If it were easy, the internet would not be littered with content on how to find it (this essay being one), and you wouldn’t have a non-fiction bestseller coming out every year that tackles this topic.
One way to figure it out is to observe your intrinsic motivations.
What do you like doing for the sake of it? What do you actually care about when no one's looking?
While reflecting on these myself, I found conflicts.
Even for the kind of work I enjoyed doing, my motivation to complete a project would fluctuate like a roller coaster for reasons I couldn’t explain.
If I tried to brute force my way through it, I would feel immense discomfort and distraction. As if every cell in my body begged me to procrastinate.
Upon investigating further, I arrived at an interesting discovery:
The CSA Framework
My passion is not just what I love to do. It has three aspects to it.
I will term them as Craft, Sport, and Aesthetic.
Craft:
It is the creative activity that requires effort but never tires you out. The more you do it, the better you do it, the more energised you feel.
For me, it’s theorising and explaining: what you’re hearing me do right now.
I love to theorise about the mechanics of how the world works. I love reading dense books by physicists, computer scientists, psychologists, and philosophers extensively, and I love coming up with my own explanations for various cultural, technological and physical phenomena.
I do this all the time, like when I am commuting, when I am in the elevator, sometimes even in the middle of a conversation if I’m suddenly struck with an idea.
I also love to explain. Be it in writing or speaking into a mic or sitting in a circle with my colleagues on Friday evenings. I love to narrate theories, facts, and histories.
This is my craft, the execution part of my passion.
Something that I will never delegate to anyone else, even if I had all the money in the world, because I have fun with it, I find meaning in it, and I like getting better at it.
For you, it can be making memes, animation, woodwork, gaming, solving math, writing code. It can be doing experiments in the lab or managing people, or making motion pictures. You can also have a double-barreled craft like I do.
The way you identify your craft is to identify the activity that feels like play to you, but for anyone else, it is a skill or a job.
If you feel like you can't identify your craft, chances are you already do it all the time and overlook it.
Certain types of crafts are elusive, especially if they involve a soft skill. Like your sense of humour, or your ability to have good conversations.
(Yes, conversation can be a craft too. People literally take classes for it, and hundreds of thousands have made a career out of talking.)
But don’t get carried away yet.
Your craft is not enough to give you a holistic picture of what you desire.
Sport:
When I see an idea or an explanation of mine reaching a lot of people, I feel energized.
When I ideate a product and it stands the test of business, or when people resonate with the content I put out and share it with others, I feel pumped up.
Initially, it was easy to reject this part of myself, thinking, “Okay, I’m seeking validation. I am just playing some status game. This will only harm me in the long run.”
But that was a mistake.
Certain metrics actually make sense to us. To some, that metric can be money, and to others, it can be the number of trophies they win, the volume of books they publish, the number of products they ship, or the number of commits they make to open source software.
For me, it is reach.
And I know that my hunger for reach is not toxic because if someone is better at it than I am, my first instinct will be to wonder how they do it, and if possible, talk to them and learn from them.
I cannot say the same about other metrics, because, like most humans, I too have the propensity to compare myself to others in unhealthy ways.
But in the case of reach, I would only be amazed and inspired by someone who is better than me, and would be excited to help someone who knows less than me.
Will I also compete with them? Absolutely. I want to be the best in the world in this.
But it will not be bitter competition. It will be nourishing and invigorating.
That is how I know that this is not a typical status game; this is a sport.
An important clarification for me was that my sport is definitely a thing of its own. I’m not using it to measure my craftsmanship.
Whether I reach 5000, 100k, or 2000 people, I am not judging the quality of my essay/video essay based on that.
If I make something that I am proud of, the craftsman in me will be happy and won’t care about its reach. But the sportsman in me will. If I ever end up making something that I don’t like, but it goes viral, the sportsman in me will feel pumped up, but the craftsman in me will not be able to stop thinking about how to build it better the next time.
Aesthetic:
And then there's the third thing, which is the.. vibe that I like to indulge in. The texture of the world I want to create and inhabit.
For the lack of a better word, I’m calling it Aesthetic, but I am open to suggestions for a better name in the comments.
My aesthetic lies in the intersection of adventure, intellectualism, and romanticism.
This is probably the easiest aspect to detect: just look at the kind of media you like to consume. What is the feel of it? What is the recurring pattern you observe?
What are certain tropes that move you to tears? What is the flavour of the world that you create in your daydreams?
Your aesthetic will always be a combination of multiple existing styles and tropes. You will discover its true nature by finding a harmony between them.
It is your aesthetic that will decide the niche you create or the field of work you find yourself at home in.
To give you an example: You might be a craftsman in linear algebra, but your aesthetic will dictate whether you lean towards physics or AI research.
You might get a kick out of outrunning others, but your aesthetic will dictate whether you get into athletics or football.
Once again, this is a thing of its own. The craftsman cares about the quality of his craft. The sportsman cares about making his numbers go up. The aesthete cares about decorating the outer world with the colours of his inner world.
How this helps me
Recognising the difference between the three helps in decision-making and reorientation when you hit roadblocks.
When something feels off about a project, I can now articulate the feeling and isolate the failure mode.
I can ask myself:
Am I chasing a meaningless metric? Am I forcing myself onto a topic that bores me? Am I testing the limits of my craftsmanship, or am I stagnating it?
Once you see the architecture, it is hard to unsee it. You will watch yourself procrastinate and know exactly which of the three you are betraying. If you closely watch a friend's work process, you will recognize precisely which of their three aspects is better honed than yours. When working in a team, you will know which responsibilities to delegate and which ones to own yourself.
An Internal Conflict
"Passion" is a difficult thing to find.
