Discovering Your Passion

I am blessed. With the help of several twists and turns, failures and successes, I am fifteen years into a legal career and almost a decade into a real estate career and I have never been happier. More important is that I have a vision for my work that reaches multiple decades into the future.

People occasionally ask me, "How did you find your passion?" The following is a short, but potent plan of action, in bullet point format, that I usually offer to those who have the time. This has worked wonders for me and may be of value to you.

• You have to be intellectually curious. This means wanting to learn more about things beyond what is placed in front of you. Schools steadily expose kids to new subjects and force students to master them through exams and the threat of not being advanced to the next level. As adults, that force does not exist.

• No one talks about this, but intellectual curiosity is a skill. You must hone it or you will lose it. If you do not read, you will not like reading. If you do not research, you will always rely solely on the words of someone who does. How can you tell if your curiosity skill has eroded? Evaluate the range of your conversations. If you struggle to engage with others beyond a few topics, you have lost your curious mind and have greatly reduced your chances of being exposed to new opportunities.

• Monitor what your brain consumes. If you only watch sports and browse Facebook posts, that's all you will know. There is a whole world out there. Your destiny might be as a marine biologist. That will be hard to discover if the only thing on your mind is the dating lives of celebrities.

• Place yourself in the flow of information. Once you have become more intellectually curious, you must situate yourself such that new information finds YOU. This is how you will know if you are on the right path.

• Subscribe to industry e-newsletters. Attend conferences. Join organizations. Set up lunches. Follow people (on social media) who tweet links to industry news/studies. Do this and you will find yourself rich with information. It is like passive income for the mind.

• Only after you have performed the above, consider how you enjoy spending your free time. I realized my future was in real estate by recognizing that I enjoyed visiting construction sites, learning about skyscrapers and other noteworthy development projects and following commercial real estate blogs. Each of these things generated in me a deep satisfaction and excitement that I could not get anywhere else.

• Be willing to change jobs. If your current job is a dead end, is making you feel unfulfilled and is leaving you with no transferable skills, LEAVE. Maybe no   today. Maybe not next month. But don't enter next year with same job you have been complaining about for the past several years.

• If you have followed each of these steps, you may find yourself aware of positions and roles within your desired industry that you might not have known exist. Find out what it takes to get hired for the position that most interests you. If you meet some, but not all, of the qualifications, aim for the next lowest position with the intention of working your way up.

• Understand that failure is part of the process. You might mess up your first opportunity. You may end up with the wrong employer. There is a difference between wrong path and wrong vehicle. It might take an Uber, a train and a boat to get you there.

• It is easier to become passionate about something when you are successful at it. Success often breeds passion. Eliminate the notion that you must wake up doing cartwheels every morning. Get good at something first and then reevaluate your feelings.

Last, but not least...

• Fluidity is key. Be decisive about your actions but be open minded about your future. Twenty years ago, I was working toward becoming a physician. Fifteen years ago, I was preparing to settle down in Austin. Had I forced either of these things rather than obeying where life was pushing me, I would not be where I am today.