Discover Your Calling: The One Thing You Love Doing More Than Anything Else

First, let’s take money out of the equation.

Let’s say money is not an issue; you don’t need to have it to do what you like — what’s that one thing you can see yourself doing for the rest of your life?

Knowing your interests and passions in life can be rewarding. It can help make you feel you’re in a better place. This even makes you feel like you won’t have to work a single day in your life.

Imagine yourself waking up every morning and walking to your made-up yoga studio inside a two-story bamboo house in the middle of a tropical rainforest in Thailand.

Or go to a remote community school every day across the jungle of an underdeveloped country to help teach kids who do not have access to quality education.

Or run your own little bookshop and indulge in the smell of wood with notes of vanilla, coffee, or chocolate in your surrounding. All those while spending days on end reading books you love.

Or travel from one place to another and discover new places, cultures, and people around the world.

Or manage your own cozy coffee shop where you brew cups of warm love and make cute latte arts.

Or establish a non-profit organization and work endlessly for causes that are close to your heart.

Can you see yourself doing one of those things and more?

While a lot of people have already figured out what they like to do, there are also those who are still discovering what their interests and passions are — it’s a long process that can take decades, and even then, it’s a continuous process and discovery.

If you are the latter, I asked ChatGPT (so you don’t have to) to come up with simple ways how to explore and discover your passions in life.

Here they are.

Take note of the highs

Take note of the things and activities that make you feel fulfilled, happy, or energized. Is it giving you a different kind of high when you are in the middle of doing it? Does it give you a complete relief when you’re done with the task?

More often than not, doing what you enjoy releases dopamine, neurotransmitter produced by the hypothalamus, a small region of the brain that helps you feel pleasure. 

Pay attention to what you give your time to

Once you notice a different kind of high from the activities you have been doing, take note if those are the things that you want to spend a lot of time with. Will you be spending more time to improve yourself in that area? Do you want to do it more next time?

Having the drive to do those things is important to be able to keep doing it for a long time. It should be something that is worth spending your energy and time with without completly draining you. Instead, it should fuel you to do more.

Revisit Your Childhood

If you are still unsure of what you are passionate about, you can revisit and reminisce about your childhood. Think about the things that made you happy when you were growing up. Has it resonated in your adult life? Is it something that you still like to do now that you’re grown up?

Understanding what you like to do for the rest of your life can be hard work. But it is not something definite. Ultimately, as life goes on, your choices, interests, and passion, change over time.

It is definitely okay to jump from doing one thing to another as long as it fulfills you and makes you feel better. At the end of the day, nothing in life is written in stone. You have a lifetime to figure things out and do what you love to do in that specific moment.