I had only just started high school when I asked myself for the first time: what am I going to do with my life? How do I find my passion?

I had plenty of interests, but none of them strong enough to give me the conviction that my future lay in that direction.

I liked math (sort of), I liked history too (to a certain extent), I liked technology, foreign languages and biology. But none of them enough to make me want to become a mathematician, a scientist, a historian or a doctor.

In other words, I had many interests, but no passion. If this story sounds familiar, keep reading.

Why is it important to find your passion?

A non-exhaustive list of reasons, in ascending order of dramatic effect:

• so you know which university to apply to,
• so you can build a strong extracurricular profile for university,
• so you feel more motivated in your day-to-day life,
• so you are more interesting when someone introduces you to a new person,
• so your parents stop nagging you about not doing anything useful,
• so you do not end up one day at the peak of an existential crisis, living a life that does not feel like your own.

The problem is that few people teach you how to figure out what you like to do.

The recipe for success seems simple: find a passion, work hard, reap the rewards.

And yet, if you get stuck on the first step, what do you do?

How do you find your passion?

(Three pieces of advice, to be applied in order.)

One. Get bored. Make time for introspection.

Being bored is a luxury. The vast majority of people do not have time to be bored; they have rent to pay, medical bills to cover, or people around them to take care of.

As a teenager, you are most likely shielded from all these responsibilities. It follows, then, that you have plenty of time. The catch is that there are also plenty of sneaky candidates around you fighting for your attention. You can open the internet and, as if by magic, access an endless list of videos, jokes, or interesting theories.

And yet, if I ask you what the last truly useful Instagram Reel you watched was, does anything come to mind instantly?

There is a clear advantage to the information age we live in: we can find out (almost) anything with a second of searching. That means any field, however niche or bizarre, is closer to you than it was to any generation that lived before you. But there is also a big disadvantage. Through the sheer amount of content we are exposed to, we run out of time to hear our own thoughts.

And if you want to figure out what you like to do, to discover a personal project you actually care about, to feel that your existence has more meaning, you need to be able to listen to your own thoughts.

This Sunday, run an experiment. Leave your phone at home and go for a walk. You will feel disoriented at first. No music in your earbuds, no occasional scrolling break, no calling a friend to vent about whatever is annoying you. But if you spend enough time alone with yourself, a stray thought will appear, an interesting idea.

This idea that shows up, when you least expect it, is your first clue. It comes from a part of your brain you do not control, and you would do well to listen to it.

You are walking along, slightly bored, and all of a sudden you get an urge to buy clay and sculpt a mug? Get some clay. Make a mug. See how it feels. See what comes next. Maybe one day you will become a sculptor. Or maybe you will be an entrepreneur in a business selling special mugs. Or maybe a curator at a sculpture exhibition.

Or maybe, out of boredom, your brain starts to be haunted by a question. How do solar panels work? What is the physics behind them? Pick up a book, find a few websites, watch some videos. Who knows, maybe you realize you like physics more than you thought. Or that you want to become an activist.

Two. Explore without the pressure of being productive. Play.

When we were children, almost all of us had a multitude of interests. We loved dinosaurs, or fairies, or stories about brave warriors. We loved to draw, or to read about wizards, or to paint clay mugs. Whatever activity we were doing, we were completely absorbed in it; hours could go by without us realizing.

The reason we were so free to explore is that we did not stress so much about turning every minute into something productive. We played, and we would see what came next.

When you are in high school (and later, when you are an adult), there is this gravitational force of productivity, constantly whispering that everything you do has to have a concrete result, give you some clear skills, or earn you some money. If you give it too much room in your mind, it will paralyze you. When you are too focused on concrete results ("I want to get good grades at school," "I want to be successful," "I want to make a lot of money"), you set your imagination aside.

But if you want to discover yourself, to find your passion, you need that imagination.

So once you have found an intuition pointing in a certain direction, hold back from trying to monetize it, or to turn it into an experience that looks good on a CV. You have plenty of time to do responsible things too. For now, keep your passion pure so you can enjoy it.

Three. Give yourself enough room to be a beginner.

Whatever field you explore, whatever challenge you try to solve, one thing is certain: at the beginning, you will be extraordinarily bad at it. The first sketch you make will look incomplete. The first paragraph you write will be boring. The first technical report you read about spark-ignition engines will be fantastically hard to understand. To become an expert in a field (whatever field it may be) you first have to go through a trench of failures. Otherwise, we would all be experts in everything and it would be very easy for us to do difficult things.

Many people have an intuition, try something, realize that the activity is harder than it looks, get scared by their apparent lack of talent, and give up. Being weak at the start is natural. But if you have a phobia of being a beginner, you will never get past this stage, and you will never get to discover a field in depth.

One secret here is not to publicly declare, right away, the passion you have discovered. If you do, the people around you will start asking you questions, and they will make you feel guilty for not yet knowing how to answer them.

A closing story.

In The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath sketches an analogy that I am going to borrow now. Imagine a fig tree, with many twisting branches. All the branches start from a common trunk, but at some point they begin to break away from one another and form the crown of the tree. Now imagine that each branch represents a possible version of your future.

The trunk is childhood, and the zone that separates the trunk from the branches is adolescence. Your future can take any number of directions.

You can take one road, which starts with studying medicine and leads you to a career healing people. Or you can take some acting classes, develop your sensibilities, and spend your life going from one stage to another. But here is the compromise. Whatever branch you choose inevitably means that you cannot choose the rest. You cannot be a doctor, and a lawyer, and an engineer, and an artist all at once.

Through this analogy, Plath hints at the terror we all feel in adolescence, when we sense that there are so many options yet we are paralyzed by having to make a decision.

I will leave you, though, with a suggestion. Instead of being terrifying, the lack of certainty can be a source of excitement. The differences are actually only apparent. The key is simple: every branch of the fig tree has an equally beautiful destination. The ocean of options is not meant to paralyze you, but only to show you how many beautiful ways there are to live your life. All you have to do is begin.