Passion, a simple word yet it holds so much power is our daily actions. Ask anyone in any field, and the first thing they say about being successful and happy in your career is to have passion. Now, it's easy to tell someone that they need to be passionate and encourage them to pursue a career that incorporates that passion. But the question is, how do you find passion?

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In our day to day busy student lives, we hardly ever have time to really sit down and think about our feelings, our hobbies, what we like, what we don't like, etc. And as silly and irrelevant as it may seem, it's extremely important to know those things about yourself. Knowing yourself is the first and foremost step in fulfilling your dreams and achieving happiness. When it comes to figuring out your passions, you need to first know what you enjoy, and by that, we mean something that truly interests you. We usually follow a three-step process that has worked for us personally and many other people that we have shared this strategy with. 

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1. Make a List

The first step is to make a list of your hobbies and interests. You want to try to make this list as specific and detail-oriented as possible in order to ensure the maximum result. For example, if you like art, don't just write art, try to be more specific with the type of art. The key to this strategy lies in detail. 

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2. Find Similarities in Your List

Once you have compiled a list of your interests, look to see if there are any similarities. Not every item on your list is going to be related to another item and you most probably will not be able to group them under one common point. The goal of this step is for self-reflection. By forcing yourself to look for similarities among the tasks or activities on your list, you are actually reflecting and asking yourself why is it that you are interested in that specific task or activity. In other words, what aspect of that task that you listed really appeals to you and makes you want to continue pursuing it. By asking yourself these questions, you are not only on the right path to discovering your passion, but you are also accomplishing self-reflection and self-analysis. 

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3. Categorize Your List

The last and final step is to categorize the list. Based on the similarities that you identified in the previous step, see if you dig a little deeper and find a broad category that would encompass many of the items on your list. The point of doing this is that it will help you identify the underlying reason for why you wrote that task or activity on your list in the first place; in other words, you'll figure out what the common point, or link as we like to call it, between all the items on your list. And at the end after following these steps, you'll have definitely learned a lot about yourself and hopefully you're able to identify your passion, or at least you feel like you're on the right path to doing so.

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At the end of the day, there is no clear cut formula as to how someone figures out what they want to do in their life, but there are things that we can do to help clear the fog in our minds and put us on the right path. With that being said, don't forget to live your life. You only get this life once and you only get each day once, so make it count. It's important to find passion and purpose in what we do in life, but it's even more important to live the life we have and it's up to us to make this life beautiful and worth remembering forever :)