Finding Your True Passion. NOW!

1. Find something that makes you happy right now.

You do things all of the time.  Some of these things are required and some of these things are activities or events that bring you happiness, and you HAVE FUN doing it.  Think about what you do in your day, week, or month that brings you the MOST happiness.

For me, I have been working at my synagogue since I was 13 years old and a few years ago, I realized how much I LOVED being there and how much I LOVED teaching Jewish history and Hebrew to younger kids, so I decided to explore this.  I left my childhood dream of becoming a public school teacher because that no longer brought me happiness (passions change as I will talk about later) and started to explore becoming a Jewish educator.

I spent four months at the beginning of my junior year studying abroad in my favorite place in the entire world, Jerusalem, Israel.  I was able to study 4,000 years of Jewish History and the basics of the ancient Hebrew language. I was able to travel everywhere from the tip of the North of Israel to the tip of the South and explored the Holocaust curriculum through a week all throughout Poland.  THIS CHANGED EVERYTHING. I was more enlightened and I realized how much joy I experienced in this place and how much more committed I was to spreading the knowledge of this history and spreading my love for the place I call home. When I came back, I realized that when I was at work, teaching kids topics that I was truly passionate about made me the happiest I could have been at the time.  And you can too. The moral of this story is that I found what in my day at the time made me happy.

Now I want you to take out a piece of paper.

Ready?

I want you to reflect on your typical day or your typical week and pull out and write down different thing(s) where you experience happiness greater than the rest of your day.  Now look at your list and think about what you can turn into a major, what can you turn into a career.

I truly believe that your passion can change, you see it in my story here but I want you and teens or adults just like you to find happiness in your day and realize and pursue a passion that you have right now.  I preach this so much because I believe that time not spent pushing you towards your goals and your dreams is time wasted. I’m sorry to say, but it is.

So why waste years of your life in a job you hate so much that is making you sick physically and mentally even when it brings good money?  Why waste years of your precious time, money, and education to major in something that you don’t even like and you are majoring in it because other people told you to?

Would you jump off a bridge because someone told you to? Probably not.

2. Realize that this is your passion currently.

Passion is a feeling of intense enthusiasm towards or compelling desire for someone or something. You do not just develop a passion later in life, in fact, while you are reading this, you do have a passion. You just may not know about it. No one ever said that at a certain age is when you experience your passion.  No one has ever said that you have to wait until 27 or 37 or even 47 in order to start your business or start your teaching career or start your road to becoming a professional sports player.

I emphasize the word currently because you may not have the same drive for a specific something for the rest of your life.  You may not enjoy playing soccer or baseball or football in 10 years, you may not enjoy teaching younger kids or even older kids in 20 years and that is okay.  I like to believe that we have seasons of our life in which we have different situations and different thinking based off of age, experience and what we have done.  In these seasons, we focus on what we need during that time and what we want to do with the “rest of our lives”.

I thought that I wanted to become a teacher at a Jewish private school in America, and then I thought I wanted to be an English teacher in Israel, and then I thought that my passion for Judaism could be my side hustle so I wanted to become a public school teacher once again, and then I wanted to be a psychologist, then I wanted to be a school counselor, and then I wanted to be a life coach, and then I got frustrated and then magic happened.  

After my semester abroad, I had the biggest epiphany in my entire life.  I finally found my dream career that I was beyond excited about. It would combine my dreams of becoming a teacher, a psychologist, a life coach, and my passion for Judaism.  

3. Run with it.

My favorite step.  When you find a passion at whatever age it may be,  go into full force. Make an intense plan and run so fast towards your dreams.  Take MASSIVE ACTION. Run with it like you are running away from a wildfire. Run so fast that you are unable to stop and you start to feel like you are flying.  When you discover your passion, there will be a fire ignited inside of you, you will want to get up every morning, you will want to head to work and the grind, the hustle that once felt like a drag or was exhausting will be no more and the hustle and the grind will feel like fuel and fire.

Go ALL in and don’t ever stop.  When you feel like its taking too long to achieve those dreams and achieve those goals that you have set, be PATIENT because I can tell you right now that everything will be achieved.  You just have to keep putting in the work and the motivation and keep chugging along. Make sure that EVERY SINGLE DAY, you are putting 115% into these goals and aspirations for YOU because YOU are the most important person in your life and YOU are SO WORTHY of these dreams that you have. You are not too old or too young to start.  You have plenty of time. Whether you are 17 or 37, you still have 24 hours in your day to do WHATEVER you desire. Of course, we have obligations we have to attend to but what about the rest of that time? What about the time from 4-7 am or the time from 8-11 pm. What do you do then? What can you take out of your day that is wasting your time when you could be focusing on one of your passion projects or one of your dreams?  What is holding you back?

I got my job at my synagogue in September of 2013 and have been showing up every day since but I can tell you that I have not worked a SINGLE day in my life and I truly never will.  I have gone from working 1 day a week to five days a week because I was presented with the opportunity to do so simply because, throughout the years, I have shown up every time enthusiastic and ready to deliver.  I LOOK forward to going to work and no matter how annoying the kids are that day, we always leave with smiles on our faces and the memories of the laughs and good times. Even on those days, because I am HUMAN too, when I don’t want to show up for work because I am tired and exhausted and stressed, I show up anyway and my spirits are lifted and I am in such a better mood.  I am able to stay connected with my students and be present to where I am and enjoy the laughs and the goof-offs even when I am trying to teach something because THIS IS LIFE. This is my life and this is the life I have always envisioned for myself and I am happy.

I truly do believe that the only person who holds you back is yourself.  And of course, other people may stand in your way and say things to you that may hold you back but it is how you react to them that can push you forward because you cannot control them.  You may have baggage and burdens that hid your passion or hold you back from pursuing it but if you think about what is the ABSOLUTE worst thing that could happen if you go forward and pursue your dreams, you may see how minuscule it is, how much you build it up in your own head in order to see later on,  that it is not that big of a deal.

To wrap up, I just want to end with a calling to you.  I urge to seek your passion, I urge you to dive into your passion because I do believe following your passion is a key to a stress-free life and isn’t that what we all want? My goal for this blog post was to create a simple way to help those who feel lost in their schooling or in their current jobs.  I believe that this world is such a special place to pursue so much. We all have been granted the opportunity to live our lives with freedom, love, and peace and I believe that when you follow your wildest dreams, you are able to achieve this.