You don’t have a passion problem. You have a sample-size problem.

You have been told to follow your passion since you were about fifteen. It is the most repeated piece of career advice in the region, and it is given by people who are already successful, which should make you suspicious.

Here is the problem with it. To follow your passion you first have to have one. To have one you have to have found something you are good enough at to enjoy. And to be good at something you have to have done it for a while.

You are nineteen, or twenty-two. You have tried school, maybe an internship, maybe a side project. That is a sample size of three or four. You are being asked to search a space you have not visited.

Passion is downstream, not upstream

Nobody is born passionate about pricing. I am passionate about pricing because I won an argument about it once, with real money on the table, and the winning felt good. The interest came after the competence, not before it.

This is the part the advice gets backwards. You do not find the thing you love and then get good at it. You get slightly good at something, that produces a small win, the win makes it interesting, and the interest makes you practise. That is the actual loop.

Which means the question is not what do I love? It is where do I get traction? Where does a small amount of effort produce a visible result? That is a question you can answer with evidence instead of feelings.

What to do instead of reflecting

Stop journalling about it. Your feelings are not data yet — they are a report on a sample of four.

Go and get more samples. Small ones. An hour each, not a degree each. Write a positioning line for a company you already use. Sit in on one sales call. Take one company apart and work out how it actually makes money. Send one partnership email and see what comes back.

You are not trying to find the thing you love. You are trying to find the thing where the hour felt short.

The uncomfortable part

Some of those hours will be boring and you will want to conclude that the field is not for you. Be careful. An hour of anything at the beginner level is mostly confusion, and confusion feels like dislike.

The signal is not enjoyment. The signal is did you want to know what happened next? That question survives being a beginner. Enjoyment does not.

And the thing nobody says

You might do five of these and like none of them. That is a real result, not a failure — and it is far more useful at twenty than discovering it at twenty-eight, three years into a career you chose because it sounded respectable at a family dinner.

This week: pick one of the five hours. Not the one that sounds most like you. Pick the one you would be slightly embarrassed to be bad at. That reaction is information.