How to Develop Your Multiple Passions

I believe that developing your multiple passions is important to live a rich life. Besides, it is also important to be able to develop your ideas exponentially. But how do you do that? How do you develop your multiple passions? Here I’d like to share some practical steps you can do to develop your multiple passions. Here they are:

1. List your passions

Before taking further actions to develop your passions, you should recognize what your passions are. Make a list of all the things you are passionate about. To help you recognize your passions, here are signs of passion: you lose track of the passage of time while doing it; in a real sense, it’s something you’d be willing to do for free, for its own sake (from 37 Lessons to Help You Live a Life that Matters).

For more tips on recognizing your passions, see How to Find Your Passion.

2. Get resources for each passion

After listing your passions, you need to have good resources to learn from. Fortunately, there are a lot of free good resources on the Internet. For each passion:

1. Subscribe to at least one blog
   Browse the Technorati Blog Directory to find the topic which correspond to your passion. You can also browse Technorati based on tags. List the blogs in your topic according to authority. Blogs with high authority are usually good resources to learn from. Browse those blogs and subscribe to at least one of them.
2. Subscribe to at least one podcast
   Besides subscribing to blogs, I recommend you to also subscribe to at least one podcast related to your passion. Podcasts give you different learning experience since they are in audio (or video) form. Having different forms of resources allows you to learn in a richer way.
   iTunes has lists of top podcasts in many categories, so you can browse the topic related to your passion and subscribe to the podcasts there. LearnOutLoud also has good podcast directory with selected podcasts from around the Internet.
3. Join the corresponding StumbleUpon channel
   If you haven’t joined StumbleUpon, then you should. It’s an easy and fun way to discover new resources. StumbleUpon allows you to do “channel browsing” in which you will be presented with new pages of that topic. There are a lot of topics available at StumbleUpon, so join the one that correspond to your passion.

These steps are only for the resources you can get freely on the Internet. Of course it is a good idea to also add other resources such as reading books.

3. Write the ideas you get

This, of course, is an important step. I’ve talked about the importance of writing your ideas several times in this blog. See 4 Simple Ways to Never Lose Your Ideas for some practical tips on capturing your ideas.

4. Make “next action” list for each passion

After learning and getting ideas, you need to determine what actions you are going to take to apply them. Think about practical things you can do to put your knowledge into action. They don’t have to be something complex, simple things will do. And you don’t need to do many things, one or two things are fine. The bottom line is you should do something to develop your passions.

5. Explore things outside your current list of passions

All the steps above can be used to develop the passions you list in step 1. But who knows, maybe you still have other passions you haven’t recognized. So keep an open mind and explore areas outside your current list of passions. You can start your exploration by gathering some resources as described in step 2 above.