How To Know What Is Your Passion

Knowing what your passion is comes down to reading specific behavioral signals: you return to something voluntarily, lose track of time doing it, feel energized rather than drained, and find yourself wanting to go deeper and share it with others. Passion psychologists define passion as a strong inclination toward a self-defining activity that you love, find important, and invest significant time and energy in— not simply enthusiasm or a hobby you enjoy. And if those signals are faint for you right now, that’s not a personal failure: research from Stanford and Yale shows that passion can be deliberately developed through engagement, not just discovered waiting inside you.

Key Takeaways

• Passion has five readable signals: You return to it unprompted, lose track of time, feel energized, seek mastery, and teach or share it— these are behavioral, not just emotional
• “Find your passion” is incomplete advice: Stanford and Yale research shows that people who treat passion as fixed and pre-existing are less resilient when it gets hard; developing passion through engagement is more effective
• Two valid paths exist: Some people need to surface signals that are already there; others need to build passion from scratch through sustained engagement and growing skill
• Not all passion is healthy: Psychologists distinguish harmonious passion (you control it, it integrates with your life) from obsessive passion (it controls you)— knowing the difference matters

What Passion Actually Is (and Isn’t) {#what-passion-actually-is}

I’ve spent years watching people tie themselves in knots over this question. They know something is missing. They just can’t name it. Part of what makes it so hard is that we’re working with a word that carries enormous weight but almost no precision.

Psychologist Robert Vallerand defines passion as a strong inclination toward a self-defining activity— something you love, find important, and invest significant time and energy in, voluntarily. That last word matters. Nobody’s making you.

The word “passion” can feel big and loaded. Maybe even a little intimidating. If you don’t have one (or can’t name one), the implication seems to be that something’s wrong with you. It isn’t. But it helps to know what we’re actually looking for.

Here’s a useful distinction— a hobby is something you enjoy. Passion is something that feels like part of who you are. The person who cooks occasionally for fun has a hobby. The person who researches techniques obsessively, watches every video on heat and emulsification, hosts dinner parties to practice different cuisines, and identifies themselves as “a food person”— that’s passion. The difference isn’t intensity of enjoyment. It’s identity.

Amy Wrzesniewski’s foundational research at Yale offers a related concept worth knowing: calling orientation. It’s the experience of work as central to your identity— not just a means to financial stability (job orientation) or a ladder to climb (career orientation), but an expression of who you are. In her study of 196 workers across occupations, people with calling orientation reported higher life satisfaction and work satisfaction than either of the other groups.

Passion can be bigger than a career, or smaller. It can live inside a job, or entirely outside one. What matters is that it’s self-defining and voluntary.

But here’s the problem with the most common advice about passion— and why you may have already tried it and walked away frustrated.

Why “Find Your Passion” Advice Often Fails {#why-find-your-passion-fails}

“Follow your passion” fails because it assumes passion is already fully formed inside you, waiting to be discovered— and research shows that assumption makes people less resilient, not more.

In 2018, researchers Paul O’Keefe, Carol Dweck, and Gregory Walton published findings in Psychological Science that directly challenged the “find your passion” frame. Across five studies, they found that people with a fixed belief about interest— you either have a passion or you don’t— showed more drop in interest when things got difficult. They were also less likely to stay engaged when a topic connected to something outside their existing interests. Stanford’s reporting on the study captured the core problem plainly: “Urging people to find their passion may lead them to put all their eggs in one basket but then drop that basket when it becomes difficult to carry.”

Cal Newport arrived at a similar conclusion from a different direction. In his book So Good They Can’t Ignore You and in a CNN opinion piece, Newport argues that passion rarely precedes skill— it tends to follow it. Most people don’t have a pre-existing passion waiting to be found. Passion grows as you get genuinely good at something.

Think about someone who “found” their passion for photography and threw themselves in. Things went well at first. Then progress plateaued. It got hard. And they assumed— since the excitement faded— that it must not have been their “real” passion after all. That’s fixed-theory thinking in action. Not you. The model.

Two beliefs. Very different outcomes—

• Fixed belief: Passion is innate; if it doesn’t feel obvious or easy, it’s not the right one
• Growth belief: Passion develops through sustained engagement; difficulty is part of the process

If you’ve tried “finding” your passion and walked away empty-handed, the model may have failed you— not the other way around.

So instead of asking “what is my passion?”— start by asking what signals passion leaves in your behavior. Because it does leave signals. Here’s what to look for.

Five Signals That Something May Be Your Passion {#five-signals}

Passion doesn’t stay hidden. It shows up in your behavior before you consciously identify it— in what you do with free time, what you read without anyone asking you to, and how you feel when you’re done.

