One way to get into a good conversation is to ask your opposite number about their passions, their interests, what really drives them.
That might be the type of music they listen to:
Jay Doubleyou: what's your playlist?
Or the food they enjoy:
Jay Doubleyou: slow food: "pleasure, hedonism, enjoyment, tranquility, conviviality, richness"
But 'passion' involves deep feelings, not just a 'hobby' or 'pastime' activity:
Jay Doubleyou: emotional intelligence
Ultimately, if we are to have good conversations which really engage, then we need to ask the right questions and listen in the right way:
Jay Doubleyou: how to be open to other people's opinions
Of course, this is also a typical if rather to-be-expected question at an interview - so we need to be careful how we answer!
What are you passionate about? Crafting an ideal interview answer | Indeed.com UK
How to Answer “What Are You Passionate About?” (Samples) | The Muse
Interview Question: "What Are You Passionate About?"
How To Thoughtfully Answer "What Are You Passionate About?" | Indeed.com
But maybe it's a question we shouldn't be asking!
Remember back when you were a kid? You would just do things. You never thought to yourself, “What are the relative merits of learning baseball versus football?” You just ran around the playground and played baseball and football. You built sand castles and played tag and asked silly questions and looked for bugs and dug up grass and pretended you were a sewer monster.
Nobody told you to do it, you just did it. You were led merely by your curiosity1 and excitement.2
And the beautiful thing was, if you hated baseball, you just stopped playing it. There was no guilt involved. There was no arguing or debate. You either liked it or you didn’t.
And if you loved looking for bugs, you just did that. There was no second-level analysis of, “Well, is looking for bugs really what I should be doing with my time as a child? Nobody else wants to look for bugs, does that mean there’s something wrong with me? How will looking for bugs affect my future prospects?”3
There was no bullshit. If you liked something, you just did it.
“How Do I Find My Passion?”
Today, I received approximately the 11,504th email this year from a person telling me that they don’t know what to do with their life. And like all of the others, this person asked me if I had any ideas of what they could do, where they could start, where to “find their passion.”
And of course, I didn’t respond. Why? Because I have no clue. If you don’t have any idea what to do with yourself, what makes you think some jackass with a website would? I’m a writer, not a fortune teller.4
But more importantly, what I want to say to these people is this: that’s the whole point—”not knowing” is the whole point. Life is all about not knowing, and then doing something anyway. All of life is like this. All of it. And it’s not going to get any easier just because you found out you love your job cleaning septic tanks, or you scored a dream gig writing indie movies.
The common complaint among a lot of these people is that they need to “find their passion.”
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