Are you Building your passions?

Do you know what you're passionate about? If you do, are you actually living it? Whether you hate your job, wish you had a hobby you loved, or just feel stuck in life, recognizing your passions can help move you forward.

Through real conversations with real people, Crazy Enough To Try explores how others have discovered and incorporated their passions into their lives. Learn from their successes and their failures and apply these lessons to your own life.

I believe that by incorporating your passions into your life, not only will you find more satisfaction in what you do, but you'll be better positioned to make those big goals and dreams you have become a reality.

The story behind the stories

During the summer of 2012, I began a journey that would culminate in the writing of Crazy Enough To Try. I had spent years looking, searching for something that would get me out of bed every morning, and keep me up every night. I had heard and read about people who lived a life filled with activities they were passionate about, and I thought life was too short not to being doing the same. But I had no idea where to start.

This book began as a project designed to help me figure out what I'm passionate about and give me something to share with others in the end. I asked my friends, relatives, and others to help me by sharing their stories about their passions.

In the latest edition of Crazy Enough To Try, a series of interviews with ten extremely passionate people answer four key questions:

1. What is passion to you?
2. What are you passionate about?
3. How did you get there?
4. How could someone else figure out their passion?

By the end of this project I was amazed with what I had learned from these interviews. Each person had taken a radically different path, but they all ended up knowing what they were passionate about and they were living their lives based on this knowledge. Some were busy following their dreams of traveling, others were starting initiatives such as a social network for dance groups and communities.

Crazy Enough To Try is an inexpensive way to gain insight into the minds of some of the most passionate people I know.

What readers are saying:

Paperback Available From Amazon.com

Also Available as an eBook

Below are just a small sample of the questions and insights that you'll find in Crazy Enough To Try:

Ryan: I take it you believe that you can have more than one passion at a given time? You don't believe that someone has to only have one passionate lifelong thing?

Tarikh: I think you totally can have more than one passion. I think you can have any number of passions. I feel like you can do as many as your body lets you. As your will lets you. And you know, circumstances of life may allow you to dedicate more of yourself or take on more interests, more passionate works at different points. If you're starting out, maybe you can only focus on one thing. But maybe you get it started, and maybe something else catches your eye and you can work on two. I don't think there's an end to it.

Ryan: Would you say that you need to have experience in life, that you have to experience different things in order to find a passion?

Nancy: You know, I think that sometimes. I think that when people feel like they don't know what their passion is, I feel like they haven't tried something else. 

I talked to a friend about this just yesterday. She said she wants to be a social worker. How do you know for sure? You went to school for social work, you never tried anything else, how do you know for sure that this is something that you want to do? If you've never jumped out of a plane, how do you know? I know there are people who are passionate about jumping out of planes, supposedly. Or you don't know if you enjoy cooking if you don't actually try and do it. So sometimes I think that it's about trying new things. And it's ok if they suck, but be open and not fearful. Because I think a lot of times people don't want to step into the unknown. You know?

Ryan: So how long would you say you were searching for your passion? Four, five years?

Dawn: Around six years, though I was probably actively searching for four or five years. It took a little while. But I feel like that whole process happened for a reason. I feel like I was being developed in this direction this whole time.

Ryan: Are you living your passion?

Sam: Well, yes and no. I'm developing my passion; you're always developing it. So in developing it, yes, I'm living a life that I'm passionate about.

Ryan: So empowering women is your passion?

Scarlet: I think it's turned into that. I think my thing is to empower people in general. Especially, coming from being very poor and understanding what that means, I've come to realize that empowerment is really important. To me it's about people who have disadvantages. I have been through that and the fact is that those people are vilified by society and there's still a lot of stigmas against people from more humble backgrounds as being poor or lazy.

Ryan: When you found your passion for writing, did it come to you? Had you written previously and decided that you liked it, or was it something you decided to try then and then realized you loved?

Morgan: Ah, good question. I sort of got out of my own way. I started to let myself write...differently more freely. I realize now, retrospectively that I've been writing for a while but around that time, I decided to let it go beyond descriptive, essay-like, academic-style writing. When I started to write about my feelings with more fluidity, more metaphor, I found the art in it. It took time to get over the shyness of that sort of vulnerability.