How To Find Your Passion: 8 Ways To Get Started

Finding your passion can be easier said than done. You may have a sense of what excites you when you’re young, but it’s easy to lose track of those interests as the responsibilities of adulthood get in the way. Understanding how to find your passion can help you identify interests worth pursuing and how they might fulfill you in your life or career. 

If you dream of starting a business, identifying your passion can be key to helping you stay motivated and connect with your customers. According to a 2025 Shopify survey,* 77% of US business founders strongly agree that they started their business to turn a passion into a reality. 

Learn how to find passion with eight practical strategies from founders who turned their own interests into businesses and careers.

Passions vs. hobbies: What’s the difference?

Passions are interests, causes, or activities you care deeply about and feel driven to pursue. A hobby, by contrast, is something you do in your free time, primarily to relax. 

Both can provide personal satisfaction, but the key difference lies in the intensity of emotion they provoke. Passions tend to play a larger role in your sense of purpose, whereas hobbies are activities that provide an outlet to unwind outside of work or other commitments. 

Of course, a hobby can evolve into a passion over time—even a new career. This was certainly the case for Ali Osterholz, who started what would become Explorer Knits + Fibers while she was in graduate school. 

“I started the business as a creative outlet and something just for fun,” Ali says on the Shopify Masters podcast. But the more she learned about the fiber world, the more she wanted to be part of it. Eventually, she left her planned path toward a PhD and a career in science to pursue the business full time. 

“I love it so much. I’m so excited about it,” Ali says of her decision. “I will kick myself for the rest of my life if I don’t see what happens.”

If you’re driven to make time for a hobby, particularly at the cost of other activities, there’s a good chance it’s a real passion. Likewise, if you can go months without feeling the need to engage with your passion, it may be more of a hobby. 

How to find your passion

• Create space for experimentation
• Self-reflect
• Put your thoughts on paper
• Read books on a range of subjects
• Continue to learn and build expertise
• Examine what you like and don’t like doing
• Seek guidance from many sources
• Get out of your comfort zone

Finding your true passion may require some deliberate exploration. Try the following founder-recommended exercises to explore your interests and passions.

Create space for experimentation

You likely won’t uncover your passion overnight, so don’t pressure yourself to find your one true passion in life on a timetable. Give yourself opportunities to explore your interests without requiring a particular outcome. Try something because you’re curious about it, want a creative outlet, or simply think you might enjoy it.

Experimentation is common among entrepreneurs. In four of five markets surveyed by Shopify, about 70% of founders said they relied on trial and error when getting started.

Executive Coach and Content Creator Timm Chiusano took this approach when he started using social media as a creative outlet with zero expectations for where it might lead. 

“I was driven to be in a position where I could experiment and just have fun creating,” Timm says on Shopify Masters. “One of the potential opportunities that people don’t see is how to experiment and have zero expectations as to what’s going to happen. You just do it because you love it or because you’re sitting on a wealth of information that you think would be beneficial to other people.” 

By creating this space to explore, Timm was able to grow his TikTok following to more than 1 million people, secure brand deals, and author a book.

Self-reflect

In a Shopify survey, a majority of founders said they started their businesses in pursuit of a goal they wanted to achieve rather than in response to instability in their circumstances at the time. Identifying what you want to pursue requires understanding what matters to you. 

Nick Bare, founder and CEO of Bare Performance Nutrition, finds that regular self-reflection can help you distinguish what genuinely matters from goals and interests you may be pursuing because other people tell you that you should. 

On an episode of Shopify Masters, Nick advises everyone to “take an inventory and audit of your life.” He also recommends “having an honest conversation with yourself,” whether you write it out or reflect while running, meditating, or spending time alone. 

Nick suggests asking yourself:

• What matters to me? 

• What am I passionate about?

• Where do I want to be in 10, 20, 30, 40 years? 

• How do I want to be perceived by my friends, my family, and my coworkers in a community? 

• What’s the impact that I want to create? 

• What do I enjoy? 

Put your thoughts on paper

Writing down your thoughts can help you organize them, explore possibilities, and clarify what you want. You might try stream-of-conscious writing, making lists, jotting down your dreams, or answering specific questions about the future you see for yourself. 

Founder and CEO of ButcherBox Mike Salguero says in an interview with Shopify Masters that he often advises aspiring entrepreneurs to take a notebook somewhere quiet, clear their minds, and write down what they envision for themselves in three to five years. 

Writing can also help keep your goals front of mind. AC Hampton, founder of Supreme Ecom, took that idea to the extreme in his first apartment. He covered the walls with sheets of notebook paper describing what he wanted from his life. 

“Wherever I walked, if I turned my head, I saw what I was trying to achieve,” AC says on Shopify Masters. Living alone and without anyone nearby to motivate him, he used those written reminders to motivate himself.

