Are your interests all over the place like mine?
Here’s two simple questions I came up with to help you identify your passion and expertise.
❓ PASSION: Do you seem think about it when no one else is?
If we’re passionate about something, we often find connections and applications in everyday scenarios when most wouldn’t.
Three people in the same conversation can see it three different ways:
• Time to discuss to-dos and tactics
• Opportunity to teach and collaborate
• Chance to inspire and energize
The key here is to view things through as broad of a lens as possible. Are you passionate about formatting documents properly, or are you passionate about aesthetics and UX?
❓ EXPERTISE: Do you have opinions when you read something on the subject?
To clarify, I don’t mean general or uninformed opinions like “I don’t like that font” or “Baloney, no one can know how a black hole works!”
But if you find you’re always itching to add nuance or detail or informed objections to what others are saying, that probably means you
• Know a lot about the subject
• Have something valuable to add
❓ BONUS: Do you generate new ideas around it without meaning to?
New ideas require both knowledge and unknown quantities of rumination. If you come up with a new idea about something, you’ve probably expended a lot of brain cycles to make that happen.
Note: It’s okay if it turns out someone else has had it already. It’s new to you if you didn’t originally hear it from somewhere else.
Note 2: Ideas don’t need to be well-formed. You might not be able to do anything with them until they age a bit. But they’re there.