There’s a certain kind of panic that grips us in our twenties—or maybe it’s in our thirties, or even our forties. It comes in waves, usually during long commutes, after breakups, or while scrolling through the curated ambitions of others. The panic says: You haven’t found your passion. You’re wasting your life. Time is running out.
We’re told that finding our passion is the key to happiness, fulfillment, and even success. The idea is alluring: discover what you love, and the rest will fall into place. It’s a beautiful myth—equal parts inspiring and cruel. Because what happens when you don’t know what you love? What if nothing calls to you louder than the next obligation?
This advice—“follow your passion”—is, frankly, the career version of telling someone to wait for true love without ever asking anyone out. It’s passive. It assumes clarity strikes like lightning. But passion doesn’t work like that. Passion is not found. Passion is made.
And it’s forged through discipline.
Let’s strip “discipline” of its dusty connotations. This isn’t about waking up at 5 a.m. to meditate and run a 10K (unless that genuinely feeds your soul). Discipline isn’t punishment. It’s commitment in the absence of immediate reward. It’s choosing to show up—even when the muse is silent, even when nobody’s watching, even when you’re not sure it matters.
At first, discipline feels like effort without payoff. You’re writing pages nobody reads. Coding apps no one uses. Practicing scales that don’t sound like music. The early stages are full of friction, boredom, and insecurity. But here’s the alchemy: if you persist long enough, something shifts. Not dramatically. Just enough.
The lines get smoother. The work starts to hum. The thing you were forcing yourself to do becomes something you want to do. Not always, but often enough to matter. What began as a grind reveals a glimmer of satisfaction, even joy. You realize: you’ve grown into your craft. You’ve cultivated interest—and interest deepens into passion.
That’s the part the passion evangelists miss: passion is usually the result of skill, not the precursor to it.
Angela Duckworth, a psychologist known for her research on grit, puts it like this: “Passion for your work is a little bit of discovery, followed by a lot of development, and then a lifetime of deepening.” But we rarely see the middle. We see the polished final product and mistake it for destiny.
Think of any master you admire. A chef. A musician. A surgeon. A teacher. Ask them when they “found their passion,” and you’ll likely hear a winding story. One that involves false starts, boredom, second-guessing, years of uncertainty. What they’ll tell you, if they’re honest, is that they kept going not because they were constantly inspired, but because they built habits around the work. They made room for inspiration to arrive.
Because passion doesn’t ride in on a white horse. It sneaks in through the back door when you’re elbow-deep in practice. It shows up one Tuesday afternoon when you’re doing what you always do—and you suddenly realize you care.
This matters because chasing passion can make you reckless. It can make you abandon good things too soon. You try painting for a month and feel uninspired, so you stop. You take a job that doesn’t light you up immediately, so you quit. You’re chasing a feeling that, ironically, only comes with time.
The obsession with passion can also be a way of avoiding the harder, scarier work of commitment. If you’re always searching for the perfect fit, you never have to be fully seen. You can keep auditioning identities, never investing deeply enough to risk failure.
But if you choose discipline—if you decide to stay, to learn, to improve—you risk something more profound: success on your own terms. Not just career success, but internal success. The kind that makes you proud, even if no one else notices.
To be clear: this isn’t a sermon against dreams. Far from it. Dreams matter. They animate us. But dreams alone are unreliable guides. They flicker. They shift. They can’t steer the wheel.
Discipline, on the other hand, is quiet, dependable, and often unglamorous. It builds the muscle memory of persistence. And in doing so, it invites passion to make a home in your life—not as a guest, but as a companion.
So don’t worry if you haven’t found your passion yet. Don’t measure your worth by the intensity of your inspiration. Instead, find something—even a small thing—that you can return to, day after day. Make a habit of becoming excellent at it. Give it time. Give yourself time.
One day, you’ll look up from your work and realize: passion didn’t abandon you. It just needed you to build the road first.