The Real Secret Of A Meaningful Career Is Not About 'Discovering Your Passion', But About Designing A Life

Walk into any graduation ceremony and you’ll hear the familiar refrain: Follow your passion. The phrase rolls off tongues like a mantra. It’s inspiring, but also incomplete. What if you don’t know your passion? What if your passion changes? What if it fizzles out just as quickly as it arrived?

As Mamta Mandal, life coach and founder of Cherishma Consulting in Singapore, says, “Passion is just one piece of the puzzle. While it can drive us to pursue our dreams, it’s not a guarantee of competence or achievement. An overemphasis on passion can actually set people up for disappointment.” For Gen Z, a generation raised on curated highlight reels, the pressure to “find your thing” can feel crushing.

You’re supposed to discover it first, then align your life around it. But research and real-life stories often show the reverse. Navyug Mohnot, a Designing Your Life (DYL) educator, explains: “Passion emerges from engagement, learning, and mastery, not from introspection alone. You build it through action, curiosity, and small bets on yourself.”

Instead of waiting for the lightning bolt of passion, treat every new activity as an experiment (Getty Images)

Angela Duckworth, in her book Grit, writes: “Passion for your work is a little bit of discovery, followed by a lot of development, and then a lifetime of deepening.” In other words, passion is not the cause of meaningful work but the result.

The Case For Prototyping

Think of life not as a straight line but as a lab. Dr. Malini Saba, psychologist, entrepreneur, and founder of Saba Group & Saba Family Foundation, describes it this way: “Passion doesn’t just appear one day. Most people figure it out by doing stuff—things that are a little exciting, a little scary, maybe even frustrating. Passion grows when you experiment, fail, and notice what feels right.”

This is what psychologists and educators call a prototyping mindset. Instead of waiting for the lightning bolt of passion, you treat every new activity as an experiment. A volunteer gig. A side hustle. A class outside your comfort zone. Each attempt is a test, a prototype of a possible life. And prototypes, by definition, are not perfect. They’re designed to fail fast, teach you something, and nudge you toward a better version.

What Does Gen Z Want?

For many in Gen Z, this approach feels natural. Take Ananya R, 21, a media student in Pune. She tells us, “Everyone kept asking me what my passion was. Honestly, it stressed me out. I like editing videos, but I also like cooking and photography. Why should I choose just one?” Or Rohit Khanvilkar, 23, an engineering graduate now interning at a fintech startup in Bengaluru. “My dad said I should find something I love and stick with it. But I only figured out what I like by trying different projects. I failed at two startups before this. Weirdly enough, failing made me more confident.”

Their voices echo Dr. Saba’s point: experimenting is not a distraction—it’s the very path to passion. The beauty of a prototyping mindset is that it redefines failure. Instead of being an endpoint, failure becomes feedback. You stop asking, Why did I fail? and start asking, What can I learn from this?

Life As A Series Of Experiments

Successful people have tried, failed, switched, learned, and only then stumbled into what looked, in hindsight, like destiny. For Gen Z, whose lives are already marked by uncertainty (pandemics, climate crises, job market upheavals) the prototyping mindset has become essential. It turns the unknown into an ally instead of an enemy.

So, forget the pressure of finding “the one.” Instead, start small. Try, fail, notice, learn. Repeat. One day, you’ll look back and realize that passion wasn’t the spark you were waiting for. It was the fire you built along the way.

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