Yes. There are. But mostly because this question is built on a wrong assumption.
You don’t find passion. You build it.
To explain, I’d like to combine two concepts from people I truly believe in.
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Idea #1: Passion follows from being good at what you do, not the other way around.
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This idea addresses the first part of your question:
“Talking about big passion of course, not a favorite food.”
The word “passion” in combination with career advice only showed up in modern business literature in the 1980s and started to really take off in the 90s, when “follow your passion,” became the go-to mantra of career advice gurus.
By the early 2000s, authors had stopped bothering to even explain the idea and why it’s good, just assuming you’d already be familiar with it and having accepted it as the right thing to do.
This has led to an entire generation, namely our generation, the Millennials, desperately trying to figure out their passion, so that they can then choose the right career accordingly. As a result, now only one third of the U.S. workforce feels engaged at work.
Passion first, great career later, that’s what we’ve been told.
In 2012, Cal Newport dedicated an entire book to debunking this myth, called So Good They Can’t Ignore You.
It argues that passion is slowly built over time, as you get better and better at your craft – not a predisposed character trait that you can draw upon to pick the perfect career.
One of the key arguments he rests his case on is that passion is highly correlated with motivation, which in turn is based on three components (according to Daniel Pink’s book Drive):
- Autonomy.
- Competence.
- Relatedness.
Having a high level of control over your work, feeling like you know what you’re doing and working with like-minded people to make a difference in their lives all happen to be the result of, you guessed it, being good at what you do.
So instead of fretting about what’s your passion and trying to align your career with it, you can just pick one of the many things that interests you, really dedicate yourself to it, and thus, as you get better and better, slowly build a big passion for it.
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Idea #2: To be good at what you do, you have to push through the Dip, and that’s where you’re most likely to quit.
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This idea addresses the second part of your question:
I don’t know how to explain it, but once I learn about something enough to understand, curiosity fades quickly.
When you start learning something new, excitement and motivation are high. There’s lots of easy stuff to learn, people encourage you, your skill level matches the challenge, and you’re really picking up steam.
But once you’re a few weeks in, making progress starts to get harder. You’ve gone from beginner to intermediate, and you have a better grasp on your subject than most of your friends. None of the easy things are left to learn, so to move on, you have to practice where it gets difficult and uncomfortable.
You put in some more effort, but you see less and less results, which of course hurts your motivation to continue to put in effort – and you really want to quit.
Welcome to The Dip.
(Source)
In 2007, Seth Godin published this little book that’s supposed to teach us when to quit, and when to stick with things.
The reason you seem to lose your curiosity, motivation and results all at once isn’t special. It’s not because you’re bad. It’s because you’ve reached the zone where it gets hard – the zone that separates extraordinary from average.
You’ve reached the line where most people will turn back, settle for average, and take comfort that there’s another thing they can start to learn.
What the world has told us is that we need to be well-rounded. And once again, the world is wrong.
If the way to become passionate is getting really good at what you do, and the Dip is what separates you being average from you being great at something, then on the other side of the Dip, passion is waiting.
So once you do pick a skill you want to build, prepare for what’s to come. Be fully aware of the Dip you’re about to enter, and know that plenty of good things are waiting for you on the other side. Good luck!