You don’t have to cover your walls in notebook paper, but write down what you want and revisit it. Make your thoughts concrete. 

Read books on a range of subjects

Business books can be a great way to expand your imagination and knowledge without a significant investment. If you have an idea of a field you’ve always wanted to explore, textbooks, beginner’s guides, and entrepreneur memoirs all make for great introductions. 

Self-help books like Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way and Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic can provide structure to your self-discovery journey and helpful tips for managing the fear of trying something new. 

Brightland Founder and CEO Aishwarya Iyer shares on Shopify Masters that she found Embracing Your Inner Critic by Hal and Sidra Stone to be particularly helpful. 

If you’re unsure of what you’re looking for, you can go to your local library or bookstore and browse the aisles. Flip through anything that piques your interest and note how you feel when you stumble on an intriguing genre or topic. 

Continue to learn and build expertise

There’s a good chance that the more you learn about subjects that interest you, the more you’ll be inspired to keep going. Curiosity is an important component of an entrepreneurial mindset. 

James Hoffmann turned his interest in coffee into a full-time career as a YouTube creator by diving deep into his interests. 

“I think spending time to develop expertise is really important,” James says on Shopify Masters. “I spent quite a long time trying to educate myself about coffee and also to practice sharing coffee before I started making content, and that definitely made that bit easier.”

“If it’s a passion, you’ll have a great time doing that, even if you never make a video about it ever,” James says. “If you do wanna start making videos, those will be useful to a much wider audience of people.” 

Examine what you like and don’t like doing

If you’ve tried a line of work or business venture that you enjoyed but ended up feeling like a grind, take a moment to reflect about what you love and don’t love about it. You might find that your passion lies in a particular aspect of what you’re doing.

Ty Hiss originally founded floral gifting company Fresh Sends as an events-based floral design business, doing flowers for weddings as a weekend side hustle. But Ty didn’t realize how demanding the work would be until she was in it. Doing events was fun, but it became exhausting to orchestrate floral design and deliveries with little help. 

“Slowly I realized that the floral design aspect of flowers was not what I actually was passionate about,” Ty says on Shopify Masters. “It was this moment of connection between people and how we could create a product that is meaningful and has personality, but also has a level of convenience to it.”

“The idea for Fresh Sends came about as people would ask me, ‘Hey, it’s my parents’ anniversary, or my best friend’s birthday,’ and I was able to see this amazing connection moment between people. It’s some of peoples’ best moments in life and some of their most challenging moments in life to celebrate and connect and let people know that they’re there for them.”

Fresh Sends was born from this realization. Rather than leaving flowers behind out of burnout, Ty created a new business around her true passion—but she couldn’t have found it without the experience of trying her floral side hustle. 

Seek guidance from many sources

Getting career advice from one person is helpful, but advice from a wide range of individuals can be life changing. And sometimes, the people who know you best might have a better sense for what you’re passionate about than you.

Here are a few good thought partners when trying to find your passion: 

• Mentors. Founder of fragrance brand Dossier, Sergio Tache,says having a mentor ultimately led to the creation of his company. 

• Former coworkers. Wallace Wong, founder of the gourmet meal kit company Spatula Foods, sought advice from restaurant colleagues, and they eventually became his partners. 

• Friends and family. Talk to the loved ones who know you best; they may reveal passions you didn’t realize you had.

• Career coaches. Career coaches are paid professionals you can hire to help identify alternate professions and then take concrete steps to enter a new industry. Aishwarya credits her career coach for helping her succeed with Brightland. 

Get out of your comfort zone

Sometimes the best way to spark your passion is to get out of your comfort zone—go on a far-flung trip or a meditation retreat, for example. What you learn about yourself might reveal what you’re passionate about. 

For Peter Dering, founder and CEO of Peak Design, it was a four-month trip abroad that brought into focus what he cared about most in life. 

“I spent four months traveling Southeast Asia and India, mostly on a motorcycle, just finding my way. That spawned an incredible breadth of things I wanted to do in this world. Many of those things would eventually become Peak Design,” Peter says on Shopify Masters. 

Peter also learned that entrepreneurship and the freedom and control it provides was something he cared deeply about. 

“When I was traveling for four months, I was my own boss. I was in charge of my own time. And I really feel like there's not much more that feels freeing than that feeling of being in charge of one’s own time,” he says. “And so more than anything else, that's what I just wanted: To be my own boss.” 

The idea for Peak Design’s first product didn’t come to him right away, but over time, his experiences traveling inspired his signature product: a camera clip that would allow the wearer to carry their camera hands-free. 

*These findings are from a survey by The Harris Poll for Shopify, conducted online between August 22 and 31, 2025. It included 519 US business owners and senior decision-makers from companies selling products online.