Hey, welcome to Lessons From A Quitter, where we believe that it is never too late to start over. No matter how much time or energy you've spent getting to where you are. If ultimately you are unfulfilled, then it is time to get out. Join me each week for both inspiration and actionable tips so that we can get you on the road to your dreams.

Hello my friends and welcome to another episode. I'm so excited you are here. A couple weeks ago I did a episode that was entitled Help. I have Too Many Passions and I get that a lot from people. So if you are that person where you're kind of all over the place, you have a lot of things that you're really interested in, you don't really know where to go with them, which one you should follow, which one you shouldn't. That episode is for you.
Today I wanted to make kind of a sister episode to that, a follow up for my other people that tend to fall in the camp of help. I have no passions. I really have no idea what I wanna do and there's nothing really that I'm that interested in. This is also a very big group of people that I work with and it was what I fell into when I quit my job as a lawyer. One of the biggest things that held me back, that terrified me frankly when I was deciding to quit, was this thought that I had this belief that I had that like I have no other interests that I don't know what else I would wanna do. There really is nothing else I wanna do. I had spent so much time becoming a lawyer. I had spent so many years working towards, you know, both undergrad and then grad school, studying for tests, figuring out, you know, what I want to do.
And then I spent so many years as a lawyer that I truly thought like, this is all I know how to do. This is the only skills I have. This is the only thing I really am good at. And there's not like a secret passion that I have that like, if I wasn't doing law, I would be, you know, pursuing photography. Like I don't have that. So I don't know what else I would do. And so if that's you, you're in the right place 'cause this is the episode for you. Okay? And I'm gonna give you some practical advice and tools that I think you can use as you're sort of discovering what you should be doing or what you want to do. And if you're exploring that arena, okay? The first thing I wanna say to you is that it's not true. I think that a lot of us believe these insane thoughts that like I am just not creative.
I used to say I don't have a creative bone in my body. I'm not a creative person. There's just not things that I'm interested in. And the reason I say that that's not true is because that's just not how humans are built. Human beings are curious animals. We are one of the only animals where our brains never stop developing. They never stop growing. There's never a time where like you can't create new neuropathways, new synapses. Our brain was created for growth. And with growth comes curiosity is wanting growth, right? It's good for us, it's good for our brains. We are built for it, right? And so many people, most people, we have this desire to learn and push ourselves. Oftentimes when we don't, when we become stagnant is when we can feel really restless and it can lead to depression. There's a lot of obviously studies of people who, when they retire their health and mental health decline, their mental cognition, their mood.
Because for most of us, while it sounds wonderful, where we wanna lay on a beach for weeks on end and we think it's, it's great, that's not typically what we're built for. That's not what we want. We want to push ourselves, we want to grow, we want to learn things. And so if you really think about it in the sense of like, if you think about children, you never see a kid who's not creative. There just is no such thing. Sure, there's some kids who maybe are more artistic in certain ways and maybe there's some kids where if you think about like traditional creativity, how, how, maybe we might define it. They might be better at it. Maybe they're better artists. They're, you know, they can draw better or whatnot. But every child is creative. Every child is curious. Like you'll never go into a preschool or kindergarten class and see a kid who doesn't like to be creative, who doesn't like to learn things, who doesn't like to, you know, try different new things.
That doesn't just change, that doesn't stop. What happens unfortunately is that we become programmed to not be curious, right? We become programmed to suppress it because we have to become adults and we have to have jobs and we have things to worry about and we have too much on our plates and so we don't have time for it. And so we learn to start suppressing those urges because you need to focus and you need to be productive and you need to get through all your tasks and you need to climb the corporate ladder. And so for so many of us, it just becomes this suppressed part of us, right? We don't have time for hobbies, we don't have time to explore those areas. We are so inundated with these societies that we've built with all of the things that we have to do all of the time that it sort of atrophies a little bit like that part of our brain, that muscle that we have in order to flex our creativity, in order to flex our curiosity at varying degrees for each of us just becomes unused.
But it's still there. That's what I want you to really understand When I say that it's not true is that underneath it all, you are still a curious being. You are still a person who has lots of interests, who has lots of things you're curious about, right? But what I want you to start uncovering and understanding is that there are flickers of it there. It's just buried. And you have to allow it to come up. You have to allow it to kind of seep the light of day and to engage with it. And I think for so many of us, again, we are programmed in a society where perfection is required. So if you're not good at something or if you're not perfect at something, you just don't do it. And you've been trained in that way from school, right? You might have been told like, you're not really good at science, you should focus on English.
