Letter to Self - Passion

10 Dec 2025 Share on:

Dear Palak,

I know you would not have expected your future self to write to you, but this is in fashion these days and you have always been fashionable, so here it is.

I want to talk to you about this whole “find your passion” thing you keep worrying about.

You keep saying you are not sure what you are passionate about. You say it like it is a defect, like some magical signal that never arrived from the sky. I want to tell you gently: that sentence is hiding the truth instead of revealing it.

Most people, including you, already have some sense of what they enjoy. You know which problems make you forget the time. You know which topics your eyes light up for, because your family has to tell you to stop talking about them. When you say “I don’t know my passion,” what is usually happening inside you is not emptiness. It is a mix of fear, confusion, and borrowed ideas about what passion is supposed to look like. Don’t let other people define your preferences. Decide and build your own.

So let us unpack the lies you have quietly absorbed.

The first lie is that there is one true passion.

You are not a single label. You never were. You like computer science, physics, management, writing, astronomy, history, mentoring, and three other things you will discover later. You are not broken because you cannot squeeze all of that into one tidy word like “developer” or “writer”.

For you, passion is not a single topic. Passion is the way you engage with many topics. You love taking things apart, understanding how they work, building something from that understanding, and then explaining it to someone else. That pattern keeps repeating in different domains. That pattern is your passion, whether you are debugging a system, appreciating history, writing an essay, or teaching someone to look at Jupiter for the first time.

When you try to force yourself to choose one banner and kill everything else, you feel like you are betraying yourself. You are right to resist that.

The second lie is that you must discover your passion before you are allowed to move.

You imagine that somewhere out there is a perfect fit, a calling with neon lights and background music. Until you “find” it, you feel you are just wandering.

Here is what you will slowly learn. Passion is not a lightning bolt from the sky. Passion is a story you tell later about the things you have stuck with long enough to get good at and care about. You start with something you already kind of like. You do it again. You do it when it is fun. You do it when it is boring. You survive the part where you think you are terrible. You improve. Other people benefit from what you do. Somewhere along that path, it stops being just a task and starts becoming part of who you are.

From the outside, people say, “You found your passion.” From the inside, it feels much more ordinary. You chose something. You stayed with it. Habit, skill, and meaning slowly braided themselves into something deeper.

This is not ordinary. Building habit and skill takes effort and time, and you did it. Yourself.

This is true for writing. It is true for leadership. It is true for engineering. You did not “find” those passions like lost keys. You built them out of small, stubborn repetitions.

The third lie is that real passion feels like a 24/7 fire.

You secretly believe that if something is truly your passion, you will wake up excited every single day. No doubt. No friction. No boredom. Always “on fire”. Therefore, whenever you feel tired, or bored, or stuck, you quietly conclude, “Maybe this is not my passion after all.” Then you start scanning the horizon for the next thing that will keep you permanently excited. You call this searching for passion. Mostly it is just running away from discomfort.

Here is what you need to know. Real passion has seasons. Sometimes it looks like flow and obsession and that lovely tunnel-vision when code, or prose, or an idea just pours out of you. Sometimes it looks like maintenance: cleaning up old messes, answering emails, debugging someone else’s bug, rereading and rewriting the same paragraph ten times. The fire is still there, but it is not always a bonfire. Some days it is just a candle that you protect with your hands while the wind blows.

Years later, you will read Mark Twain saying:

“No, Sir, not a day’s work in all my life. What I have done I have done, because it has been play. If it had been work I shouldn’t have done it.”

You will recognise yourself in that line. Not because your life was effortless, but because the things you cared about most often blurred that line between work and play. Some days it felt like play. Some days it felt like hard work. It was still yours.

The absence of constant excitement does not mean the absence of passion. It usually means you have moved from the honeymoon phase to the craft phase.

So where does this leave you?

You are multi-passionate. That is not a diagnosis. It is a description. You love many domains, and you also love the process itself: learning, building, connecting, teaching. You will never be happy stuffing all of that into one narrow identity. You do not need to.

You also do not need to sit on the floor and wait for a divine “passion notification” to arrive. You already know enough to start. You know which things you enjoy more than average. You know which problems you complain about and secretly want to fix. You know where your curiosity keeps returning when nobody is watching.

So, here is the advice I wish you would trust a little earlier.

Stop searching for a single, mythical passion. Start taking small bets on the things you already like.

Write one blog post, even if only three people read it. Take on one slightly scary problem at work and see it through. Teach one person something you know. Let yourself be bad at new things long enough for them to become familiar. Let habit, skill, and impact do their slow, quiet work.

Over years, what will emerge will not be a single word you can put in your bio. It will be a pattern of work and play that feels deeply yours. Call that passion if you want. Call it craft. Call it your way of being in the world.

Just do not keep telling yourself you do not have it.

You have always had it. You were just expecting it to look different.

Regards, Palak