Interests and passions

In a working lifetime, you can expect to spend approximately 100,000 hours at work.

You may as well spend those hours doing something that you’ll enjoy, that will make you spring out of bed in the morning – or at least not make you want to hide under the covers and bolt the door!

Work doesn’t have to be a chore or necessary evil to weigh you down. Basing your career around the things that you enjoy, that you are truly interested in and that energise and inspire you can turn ‘a job’ into your dream job making your working life enjoyable and fulfilling.

In this section of the course there are some tasks that will help you to identify your interests and passions. You can then see if or how these can inform choices you make about your working life and how you spend those 100,000 hours.

So what are the things, topics or activities that interest, inspire and energise you?

If you can identify these, you can see if or how you can incorporate them into your working life, either by seeing if you can get paid for doing the things you enjoy; working in an organisation whose mission focuses around the things you are interested in… or at least, doing a job that enables you to have the income or lifestyle to pursue your interests outside of work time.

Click on the graphic to download the Favourite Things exercise and have a go at identifying 20 things that interest or inspire you!

On the next page we will see how you can turn your passions into professions.