Psychology Today’s research on passion identification and Vallerand’s framework both point to passion as fundamentally behavioral— observable, not just felt. Here are five signals worth paying attention to when you’re trying to find what you love to do.

1. You return to it without external pressure. Not because someone asked. Not because there’s a deadline. Because you want to. If you find yourself gravitating back to the same topic, craft, or problem area again and again— that’s worth noting. The person who spends Sunday afternoons watching furniture restoration videos without quite knowing why is telling you something.

2. You lose track of time. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called this “flow”— complete absorption in an activity where the ego falls away and time distorts. “Being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one.” Flow isn’t definitive proof of passion. But consistent flow experiences in one area are a significant signal.

Flow is a state of deep engagement— not the definition of passion, but one of the most reliable indicators of it.

3. You feel energized, not drained. Most activities cost energy. Some— the ones that align with what we’re built for— return more than they take. Pay attention to how you feel two hours after, not just in the middle. Even hard work in a passion area tends to leave you tired-but-satisfied rather than depleted.

4. You want to go deeper. Casual interest asks “what is this?” Passion asks “how does this really work?” If you find yourself chasing mastery— not just competency— that’s a signal. You seek the next level before anyone tells you to. You read the harder book. You look for the edge of what you understand.

5. You find yourself teaching or sharing it. This one is underrated. When you naturally start explaining something to people who didn’t ask, or writing about it, or wanting to show someone what you just learned— that’s passion leaking out. Many people dismiss this impulse. “I’m just talking too much.” “I’m being annoying.” No. That impulse is information.

A note on signal #5 in particular: if you need a quiz to tell you whether you’re passionate about something, that’s useful information too. Passion tends to announce itself. The problem is we’re often too busy dismissing it.

Once you’ve spotted something that checks some of these boxes, there’s a useful test for going deeper. Dan calls it the Four P’s.

The Four P’s: A Test for Candidate Passions {#the-four-ps}

Once you’ve identified a candidate passion— something that checks several of the signals above— you can test its depth using a simple framework— the Four P’s. People, Process, Product, Profit.

This isn’t a scorecard. It’s a diagnostic. No passion scores perfectly across all four dimensions— what matters is where it’s strong and where the gaps are.

People: Do you care about who this work serves or connects you with? Some passions are fundamentally about connection— teaching, coaching, writing for others. Others are more solitary. Neither is wrong. But knowing whether you care about the people dimension tells you something about which contexts will feel sustainable.

Process: Do you find the actual day-to-day work engaging— not just the outcome? This is the most important of the four. If you love the idea of writing but hate sitting down to write, that’s data. If you love the craft of it— the struggle with a sentence, the search for the right word— that’s also data. Process is the one that lasts.

Product: Are you proud of what this work produces— the result, artifact, or outcome? A sense of investment in what gets made matters for long-term engagement.

Profit: Can this area sustain your life in some form? Not necessarily as a full-time career. Mark Manson puts it well: passion doesn’t have to become your job. But something about the economic dimension— even if it’s just “can I afford to give this time?”— is worth examining.

Here’s a concrete example. Someone passionate about writing might score high on Process (loves the craft) and high on Product (cares about what they make), low on People (doesn’t particularly care who reads it), and uncertain on Profit (no clear path yet). If you’re thinking: do I need to figure out the money question before I commit?— no. The Profit dimension is worth examining, but it doesn’t need to be answered first. The low People score isn’t a problem. It’s just information about which contexts will feel sustainable. The Four P’s doesn’t tell you what to do. It shows you what you already know.

You can also build passion intentionally when you know what dimensions matter most to you. The Four P’s doesn’t give you permission to pursue something. It gives you information— and sometimes that’s more useful than permission.

There’s one more thing worth checking before you commit to a passion direction— whether what you’re feeling is the healthy kind.

When Passion Feels Like Pressure: The Two Types {#two-types}

Not all passion is healthy. Vallerand’s research identifies two types: harmonious passion, where you freely choose to engage and the activity integrates with your life— and obsessive passion, where the activity feels compulsive and creates conflict with other areas.

Both involve intensity. But only one involves freedom.

The practical question: does this activity energize you AND leave room for the rest of your life? Or does it crowd everything else out and produce guilt when you’re not doing it?

Think about two writers. One works intensely— really intensely— and then genuinely closes the laptop and goes to dinner with friends. The other can’t stop, cancels everything else, feels driven and anxious, unable to rest. Same intensity. Very different quality of experience. Obsessive passion isn’t a virtue. The hustle culture that confuses compulsion with commitment does real damage.

The five signals in the previous section— especially “energized, not drained”— are more characteristic of harmonious passion. If something checks the signals but leaves you feeling controlled rather than choosing, that’s worth sitting with.

