ed “Oh no! I thought that was my pas­sion!” Actu­al­ly noth­ing hap­pens. It is a process of growth. When things break, growth hap­pens. But what is the prob­lem today? Say for exam­ple, we are decid­ing upon the pur­chase of a bike or a car. We eval­u­ate many dif­fer­ent options, don’t we? Till the point where you decide to buy a bike, you would not even have noticed that a Yama­ha bike is dif­fer­ent from a Hon­da bike — you would not even have noticed this dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion. You would just have classed every­thing as “bike”, but after you decide to have your own bike, you will start noticing,”Oh, mileage, main­te­nance, this that..” and the greater the num­ber of peo­ple you inter­act with, the more var­ied the inputs you receive! Every­one will rec­om­mend what is best in their opinion.For exam­ple, when peo­ple pre­pare for GRE with the aim of going to study in the US, decid­ing upon a list of uni­ver­si­ties seems extreme­ly com­plex, because every­one rec­om­mends their own! And that is not wrong, that’s the thrill right? That is the process of growth or expan­sion of thought process. Till that point, all those details would not have been vis­i­ble to you. It is only after that point that the details start becom­ing vis­i­ble to you. So, it is because you think that every step is a deci­sion point that this process seems so com­plex. One opin­ion you hear and you decide,”Ah! This is the best.” The very next per­son who you inter­act with will say,” That is no use. This is the best.” And that’s it! Your mind goes for a toss! Many peo­ple think this is con­fu­sion. It is not con­fu­sion, it is a very valid process of expan­sion of thought process, expan­sion of your men­tal space. The same thing hap­pens with your pas­sion, it expands your men­tal space and if you have done it suf­fi­cient­ly well, kept up with it, you will final­ly come to a point where you feel, “Okay, this bike suits my pur­pose, and suits me.” You will be all the wis­er for hav­ing gone through the process. But at every point in time if you have made a deci­sion, you would have gone through a mis­er­able expe­ri­ence — it would not have been just a process, it would have been a mis­er­able expe­ri­ence. You would feel con­fused and agi­tat­ed, because you would have turned every step of the process into a deci­sion point, and you would would have got­ten a knock on the head at every step! Oth­er­wise it is just a process, a nat­ur­al process, at the end of which, you come to a rea­son­able judge­ment, and you will be hap­py with it. The same thing applies to your pas­sion. Try­ing many things is not wrong at all. It’s a process of exper­i­men­ta­tion before you arrive at what is best for you.

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