Evan Carmichael shares three ways to discover what you're actually passionate about: seek out diverse activities through local events and meetups, say yes to invitations even when they scare you, and try things briefly before committing. He learned salsa dancing, rock climbing, and snowboarding this way.
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If you're trying to figure out what you want to do in life and people tell you that you need to follow your passion and explore your options, I'm going to give you some practical advice on how to actually do that in today's video. Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. I believe in entrepreneurs, and I recently posted a video talking about how if you don't know what you want to do in life, you need to discover your passion, and the best way to start is to explore. Explore different ideas and options and see which one you fall in love with and you can turn into a potential business. And so after posting that, I got a question This is a question from one of my YouTube readers, love you guys, Stun Down, who wrote to say, "Can you elaborate a bit on how to explore? Happy face." So this is a fantastic question, and I'm gonna give you 3 main ways and strategies that I use to explore that I hope can help you in your journey. Number 1 is look for activities and communities. What I look for is groups of people who are doing things that you've never done before that you may have had an interest in, and see if you can join up with them to learn. As an example, every weekend my assistant prepares for me a list of all the things that are happening happening in my city of Toronto and city. And I look at the things that are on that list of activities happening and try to explore them and try to go to them and see if I'm going to enjoy them or not and see if it's something that I want to learn about and I'm curious about. And I try to take the approach and the mindset that maybe I can learn something from this. I don't know anything about this industry or this culture, so I'm going to go and explore. And it's led me to go to the sex show and the RV show on the same weekend. I've gone to vegan shows and different cultural shows. I've gone to dancing shows. I've expanded my range, my realm of knowledge, and what I'm comfortable doing and not doing. And every time I go out, I find a way to apply it to my life somehow. So instead of adopting the mentality thinking, "Oh, that's not for me. I'm never going to be interested in that," explore, right? You're in exploratory mode. Find things that are happening every weekend in your city and go and join them. Go to meetups. Go to events. Look at calendars that were being put out by your city or by local groups and just go for the first time and see if you like it or not. You don't know until you try. Number 2 is say yes more. If friends invite you to things, things that you've never done, things that might be scary, things that again you may feel like, "Ah, that's not for me," just say yes. Go. Try it out. Here's an example. Recently, a friend of mine, Chris Shands from the company Happy Worker, invited me to go tree planting with him and his wife and his son. And I've never gone tree planting before, ever. So I said, "Why not? Let's go and try it." And we had fun, we had a blast. I brought my son, I brought my wife, and we had fun planting trees. When I first got into salsa dancing, it was because a girl that I was interested in wanted to try salsa dancing. So I said, "Yes, let's go and try it out and see if we like it." When I first got into snowboarding, it was because my wife, or then girlfriend at the time, said, "Why don't we go snowboarding?" She had done it before, she wanted to take me, so I said, "Yes, let's go and try it." So say yes more. Unless you know with absolute certainty that you're going to hate it, say yes and try it out. And that's a great way to explore to see if you discover something that you're interested in and you love doing or not. Number 3 is quick starts and quick exits. The idea behind exploring is finding something that you love to do, something you can get lost in, think, something that you're curious about, something that may not even make sense on paper, but when you get into it, you just love it so much that you're going to have fun and you want to keep going back to it. But if you don't love it, that's cool. You never have to go back to doing it again. I tried rock climbing and I hated it, and I'm probably never going to go back to doing it again. I tried snowboarding and I liked it, and it was fun, and we go, you know, a couple times a year, and that's about it. I tried camping and I like that, and I go a couple times a year, and that's fine. Tree planting, I just tried. I enjoy that, and I'll probably go once or twice a year. Salsa dancing, I tried and I loved it. And I fell in love with it. And even though it looked terrible on paper, right? I'm too tall, I don't speak Spanish, I don't understand the music, I never heard it before, I'm not a dancer, I'm learning as an adult. All these reasons why this shouldn't be something that I'm excited about, I get into and, and I loved it. And I had to find a way to keep going. And now fast forward over a decade later, I'm an instructor, I'm a DJ, a professional dancer, I've invested into a salsa dancing company. And so you don't know until you explore. That whole thing started just because a girl that I was interested in seeing, she wanted to go do salsa dancing, and I just said yes. You never know what's gonna work out. You just got to go out and explore and try. My last bonus tip on this is keep an open mind, because I look back to that salsa example, and if I went into that looking at it as a business opportunity, right, if I said, I don't know what I'm gonna do next in my life, I need to find the next business opportunity I need to jump into, I would look at it and say, now, there's all these reasons why salsa isn't going to work out, and then I wouldn't even try. But I went in with an open mind. I went in not looking specifically for a business opportunity, and it became one. It's like when you start a business just trying to make money, you rarely do. But if you start a business because you love what you're doing and you're really helping people, that's when you start to make a lot of money. So get out of your head, stop figuring out all the reasons why something's not going to work out, and just try and see if you fall in love. So those are my 3 tips for how to explore and find your passion. For those of you watching, I'd love to know how you've explored and how you found your passion. Leave it in the comments below. I'm going to join in the discussion. And if you like this video and you want to see more, don't forget to subscribe to the channel and the newsletter. Thank you so much for watching. I'll see you soon.
