Passion project, mental health and the 10-minute rule
If there’s one thing millennials and zennials are good at, it would be pursuing passions against all odds.
Aside from having fulltime day jobs on our chosen careers, most of us also venture on passion projects.
But how do we differentiate a hobby from a passion project? Is it a goal? The truth is we can have a passion project based on our hobbies. A goal is just a goal in the sense that it's okay if we fail at it sometimes. It's okay if a goal changes over time because it can be something that is not too personal to us. Neither does it have to be related to our professional life. But a passion project has to be something that brings us joy from our talents and interests.
More so, the passion project has that element of challenge that could help us in our mental health, especially if we consider it as a way to express ourselves more. Not everybody can express themselves through words or writing a journal. Thus, we have to do something else. We need to create something with our hands.
The reason why mental health challenges can be so clogged up for others is that we don't find avenues to process our emotions. And in doing something creative, we tend to digest our feelings without being conscious about it.
But the common problem that we face when starting our passion
project is telling ourselves “I love to do it but I don't have the time and motivation for that.” So what if a person is too tired and uninterested to start?
Simple. Begin with the 10-minute rule. It's pretty straightforward. You just show up and do whatever it is that you want to do uninterrupted. And most likely, you will find the motivation because motivation is a by-product of doing the work.
If it is still off, give yourself room time to stop. It's okay. Try again the next day. That initiative already sparked a movement. It's the trajectory that we are looking for. And we cannot have the trajectory if there's no movement at all.