Why "find your passion" might not be good advice

Since school, I believed I needed to find "the thing" - my passion. The ONE thing I was meant to do. I tried to convince myself I was deeply passionate about different things - and only those things. But honestly? I wasn't. Not in the way I thought it should feel. And I felt wrong for it. Like something was missing. Like everyone else had figured something out that I hadn't.

Years later, working with senior women in career transition, I see the same pattern playing out - only with higher stakes.

A client of mine - accomplished, successful, with a long and linear career behind her - had known for a while that something was off. She knew she needed to acknowledge it and do something about it. But instead of mapping options and experimenting, she searched. She searched for THE ONE thing she was meant to do next. The perfect answer that would justify “leaving behind everything she had built”.

And in that search, something happened: she went in circles. Everything, when analyzed long enough and in enough depth, can be questioned. Certainty - which is already hard to come by in life - became impossible to find. Her busy schedule got more overwhelming. The time she did invest in planning her transition? Spent going in circles, instead of designing small experiments to test real possibilities.

This is what "find your passion" does when taken too literally. It can paralyze.

The problem with making passion the goal

To some extent, I understand the appeal of the advice. Work does feel easier when we enjoy what we do. Time goes faster when we are immersed in a topic we find interesting. We tend to be better at work we actually like.

But where it becomes problematic is when passion becomes the prerequisite. When we decide, we cannot move until we have found it. Especially for accomplished professionals in significant career transitions - what I call "career redesigns" - the pressure to identify the passion BEFORE making any move creates a particular kind of trap.

Because if a career built over one or two decades is to be changed, that change should be for something that makes sense. Something they are passionate about. Something they are meant to do. And ideally, it should all be figured out in advance.

I'm sorry to disappoint, but it doesn't work that way.

Why passion cannot be figured out in theory

As David Epstein writes in Range, the most successful people often have the most winding paths. What looks like a distraction or detour from the outside is often exactly the experience that prepares them for what comes next. Passion, more often than not, is not where the journey starts. It is where it leads.

Take a concrete example. Someone convinced that her passion is to own and run an artisanal bakery - boutique, natural ingredients, that specific place in the city that people who care about quality come to. So she tries it. Asks the owner down the road if she could help on weekends. And then she discovers the not-so-pretty parts of the business: the very early starts, the difficult customers, the parts of the business that have nothing to do with bread.

What she thought would be her passion turns out, in practice, to be not quite what she imagined.

A client of mine - entrepreneurial, creative, many side projects - had tested several business ideas she loved in theory. In one case, she genuinely enjoyed buying and restoring antiquities. But she hated having to sell them. And to have a business, it has to be sold. The passion did not survive contact with reality.

This is not a reason to stop trying; it is just a reason to try differently.

The analysis paralysis trap

There is another dimension to this: the pressure to find the passion leads directly to ‘analysis paralysis’. Evaluating (in theory) different potential passions, weighing each one, trying to determine which should be pursued - at the expense of actually pursuing any of them.

And as Bill Burnett and Dave Evans write in Designing Your Life (a very much recommended read!): happiness is not about finding your "one true calling." It is about building a life where multiple good things are possible. You do not need one perfect answer. You need options.

This is particularly relevant for the women I work with - accomplished, experienced, with skills and interests that rarely fit neatly into one box. Many do not have a single passion. They have several interests, multiple areas of competence, and no desire to spend the next chapter of their career doing only one thing. And that is not a problem. That is actually a strength - especially in a world where portfolio careers are increasingly not just possible, but a desirable path.

We are not the same person we were

There is something else worth considering: we change. Not just our circumstances or our careers - we change as people. Different experiences, places, and relationships permanently alter who we are, what we believe, and how we see the world. The person who started that linear career twenty years ago is most likely not the same person sitting at the desk today, wondering what comes next.

And with that change comes something important: interests change too. What did not interest us at 25 might genuinely fascinate us at 45. What felt irrelevant before a particular life experience might feel deeply meaningful after it. We discover new things through new places, new people, new chapters of life - and those discoveries can become genuine interests, and eventually, with time and engagement, real passions.

Which is another reason why searching for THE passion right now, based on who you are right now, with the experiences you have had so far, is inherently limited. The version of you that exists in five years, after new experiments and new experiences, might be passionate about something you haven't even encountered yet.

This is not uncertainty to fear, but rather a possibility to embrace.

What to do instead

Herminia Ibarra's research on career transitions shows something important: we do not think our way into a new kind of work - we act our way into it, and experiments precede clarity.

Which means: instead of waiting to find the passion first, reverse the process. Map the things you are genuinely curious about - not necessarily passionate about yet - and identify the smallest possible next step to test each one. Not a career change. Not a full commitment. A test. A conversation. One weekend.

Passion, when it comes, tends to develop through engagement. Through mastery. Through discovering you are good at something and that it matters. It is rarely the starting point - it is what builds over time when curiosity meets action.

What I have found working with senior women is that instead of searching for passion, a more useful question is: what actually matters to me in THIS season of my life? Meaningful work means something different to everyone, and it needs to be clearly defined - not in the abstract, but specifically. Meaningful to you, in your current circumstances, with your particular values and needs.

That intersection - of what you enjoy, what you are good at, and what people will pay for - is a more reliable guide than passion alone.

Questions to ask yourself

So instead of asking "What am I passionate about?" - try these:

• What am I genuinely curious about, even if I wouldn't call it a passion yet?

• What work have I done (in any context) that gave me energy rather than drained me?

• What actually matters to me in this season of my life? What do I need my work to give me - and what am I no longer willing to compromise on?

• What is one small experiment I could run in the next 2-4 weeks to test one possibility - without committing to it forever?

• If I stopped waiting to find the perfect answer and just picked one thing to try, what would that one thing be? And finally: what is actually stopping me from starting it?

The permission you are waiting for is this: you do not need to find your passion before you begin. You begin, and through beginning it, through trying, adjusting, and learning, clarity comes. The passion ( if it comes) tends to follow.

Stop searching for the one thing. Start with curiosity. Design small experiments. See what emerges.

Because more often than not, that is how it actually works.