In dictionary, passion can be defined as “a strong or extravagant fondness, enthusiasm, or desire for anything”.

As I looked around the popular culture, I kept finding the same messages everywhere: You are special. Trust yourself. Be true to yourself. Even movies are constantly telling children how wonderful they are. Today, commencement speeches are larded with cliches such as Follow your passion. Don’t accept limits. Chart your own course. You have responsibility to do great things because you are so great. The commencement speakers are telling the graduates to follow their passion, to trust their feelings, to reflect and find their purposes in life. The assumption behind these cliches is that when you are figuring out how to lead your life, the most important answers are found deep inside you.

When I sat down and take some time to discover myself, I realize that there are three questions came into my mind.

1. What is really important to me (the priorities of my life)?
2. What do I want from life?
3. What are the things that I truly value, that are not done just to please or impress the people around me?

By this way of thinking, life can be organized like a business plan. First, I take an inventory of my gifts and passions. Then, I set goals and come up with some metrics to organize my progress towards those goals. I map out a strategy to achieve your purpose, which help me to distinguish those things that move me toward the goals from those things that seem urgent but are distractions. This is the way I tend to organize my live in the age of individual autonomy.

However,  Frances Perkins found her purpose in life using a different method, one that was more common in past eras. In this method, we don’t ask, What do I want from life? They ask a different set of questions:

1. What does life want from me?
2. What are the circumstances calling me to do?

In this scheme of things, we don’t create our lives; we are summoned by life. The important answers are not found inside, they are found outside. This perspective beings with an awareness that the world exists long before you and will last long after you by evolution.

Being passionate is important in life, but it also can be difficult to deal with. Just like with all good things, too much of it can be damaging. Passions give us purpose, but more than that, they make us feel that we have purpose in our lives. Being passionate isn’t just about knowing – it’s also about feeling. That’s what makes passions so important; they make us feel that we’re on the right path in life and give us hope for a happy and exciting future.

Our job is to figure certain things out: What does the environment need in order to be made whole? What is it that needs repair? What tasks are lying around waiting to be performed?

As the novelist Frederick Buechner put it, “At what point do my talents and deep gladness meet the world’s deep need?”