I have no idea what I want to do

After I entered university, I've been thinking a lot about what I want to do after I graduate. It has been more than a year now and I'm not sure what exactly I want to do or specialise in. Instead of just thinking in my mind, I decided to write this blog post so that I can reflect better.

I don't know what I want to do

I feel that if I don't know what I'm passionate about, I'll never know just by lying on my bed and thinking. I doubt I will ever jump out of bed thinking, "OH! I am passionate about (insert passion)!" Definitely not if I have not tried that activity properly before. This is why many people advocate trying new things for finding one's passion.

Over the course of last year, I've tried a few things - blogging, coding and "starting a business". I never got to a reasonable level of success for any of those and I dismissed them as things I love to do. Thinking back now, I realised that the problem was that I did not try them for a sufficiently long period of time. I blogged for only about 2 months and coded consistently for only about a month. I gave up on starting a business within a month when I could not think of an idea.

I stopped too quickly. Was it because those are not what I want to do? I can confidently say that that's not true because ever so often, I think of doing those activities again. It is simply because it was hard. It's hard to write; it's hard to gain readers for a blog; it's hard to learn to code; it's hard to start a business. I gave up because I did not see much results. However, it was silly of me to expect any results from doing so little. By giving up too quickly, I also gave up the opportunity to see any results.

I stopped because I felt that I didn't like doing them. I've wrongly assumed that just because something is hard, it means that I don't like doing it. Most things in life are not easy. And the fact that I kept wanting to do those activities again shows that I do not dislike them.

It's not that I do not know what I want to do even after trying new things. It was because I did not tried them long enough. So now I'm back to writing and coding and trying to do them consistently. Until I've written and coded for a substantial amount of time, I shall not be so quick to dismiss them again.

Have you tried searching for what you love to do and finding it really tough? I would really like to hear your experiences on this.

Photo credit: Brent Danley)