Or you're not really good at sports. Like maybe you shouldn't try out for that. Maybe it was, well-meaning adults that are trying to protect you from disappointment. But a lot of what we learned is that like failure is bad. Trying something new and not being great at it is bad. I should just stick to the things I'm good at. And for a lot of us, a lot of the things that we're good at are not necessarily things that light us up or that, you know, spark our curiosity. 'cause we've really learned what we need to learn there. And so we become terrified to try new things. We become terrified to just like try hobbies, even if we're gonna suck at it because we're terrified to fail, we're terrified to not be good enough. We're terrified to figure out that maybe we're average in so things or whatnot.
And so for so many of us, we've spent so long only doing things we're good at that we haven't allowed other, you know, interests to develop. Because as soon as we're not good at, it's like I don't wanna try that, right? That makes me feel inadequate or I don't like feeling like I'm gonna fail or I don't like people judging me, so I'm just gonna stay away from it. And part of uncovering that is learning to kind of be in that beginner mindset is learning that of course it's going to not be good in the beginning. It's learning that you are gonna fail and that you're gonna fail at a lot of things. Like I think another thing that happens for a lot of us is that like we don't wanna quote unquote waste our time. So we wanna just find something and you know, pour all our energy and become an expert in it and make sure that it's gonna be worthwhile.
But that's just not how your life works or should work or that real world works. Like, yes, with respect to maybe a job, but as you grow and as you experience life, like you should be able to spend time doing things, even if it's not going to go somewhere, even if it's not gonna become something you become an expert at, simply because you enjoy it. Simply because you allow yourself to like have you know new experiences, to learn new things, to create joy in different ways, to just try something for the hell of it to see if you can. And for so many of us, we limit ourselves with that because we think it has to not be a quote unquote waste of time as if just because it doesn't become something you master, it's a waste of time. But it's not. It's flexing those muscles.
It's allowing your curiosity to come out. It's following those like pathways for you that you're like, huh, I'm kind of interested in this. What is this about? And so for a lot of people who have specifically been very good at like, I'm gonna pick the thing and I'm gonna meet those goals, I'm gonna, you know, check off all of the achievements and I'm gonna climb that corporate ladder. It's really hard for us to like let ourselves experiment. It's really hard for us to try a bunch of different passions. It's really hard for us to try things that aren't gonna go anywhere or that we're gonna end up hating or whatnot. And that's what you have to work on, right? That's what you have to allow yourself to do. Outside of the realm of careers. Just like what comes up for me when I try this thing?
What lights me up? What doesn't? What gives me energy? What is just fun to do? What adds joy to my life? The more you kind of seek those answers, the more you, it's sort of like you're kind of following the breadcrumbs. The more you learn about yourself, the more you learn about the things that you like, the more you learn about like passions that you might have that you don't even know. So I wanna start again with this number one, because I want you to understand that it's not that there's like something defective in you and you just don't have any passions. It's that you were raised in a society where, you know, we created jobs and we said that you have to be an adult and that you have to focus on these things and you've suppressed this other side and it's time to like allow that other side to come up, right?
Which leads me to number two, you have to lower the bar. Number two is that like we have this idea that it has to be some major passion in our life. I need to find the thing that so many of us have this like weird obsession with. Like there's one thing and there isn't, there's a lot of things. You are a multifaceted, multi-passionate person that has a lot of different aspects to your personality and a lot of different things that could entice you, that could, you know, keep your attention, that could help you grow. And when you're on this hunt for this one, you know, what is the quote unquote right thing? And which one should I spend all of my time on? Not only are you just like not getting started because you are trying to find something that's not there. You're not allowing yourself to see all of the different parts of you, right?
And now some people might have an overarching passion, right? There's some people who are artists and they've been into art from when they were a child or they've always loved music and they have have a great passion for music. Great. I'm not saying that some people don't have great overarching kind of passions in their lives. They do. But I feel like you would know that by now. If you were that person and you had some great one passion of your life, you would've already kind of discovered that. And we wouldn't be talking here. Like you would already know that that's what you want to discover. I think for the rest of us, it's okay that that is not our path. That I, you know, my one passion is not dance or whatever it is, or like, you know, ceramics or whatnot. It's like that could be a passion for me, but it doesn't have to be that all defining, I have to create my whole life and business and everything around this.
