Why You Should Build Your Passions into Your Life and Work

What are the things that consume you with palpable emotion over time? What are the things you love so much that you’re willing to suffer for them? Those are your passions.

You probably have passions in different domains of your life. Are you passionate about your work—or at least parts of it? Do you talk often about what you like about your work, or find yourself working extra hours even when you don’t have to? Are you building your passions into your days and weeks?

14 Benefits of Building Your Passions into Your Life and Work

There are many powerful benefits to building passions into your life and work. For example, doing so will:

1. boost your motivation
2. enhance your engagement
3. increase your productivity
4. sharpen your focus
5. augment your creativity
6. help you achieve your goals
7. motivate you to keep learning, growing, and developing in your areas of interest
8. boost your persistence
9. help you be more resilient in the face of challenges
10. lead to more happiness and fulfillment
11. inspire others to find and work in areas of their passions when they see you loving life and thriving
12. help you avoid burnout
13. lead to much higher job satisfaction, according to a meta-analysis that reviewed data from nearly a hundred different studies (1)
14. result in better work performance, according to a meta-analysis of sixty studies conducted over the past six decades

Of course, there’s also a flip side to this: there’s much lost when you don’t have passion for what you’re doing. In that case, you’re much more likely to lack enthusiasm and “phone it in.” Over time, this can put you on a downward trajectory.

To what extent are you building your passions into your life and work? What more could you do?

Tools for You

• Traps Test (Common Traps of Living) to help you identify what’s getting in the way of your happiness and quality of life
• Quality of Life Assessment to help you discover your strongest areas and the areas that need work and then act accordingly
• Personal Values Exercise to help you clarify what’s most important to you

Related Articles

• “Why Self-Awareness Is So Important—And How to Develop It”
• “How to Discover Your Purpose” 
• “How to Discover Your Core Values” 
• “The Power of Knowing and Using Our Strengths” 
• “Tired of Settling? How to Set Your Life and Work on Fire”

Postscript: Inspirations on Passions

• “If there is any difference between you and me, it may simply be that I get up every day and have a chance to do what I love to do, every day. If you want to learn anything from me, this is the best advice I can give you.” -Warren Buffett, legendary investor
• “Passion is energy. Feel the power that comes from focusing on what excites you.” -Oprah Winfrey, media entrepreneur, author, and philanthropist
• “Paul and I, we never thought that we would make much money out of the thing. We just loved writing software.” -Bill Gates, co-founder, Microsoft
• “I did it for the buzz. I did it for the pure joy of the thing. And if you can do it for the joy, you can do it forever.” -Stephen King, writer

(1) Mark Allen Morris, “A Meta-Analytic Investigation of Vocational Interest-Based Job Fit, and Its Relationship to Job Satisfaction, Performance, and Turnover,” PhD dissertation, University of Houston, 2003.

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Gregg Vanourek is a writer, teacher, and TEDx speaker on personal development and leadership. He is co-author of three books, including LIFE Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives (a manifesto for integrating our life and work with purpose, passion, and contribution) and Triple Crown Leadership: Building Excellent, Ethical, and Enduring Organizations (a winner of the International Book Awards). Check out his Best Articles or get his monthly newsletter. If you found value in this article, please forward it to a friend. Every little bit helps!

(A version of this article first appeared on Gregg Vanourek's blog.)