Why is Passion and Purpose Important at Any Age?

It helps to have a strong sense of purpose and passion so we “come alive” and are motivated to stay healthy, happy and continue contributing to life.

What is Passion?

For this work, passion means “the emotional experiences of attraction, enjoyment, motivation, and perseverance”

Passion isn’t a particular interest or a particular type of work—it’s the way you feel when you’re pursuing an interest or doing the work. And because it’s a feeling, it’s something that can be found through different kinds of work, interests, or people.

Once you’ve identified what brings you to that feeling of passion, you can then build those things into your life

You might experience passion when you’re doing some of the following activities:

Working on your hobbies

Exercising a particular skill

Dedicating your time to a cause or a movement

Working toward a specific goal

Those experiences provide important information that you can use to build a zest for life.

Do Passions Change?

It’s important to understand that you don’t have to find the one thing that you are passionate about. Passion isn’t an object. It’s an orientation. That feeling of “coming alive.”

It’s not going to be a singular, stable, unchanging thing. In fact, your passion and how you experience it might evolve over time. As you pursue different types of activities/work, you’ll learn more about what makes you feel that sense of passion.

So, it’s important to remain open to what you might learn about how you experience passion as well.

In addition to identifying your sources of passion, you need to think about what you have to offer. Knowledge, skill or talent that can also be a passion.