And so I want you to just like put that down, like that pressure and that burden to find the one thing and know that like you can, and you will have multiple passions in your life as you grow, as you change, as you learn things, as you master some things that maybe become boring 'cause you've mastered it, now you will move on to different passions. And that's a good thing. That's not a bad thing. Why would you wanna be pigeonholed with one thing for the rest of your life? Why not? See how many things you can experience, how many things you can discover, how many things you can try. One of the things I tell people in this is like, I sometimes think that the word passion is even too overloaded of a word, right? It's too heavy of a word for a lot of us.
I want you to just think about like, what are you curious about? What is something that you would just like to learn more about? Like if you had to go to a bookstore, what area of the bookstore would you go to? What kind of books kind of draw your attention. What do you want to learn about? What do you want to know more about? What do you want to try, right? What is one thing that like if it didn't matter, nobody would judge you. Like what is one thing you would try doing? Like you have to sort of start there of like, what is just something that piques my interest and I don't even have to know why. It's just something that I've always thought is cool or I've always wanted to know, you know, how people did it and I just wanna try it out.
Like you really have to just start there. Not I have to discover like, what is this one, you know, life defining thing that I have to end up doing. The third thing I will say is that kind of in line with this is that passions are developed. They're not discovered. It's not like hiding under a rock, right? Again, like I said, if you had some big passion, you would already know it by now. But what happens a lot of times, and I don't think people realize is that like most things don't like start out as a passion. It just starts out as something you do. Something you do once in a while. And typically for a lot of people who may have this one big passion that we're sort of used to seeing it is because like they started in childhood. So like in childhood maybe they started and they were kinda messing around with it and they did it and they just did it over time so much that it became such a part of their life and their personality.
Okay? And now that's a passion. But if you're starting in later in life and you're an adult, you have to still give yourself that time for that to develop. What happens is this curiosity becomes something that is nurtured, that you seek it out more, that you try it more. And then you realize like, no, this really does light me up. I do get into a flow state, I kind of lose myself when I'm doing this. I feel really calm when I'm doing this. And so I wanna do it more and I do it more and then I wanna learn more and I get into communities and I learn more about how other people are doing it and I start learning more about all aspects of it. And then that thing becomes something that becomes really pivotal in my life. Something that becomes really important to me.
Something that becomes a part of my, like, you know, every day or every week or every month or whatever kind of lifestyle, it's something that I want to constantly engage in. I go back to. And as I master it more, as I become more proficient at it, as I start like doing it more and more, I also grow to love it more. I grow to love it more because it has now become more a, a part of my life, right? I've spent hours and hours and hours and hours doing this thing. And so of course it becomes something that becomes more important to me than, you know, just whatever hobby. And so I want you to really think about like, even if you don't have something right now, it doesn't mean that you can't have many a passion going forward. Many things that you are passionate about in the next 5, 10, 15, 20, 30 years.
It simply is that those things end up developing because of the amount of time and energy that you put into it. And going back to what I talked about earlier, I think that the thing is, is like you have to try a bunch of things in order to figure out what is the thing that I keep wanting to pour into. It's not as though like, I think for a lot of us, again, we take these like paradigms that we've been taught in school and it's like I just have to be an expert and someone will say like, you know, you have to do 10,000 hours and so I'm just gonna pour 10,000 hours into this until I become an expert at this thing. Without even really figuring out like, do I want to be an expert? Is this something I even like, just because I picked it, does it mean mean it's something I have to stick with forever.
And I think the more you allow yourself to just experiment. If you're in this phase where you don't know and you let yourself like just try a bunch of different things, some of them you're gonna very quickly be like, I actually don't like it. I thought I would like it. I thought it would be really in line with my personality. It's not some you're gonna try and be like, I kind of like it. I don't know, I'm gonna try for a little while. And then you're gonna do it for a little while and it's maybe gonna peter out. You're like, I did that for a year. I was all right, I'm gonna try something else. And some things you're gonna do and you're like, no, I really love this. I really feel good when I'm doing this. I really wanna learn more about it. And it starts growing and growing and growing naturally.
And so I think that you have to sort of not only just temper your expectations, but allow yourself to experiment. Like allow yourself to explore, allow yourself to pick things up that you're gonna drop. Like we have this obsession with consistency and mastery and, and you know, becoming an expert. And so for so many of us, we think like if I try something and I don't do it and I only do it for a month, then you know, I'm a failure or I'm a loser, or I, I knew I would do this, or I never stick to things. And it's just simply like, I tried it, I didn't like it, and now I'm gonna try something else. It could be that easy and I feel like it's like necessary that is a necessary part of you figuring out what you like to do. I recently found my goals that I had set like five years ago, and it was fascinating.
