How to find your passion
If you find yourself unhappy in your career, but at the same time keep asking yourself, “What am I supposed to be doing instead?” you may want to take advice from Rodney Curtis, the man who was laid off from his passion and managed to find another while still holding onto the first. Read on to figure out how to find your passion.
Rodney was a photo editor before the layoffs started at the big papers. If you think freelance photography is dif?cult, you should try ?nding a freelance photo editing gig. Getting another job was proving dif?cult in the economic climate.
“Find your passion, even if it’s still photography, and don’t let go of it,” Rodney writes, “Sure, you may have to do other things to make money since we can’t rely on newspapers to hire us.”
Sometimes the combination of unemployment and passion-seeking is ridden with guilt. If you have a job, it’s “okay” to spend your free time taking photographs, scuba-diving or finally trying to figure out how programming languages work.
Rodney was featured, while tapping on his laptop, in a National Press Photographer’s Association magazine story about how he was attempting to switch careers.
“I actually owe it to [my daughters] to keep creating, to keep following my dream of getting paid to write,” Rodney said. “If I give up now, what would I be telling them? ‘Uh ladies, remember Daddy’s directive to follow your passions? You should probably only do that after your 2-10 shift at Qdoba.”
But who do you figure out what that passion is?
You try everything you’ve ever been interested in. Rodney discovered a passion for teaching after a stint teaching journalism at Michigan State University. Rodney kept a blog about his unemployment experiences. He had a passion for writing lurking under the surface since he won a short story fiction contest in high school about a prince named Yendor (spell it backwards).
And if it doesn’t really pay well, you make do. First unemployment benefits, then a bit of money from a side job, and so on, and so forth.