If it were easy, the internet would not be littered with content on how to find it (this essay being one), and you wouldn’t have a non-fiction bestseller coming out every year that tackles this topic.
One way to figure it out is to observe your intrinsic motivations.
What do you like doing for the sake of it? What do you actually care about when no one's looking?
While reflecting on these myself, I found conflicts.
Even for the kind of work I enjoyed doing, my motivation to complete a project would fluctuate like a roller coaster for reasons I couldn’t explain.
If I tried to brute force my way through it, I would feel immense discomfort and distraction. As if every cell in my body begged me to procrastinate.
Upon investigating further, I arrived at an interesting discovery:
The CSA Framework
My passion is not just what I love to do. It has three aspects to it.
I will term them as Craft, Sport, and Aesthetic.
Craft:
It is the creative activity that requires effort but never tires you out. The more you do it, the better you do it, the more energised you feel.
For me, it’s theorising and explaining: what you’re hearing me do right now.
I love to theorise about the mechanics of how the world works. I love reading dense books by physicists, computer scientists, psychologists, and philosophers extensively, and I love coming up with my own explanations for various cultural, technological and physical phenomena.
I do this all the time, like when I am commuting, when I am in the elevator, sometimes even in the middle of a conversation if I’m suddenly struck with an idea.
I also love to explain. Be it in writing or speaking into a mic or sitting in a circle with my colleagues on Friday evenings. I love to narrate theories, facts, and histories.
This is my craft, the execution part of my passion.
Something that I will never delegate to anyone else, even if I had all the money in the world, because I have fun with it, I find meaning in it, and I like getting better at it.
For you, it can be making memes, animation, woodwork, gaming, solving math, writing code. It can be doing experiments in the lab or managing people, or making motion pictures. You can also have a double-barreled craft like I do.
The way you identify your craft is to identify the activity that feels like play to you, but for anyone else, it is a skill or a job.
If you feel like you can't identify your craft, chances are you already do it all the time and overlook it.
Certain types of crafts are elusive, especially if they involve a soft skill. Like your sense of humour, or your ability to have good conversations.
(Yes, conversation can be a craft too. People literally take classes for it, and hundreds of thousands have made a career out of talking.)
But don’t get carried away yet.
Your craft is not enough to give you a holistic picture of what you desire.
Sport:
When I see an idea or an explanation of mine reaching a lot of people, I feel energized.
When I ideate a product and it stands the test of business, or when people resonate with the content I put out and share it with others, I feel pumped up.
Initially, it was easy to reject this part of myself, thinking, “Okay, I’m seeking validation. I am just playing some status game. This will only harm me in the long run.”
But that was a mistake.
Certain metrics actually make sense to us. To some, that metric can be money, and to others, it can be the number of trophies they win, the volume of books they publish, the number of products they ship, or the number of commits they make to open source software.
For me, it is reach.
And I know that my hunger for reach is not toxic because if someone is better at it than I am, my first instinct will be to wonder how they do it, and if possible, talk to them and learn from them.
I cannot say the same about other metrics, because, like most humans, I too have the propensity to compare myself to others in unhealthy ways.
But in the case of reach, I would only be amazed and inspired by someone who is better than me, and would be excited to help someone who knows less than me.
Will I also compete with them? Absolutely. I want to be the best in the world in this.
But it will not be bitter competition. It will be nourishing and invigorating.
That is how I know that this is not a typical status game; this is a sport.
An important clarification for me was that my sport is definitely a thing of its own. I’m not using it to measure my craftsmanship.
Whether I reach 5000, 100k, or 2000 people, I am not judging the quality of my essay/video essay based on that.
If I make something that I am proud of, the craftsman in me will be happy and won’t care about its reach. But the sportsman in me will. If I ever end up making something that I don’t like, but it goes viral, the sportsman in me will feel pumped up, but the craftsman in me will not be able to stop thinking about how to build it better the next time.
Aesthetic:
And then there's the third thing, which is the.. vibe that I like to indulge in. The texture of the world I want to create and inhabit.
For the lack of a better word, I’m calling it Aesthetic, but I am open to suggestions for a better name in the comments.
My aesthetic lies in the intersection of adventure, intellectualism, and romanticism.
This is probably the easiest aspect to detect: just look at the kind of media you like to consume. What is the feel of it? What is the recurring pattern you observe?
What are certain tropes that move you to tears? What is the flavour of the world that you create in your daydreams?
Your aesthetic will always be a combination of multiple existing styles and tropes. You will discover its true nature by finding a harmony between them.
It is your aesthetic that will decide the niche you create or the field of work you find yourself at home in.
To give you an example: You might be a craftsman in linear algebra, but your aesthetic will dictate whether you lean towards physics or AI research.
You might get a kick out of outrunning others, but your aesthetic will dictate whether you get into athletics or football.
Once again, this is a thing of its own. The craftsman cares about the quality of his craft. The sportsman cares about making his numbers go up. The aesthete cares about decorating the outer world with the colours of his inner world.
How this helps me
Recognising the difference between the three helps in decision-making and reorientation when you hit roadblocks.
When something feels off about a project, I can now articulate the feeling and isolate the failure mode.
I can ask myself:
Am I chasing a meaningless metric? Am I forcing myself onto a topic that bores me? Am I testing the limits of my craftsmanship, or am I stagnating it?
Once you see the architecture, it is hard to unsee it. You will watch yourself procrastinate and know exactly which of the three you are betraying. If you closely watch a friend's work process, you will recognize precisely which of their three aspects is better honed than yours. When working in a team, you will know which responsibilities to delegate and which ones to own yourself.
Thanks for reading!
This post was originally published on my Substack.