First of all, I did goal setting very differently than I do now. And I realized why I was overwhelmed all the time and didn't reach a lot of my goals. But one of the things that was interesting was seeing a couple of the things that I'd listed as like hobbies I was gonna try or I wanted to get into. One was reading, there was like meditation, I can't remember. And then there I wanted to do pickleball, I think, and I can't, anyways, there was like two other things that I was gonna try. It's fascinating to look at like five years down the line. And you know, for a couple of years I kept trying to make reading a hobby of mine, something I was gonna do more and more. And I started out like reading, I think it was like 20 books a year, and then I went up to like 30.
And I remember it being forced, like I had to kind of force myself to read. And then in the meantime, like I took a pickleball class and I was trying to do meditation. I say all that to say like five years out. I look back and it's like I'm an obsessive reader at this point. I mean, it's become a problem, but nobody has to force me anymore. I find every moment I can to read. I, I think I'm at 90 books for the year. Um, and we're in October, so we have like three, three months left. Um, I read a lot that simply developed over the last five years. I found genres that I cannot put down that I like want to consume all the time. I found things that I don't like. I allowed myself to do it in the way that I wanted to.
And then in the same time, I've dropped so many hobbies. I don't play. I never played pickleball after like a series of classes and after that I just didn't do it anymore. I also have other hobbies that like I kind of do seasonally, like I'll get into for a while and then I'll get bored of it and I won't do it. And then I'll get back into it and I'll do it for a while. All of it's okay, right? I think about like, like reading now adds so much to my life, and I feel like if it had been this thing that was forced and it was the only thing I was doing, I don't know if I would have like really developed it the way that I did. And if I forced myself to do all of these other things as well, just because I had started them, I would be miserable, right?
I'd be forcing myself to do something I don't wanna do. And so I want you to really think about the fact that part of this is allowing these passions to develop over time, is allowing yourself the time to see like, you know, what, what really does call to me? How can I experiment with this in different ways? How can I see what I like and what I don't like? And that ends up becoming growing into something more, right? Like you might start running, you might start with wanting to do a half marathon, and then it's not like you start becoming an ultra marathon runner. Like you start small. And then over time, if it's something that you know speaks to you and that, uh, you get a lot out of, you grow and grow and you wanna constantly push yourself and like, that's how most passions are developed.
So I want you to think about like, even if you don't have it yet, if you think you don't have it yet, that's simply because you haven't had the time to really develop it at this point. And that's okay. You still have a lot of time. And so I want you to think about like what is the, you know, type of things that I want to develop. What are the things that I want to spend time nurturing and growing? And what if it didn't have to all happen within six months or a year, right? The fourth thing I'll say is that your job doesn't have to be your passion. I think for a lot of us, we have this mistake belief that like, I need to have a passion nor to be happy at work. And that's just not true. My whole membership is on that you can be ha happy at work doing whatever, and you can decide that your work is gonna be the kind of investor in your life.
It's gonna be the thing that funds your life, but your passions are gonna be outside of work. Your passions are gonna be the things that you spend the rest of your time doing. And you can make yourself, if you learn how to manage your mind around that, it can be so much easier to actually like, enjoy work for what it is and not require it to be this all encompassing thing that fulfills every, you know, part of you and is something that you, you know, it's like we have these like quotes. Like if you love what you do, you never work a day in your life. That's not true. You're working. No matter how much you love it, ask anybody who has those like all encompassing passions, like painters or whatever, when they make it a business, it's still work. And so I think that you have to put down this not the desire.
Hopefully you do end up having a passion for the, the work that you're doing, but just this sort of requirement that you think like it's the key to my happiness. If I don't find this passion, I can never be happy. Of course you can and you can develop those passions outside of work. Again, that's not to say that you can't be passionate about what you do for work, you can, and if that's important to you, that's totally fine to develop that. But I think that oftentimes the pressure of that keeps people on this like constant hamster wheel of like jumping from thing to thing, constantly trying to figure out like what's gonna be the passion, what's like, I need to find this in order to feel fulfilled. And I think if you sort of calm it down, it's like, all right, a job's a job, it pays my bills and it allows me to have the time and flexibility and the, you know, whatever it is to do things outside of this that develop my passions.
