Can Your Passion Put You On The Easiest Path To Success?

Open up any newspaper or magazines and you probably would almost always find articles about successful people saying the reason they achieve success is largely because they have listened to their own inner voices to go against the grain and follow their own intuition. Career consultants and self-help books will probably also tell you that in order to find meaning in the work you do. However, the co-founder of the popular Life Design Lab at Stanford, Bill Burnett, thinks that "following your passion" is a dysfunctional advice anyone could ever give.

According to the Director of the Center on Adolescence at Stanford University, Professor William Damon, only 25% of the young people aged 12 to 26 know where their passion and interests lie, while the remaining 75% are simply clueless. The studies also revealed that for most cases, personal interests only start to surface after several attempts at trying out something. Therefore, we can all be glad that designing a good life does not require passion right from the start.

In the face of living a life that provides no definitive guide and answers, we can make use of the process of "Design Thinking" to quit waiting for that perfect future that resides only in your fantasy world and start exploring opportunities with curiosity to swiftly create your own prototype towards that ideal way of Life. Never fret should your prototype quickly fall apart. Instead, let it go and move forward by restarting this prototyping process once again. Through this iterative process, you will eventually be able to design a life that is unique only to you.

There are 3 main areas covered in one of Stanford University's most popular Life planning courses to allow you to rethink your own Life as of this very moment:

1. Get rid of all weights from your own gravity as well as the anchors that are holding you down, and redraft your existing doubts.

2. Through many of the tools out there, devise a Odyssey plan of epic proportion.

3. Build the prototype of your life through varying personal experiences, learn to move on in spite of failures, so as to avoid wasting unnecessary time taking the long way.

All of us are living in search of our own direction throughout our lifetime, and we hold our own keys to our own destiny. It is only when we become the designer of our own lives, can we then avoid making repeated mistakes and live out the true value of Life.

1. Get rid of all the weights from your own gravity as well as the anchors that are holding you down, and redraft your existing doubts.

Throughout your journey as you grow older in Life, any one of us may get caught with the Gravity Problem or Anchor Problem, many a times unconsciously. 

Gravity Problem: 

This generally refers to the fundamentally established facts that already existed, and that no amount of action can ever overturn it. It is like you want to ride yourself up a particularly steep slope on a bike, but gravity somehow would prevent you from doing just that. Somehow, your focus now is to attempt to remove this gravity in order for you to achieve it. This kind of focus in trying to solve an unsolvable problem is the mire of Gravity Problem.

We must first be able to accept the fact that such facts are infalible when facing up against Gravity Problems, and aim to shake things up by seeing things from a different perspective and reframe the problems into something more actionable. For instance, you aim to make riding up the steep slope much easier, and you thought a specially designed mountain bike might make the ride smoother so your first action might be to figure out where can such bikes be purchased or built.

Anchor Problem: 

This generally refers to diving into a solution at the very first instance, with unwavering doubt that this solution can fix the problem without hearing out other possible solutions.

Take for example, Melanie, a sociology lecturer at a small liberal arts college, who had hoped to advocate the idea of social innovation through the setting up of an institute in the college and hence began the effort to raise funds in order to do that. Her fund-raising efforts was not successful after a long while and she soon felt depressed and helpless with all the rejections. Melanie was then able to reframe her problem set after adopting the Design Thinking mind-set. She put off the idea of fund-raising to set up the institute as the solution and decided that having social innovation-themed dormitories could provide similar impact that she had initially hoped.

Soon after, the establishment of such themed dormitories brought about lasting effect on advocating social innovation throughout the college. The very essence of the "Anchor Problem" lies in recognizing the solution you undertake is simply not feasible, but the refusal to step away from it for fear of wasting any investments from before,  or just not wanting to see it fall apart.

Whenever feeling stuck or stagnated in any situation, Designers will usually reframe their doubts, and reaffirm that the problems they are solving are indeed the problems that can be solved. Keep an open mind, take a step back to examine your biases, and open up many possibilities to solving solutions. Reframing your doubts can provide you with the right questions to ask and resolve issues in a better way, is a critical part of planning your Life.

2. Through many of the tools out there, devise a Odyssey Plan of epic proportion.

Bill Burnett mentioned that you tend to "choose better when you have lots of good ideas to choose from" and hence, "do not fall in love with your first idea" for that is usually the worst since your brain tends to be lazy and would skive by making you "fall in love" with your first ideas. Designers often like to make use of various tools to tap into the endless potential and creativity of the brain during brainstorming sessions.  