But what about the people who don’t feel any of this? What if you’ve checked the signals and still come up empty?

What to Do When You Don’t Seem to Have a Passion {#no-passion}

If you’ve read this far and still can’t identify a passion, you’re not broken— and you’re not alone. Feeling passionless is far more common than self-help content suggests, and it usually means one of three things.

1. Your existing signals are being dismissed as impractical.

Many people have clear interests but have been conditioned to treat them as frivolous or unrealistic. The accountant who’s secretly obsessed with urban planning. The teacher who spends every free hour building furniture. The person who insists they “don’t have passions” but has reorganized their entire home library twice and can talk about book design for 45 minutes without noticing.

Mark Manson argues that passion is often already visible in your behavior— you’re just not taking it seriously. What people can be passionate about is wider than most of us allow ourselves to imagine. The passion may be there. You may just have a long-standing habit of calling it “just a hobby.”

2. You haven’t had sustained enough engagement in any single area.

If you’ve tried many things briefly and none stuck, it may not mean none fit— it may mean you moved on before engagement had time to deepen into passion. Cal Newport’s central argument, made in So Good They Can’t Ignore You, is that mastery precedes passion. Go deeper before going broader. The O’Keefe and Dweck research makes this explicit: engagement produces interest. You can’t always wait to feel passionate before you begin. Sometimes you have to begin to feel passionate.

Engagement before certainty is not settling. It’s how passion actually develops.

3. Burnout or depression may be suppressing your ability to feel engaged.

This one matters and is under-acknowledged in most passion content. If nothing sounds interesting and everything feels flat, that’s a signal about your state, not your identity. It may need attention before passion discovery can happen. If you don’t know what you want to do and everything feels gray, please consider whether that flatness needs its own kind of attention.

A brief note worth including here: for some people— including those managing depression, ADHD, or other conditions— passion discovery may work differently. The framework above is a starting point, not the whole picture.

The questions below address some of the specific edge cases— multiple passions, passion vs. purpose, and whether passion has to become your career.

Frequently Asked Questions {#faq}

These questions don’t have complicated answers. Just honest ones.

Q: How do you know if something is truly your passion?

Look for the five behavioral signals: you return to it without external pressure, lose track of time doing it, feel energized afterward, seek mastery rather than just competency, and find yourself sharing or teaching it. These are observable and testable— you don’t need certainty before you start. You need consistent evidence over time. Vallerand’s research and Csikszentmihalyi’s work on flow both support these as meaningful indicators of deep engagement.

Q: Can you have more than one passion?

Yes. The idea of “one true passion” is a cultural myth, not a research-backed finding. The O’Keefe and Dweck work actually demonstrates the danger of fixed-passion thinking— assuming passion is singular makes people less resilient, not more focused. Some people have complementary passions that inform each other— a passion for teaching and a passion for a specific subject area, for instance. What matters is how each passion integrates with your life, not whether you’ve narrowed to one.

Q: What’s the difference between passion and purpose?

Passion is what absorbs and energizes you— it’s about the activity itself. Purpose is about contribution and meaning— why that work matters beyond you. Wrzesniewski’s research on calling orientation— work that feels integral to who you are— is really about the integration of both. The Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley puts it well: purpose connects to contribution, not just personal fulfillment. Passion asks “what absorbs me?” Purpose asks “what am I for?” The most satisfying work eventually answers both— and how passion connects to meaning is worth exploring on its own.

Q: Does my passion have to become my career?

No. Passion can be a career, a side practice, a creative outlet, or simply how you spend your most alive hours. The pressure to monetize every meaningful interest is a modern cultural phenomenon, not a requirement. Mark Manson makes this point clearly: maintaining a regular job while pursuing passion independently is completely valid. What matters is that you give your passion actual time and space— whatever the context.

Start Where You Are

You don’t have to know your passion to start. You have to start in order to know it.

Here’s the article’s arc in plain terms: passion leaves behavioral signals you can read right now— the voluntary return, the time loss, the energized feeling, the pull toward mastery, the urge to share. And if those signals are faint? That’s not a permanent verdict. Passion can be developed through sustained engagement. Both paths are real. Both are available.

You’re in good company if this still feels uncertain. Most people are further along than they think— they’re just not taking their own signals seriously.

The one first step is simpler than it sounds. Pick something that checked even two or three of those signals. Engage with it— genuinely, for 30 days— and then honestly assess what you found. Not “am I passionate about this?” But: did I return to it? Did I want to go deeper? Did I feel more alive?

Passion is less about finding something hidden and more about paying attention to what’s already pulling at your attention— then following that pull with enough consistency to let it develop into something real.

You don’t need a map. You need to take the next step.

I believe in you.