And I think if you give yourself that time outside of work, you can then develop passions that you might turn into work, right? It's like if you allow yourself to then get deeper into things that you love naturally, there are ways, obviously there are industries, there are different ways to make money off of anything in America. So I mean, even if you're not in America, I feel like now with the internet, there's ways to make money off of anything. You can then decide like, how do I turn this into a business? Or how do I work in this industry? Or you know, how do I transform my skills to this and make that your job? But I just wouldn't start with like, this is a thing I have to find in order for my work to feel meaningful or for me to be happy at work because I think they're two separate things.
And I think you have to first develop your passion and then figure out if you wanna like monetize that or if you wanna figure out a way to like incorporate that into your day-to-day life. And so I would say like, just take off that pressure for now. Like what if your passion just doesn't have to be related to your job? And what if your job can be the investor in your life that allows you to do your passions? And I think that the problem is that from so many of us, because we're so unhappy and we don't really take stock of our life and we don't really know how we wanna spend our time, we don't spend our time outside of work developing passions. We don't spend our time outside of work allowing ourselves to be curious, allowing ourselves to try things, doing things for joy.
I feel like we spend our time outside of work scrolling TikTok, and I'm not No shade, I do that too for hours on end. And part of that is like reigning myself in and realizing like, okay, if I can just let work be work, how can I build in the time to do the things I wanna do outside of work without getting kind of sidetracked by things that eat up all the rest of my time, right? How can I use my weekends? How can I set really good boundaries in order to make sure that I have time to really like engage in the things that light me up? So if this is you, I want you to really like take these into consideration as you're thinking about the next steps. I know for me, like when I say this, I really thought I had no passions.
Now it's laughable to me because I have a million things I wanna do. I have so many things I'm curious about and interested in. I have so many different directions I could take my career in if I wanted. And I'm super passionate actually about the work that I am doing now. But even that was so interesting, like when I left the law, it took me a couple of years to really figure out what I'm passionate about. I just like kind of stumbled my way. I, I created a business that had nothing to do with anything I was passionate about. And in that process I learned about mindset work and I was, I'd always been obsessive about learning. Like I really loved learning facts and material and I loved psychology. I'd gotten my degree in psychology and I love learning about the mind. And it like that just naturally became something that I became really passionate about, about like thinking about how we think and why we act and why humans do the things that they do.
And that naturally became something that I was like, I want to help other people with. I wanna talk about this all the time. I wanna read about this all the time. I wanna learn about this all the time. And that again, like turned into a business that didn't happen for years, right? Like I left the law in 2014. I didn't start my business until 20 18, 20 19. And so it really took a long time for me to kind of develop over those years that I was learning my own thought work and my own mindset work to really get to this place. And yet now I'm doing something that I'm really passionate about. I have tons of passions outside of work that I spend a lot of time on that I don't ever plan to monetize, but that just really fulfill my life. And that simply was because I allowed myself to like really follow those curiosities, allowed myself to have the time to spend doing these things.
And so I just encourage you to like slow it down, not even think about work right now, really figure out like, where am I curious? And follow that and give yourself the time to just try things and allow those passions to develop over time. I promise you there's a lot of things that you're interested in. There's a lot of things that you can develop into passions. You just have to like slow down enough to give yourself the time to do it. And if you want help with that, a lot of what we do in the Quitter Club is this, right? Is one teaching you how to allow your job to be an investor in your life is to allow you to be happy even if you're not passionate about the work, so that you have time so that you can set up the boundaries so that you can, uh, figure out what you wanna work on, on the weekends, on the nights like planets so that you actually have these things.
And then figure out what you're curious about, what you're passionate about, and develop those. So if you wanna help with that, you can go to lessons from a quitter.com/quitter club and join us in the Quitter Club. I would love to have you in there. Otherwise, get out there and just try things, be curious and have fun with it. All right, my friends, I hope this was helpful and I'll see you next week for another episode.

Hey, if you are looking for more help with your career, whether that's dealing with all of the stress, worry, and anxiety that's leading to burnout in your current career or figuring out what your dream career is and actually going after it, I want you to join me in the Quitter Club. It is where we quit what is no longer working like perfectionism, people pleasing imposter syndrome, and we start working on what does, and we start taking action towards the career and the life that you actually want. We will take the concepts that we talk about on the podcast and apply them to your life and you will get the coaching tools and support that you need to actually make some real change. So go to lessonsfromaquitter.com/quitterclub and get on the wait list. Doors are closed right now, but they will be open soon.