The health/work/play/love dashboard, just like a vehicle's dashboard that describes the its current condition, can be devised to let you be clear of your own current state. This way, you can then start to define the problems that have already existed in your Life and could also mark the start of your journey. You will then create and have with you a blueprint that lets you define a direction in your Life. A review of your current work contribution and forward-looking outlook on Life will then form that Guiding Star which will lead you forward from here on. You may want to spend an hour or two to list down your work contributions and your current standpoint in Life, observe if these two aspects of Life indeed complement each other. This Guiding Star of yours need not be static and may likely shift according to the priorities of your own expectations in relation to the contributions you are making through your current work. Hence, a half-yearly or an annual review may be required to recalibrate your direction.

Be consistently aware of your own behaviors, and make use of Good Time Journal which allows you to identify activities along the day that energised you and makes you feel engaged. Each record in the Good Time Journal per se ought to include:

1. The level of commitment

2. The energy being consumed

The level of commitment reflects the degree of focus on a certain task or activity. Having focus at the highest level constitutes being in the "Flow", a state of complete absorption in the current task or activity and your heart is feeling untroubled and calm, usually to a point where your mind have lost sense of the existence of space and time. The energy consumption demands the level of enthusiasm on a task; a determined and tireless display is of the most ideal. However, certain activities may tend to deplete your energy quickly and so, it is important to quickly identify the source of your lethargy and find ways to improve on it. If you procrastinate, it may then take more time for you to recover as you would have been completely exhausted.

After you have known yourself better using the abovementioned tools, you may devise three plans known as Odyssey Plans for the next five years of your Life.

• The first plan is simply an extension from your Life at present. Take for example, Jack, a business school graduate who once had an internship in the Fast-moving consumer goods industry for a year, decides to embark on his career as a Management Associate in the same industry as his first job

The second plan is the adjustments you may need should your first plan starts to deviate from its original plan. For example, during the year that Jack graduated, the Fast-moving consumer goods industry does not have openings for the management associate position that he desires. He shall then adapt and make the choice to leverage on his expertise on commerce to look out for jobs on the technology sector as a Product Manager.

• The third plan is to imagine an ideal Life that you want to have without constraints. For example, Jack have always wanted to form a rock band, and be a rock star.

3. Build the prototype of your life through varying personal experiences, learn to move on in spite of failures, so as to avoid wasting unnecessary time taking the long way.

Whenever a designer comes up with different design concepts, he will then follow on by building the prototypes. Not just a single prototype, but a large number of prototypes. 

Before you can actually settle for a result you deem as satisfactory, it is imperative that you have lots of prototypes to work with. You can certainly rely on these prototypes to discover any complications that are not obvious without hindsight, recognize any biases that are hindering your progress and making use the momentum from these experimentations and reiterations to finally chart your own course of action.

Creating prototypes also allows Designers to quickly visualize and test run all sorts of possibilities in quick succession; to be able to fail rapidly, improvise rapidly, moving forward from these learnt experiences to avoid spending too much time and energy on unnecessary stuff.

There are two suggested ways to build a prototype:
1) Life Design Interview
Seek possible answers from people who are actually living the Life that you desire.Ask about how does it feel at this moment about their Life, how they managed to get where they are today and listen to their stories. Bill Burnett mentioned to never be afraid of asking, for human in general often will like to feel that they can be of some help to others in genuine need. Hence, it is important that you do not try to sound desperate trying to make others think that you must gain something from them, such as urging them to land you an opportunity of a job interview in their companies. Athough many times, you might just be able to land one if you are truly sincere enough to learn.

2) Prototype Experience
Undertaking projects without renumerations allows you to gain real exposure and often can be a good way to confirm if you truthfully wish to commit your efforts for the long term. This allows you to avoid the situation where you show your hand, only to find that the experiences may not be be as ideal as you have imagined, or you are simply not suitable as you have thought it would.

Leverage on the information you gathered from the interviews, and spending some time through real experiences will allow you to unearth some of the pre-existing prejudices that you unconsciously harbor, as well as taking a sneak peek into the future.

Designers thrive on handling problems, questioning norms, and solving them. Every product design originated with a particular problem statement. The invention of MP3 players came about when there is an increasing need of having a music player that provides portability and mobility for music listening consumers.

Designers like to get their hands dirty, and not just simply fantasizing. More possibilities in Life can be discovered and your direction in Life can be defined more clearly through the trial and error process of prototyping. The problems that Designers face usually have no precedent events that can be referenced from and no single answer nor a clear objective to hold on to. Isn't the journey of Life fraught with uncertainties as well?

No standard answers, no scripts to memorise, no way of rehearsal, and every single moment of your Life is a brand new showing of your Life and that in itself, is a typical "Design Problem". The application of Design Thinking to design your Life will enable limitless creativity and productivity. Never confine yourself in your muddling search for a passion to work hard for and start learning to be a designer of your own Life.