“So, what do you want to be when you grow up? A doctor? A lawyer? An engineer?”

I glanced away from the Spy Kids 4 movie on the plasma screen T.V. and towards the adult asking the question. It seemed absurd. He found it reasonable to ask me, a seven-year-old boy, exactly what I wanted to do with the next ninety years of my life. Looking down at the soft, brown, almost-moldy carpet beneath my feet, I struggled to find an answer. What did I want to do? To be honest, I had no idea. I pictured myself in a boxing ring, throwing punches at Mike Tyson as thousands of camera flashes and cheers erupt in the background as I pound him with the classic one-two punch. I pictured myself as a classical musician, finishing my violin solo as the crowd transitions from pin-drop silence to a loud, standing ovation. I pictured myself exploring the freezing, murky atmosphere of Mars, hoisting the American flag as the first person on the planet. I could easily picture myself in a million careers, but this adult only wanted one answer. So I gave him one:

“A CEO.”

A ridiculous answer to a ridiculous question. A CEO of what? A technology firm? A shipping company? An animal farm? The answer was vague enough not to specify any certain industry, but specific enough to throw the question (and the adult) off my back. In the meantime, I would have just enough time to figure out my passion and know exactly what I wanted to do with my life.

From that moment on, I attempted to try everything. I needed to find my passion. I needed to find that one activity that I could live and breathe every day and be better than anyone else at. Spending hours at different playing fields, I ironically thought that I was born to be an athlete despite my heavy weight and overall laziness. I entered the soccer pitch and imagined myself as Lionel Messi, quickly evading a wall of defenders as I punted the ball into the upper-left corner of the goal. When that didn’t work out, I tried being Roger Federer, throwing a tennis ball into the air as my racket head crashed into it with a resounding thud and sailed past the net. When that failed, I tried being Tom Brady. Then Michael Phelps. No matter how many sports I experimented with or who I tried to emulate, I couldn’t find my passion. All I had to show for these experiences was some lost time and new equipment for soccer, tennis, football, and competitive swimming.
So, maybe sports weren’t my passion. I decided to try other areas which piqued my interest, such as photography, the flute, chess, and the stock market. From Monday to Friday, I dabbled in band music for an hour, glued to a rusty black chair, forcing myself to sit and stare at musical notes as I blew air through my flute. I was bored. Saturday morning, I would sit and play chess against a few, straight-faced kids, where the result of every match seemed like life or death. I was bored. In the evening, I experimented with mutual funds and portfolios in a mock stock market, and took pictures of anything and everything with my shiny blue digital camera. I was bored by everything. I couldn’t imagine myself doing any of this for the rest of my life.
Finding my passion seemed like finding a needle in a haystack. Except in this case, I had to pick apart the hay, straw by straw, to see whether or not it was really the needle in disguise. After all, I never actually knew what was going to be my passion. Maybe my predestined desire in life was to make the best aluminum cans in the world, or mine for diamonds in South Africa. Either way, I knew that picking out billions of pieces of hay for a single needle was an improbable task. So I gave up.

One night in the sixth grade, I exposed myself to computer programming. I was always curious about how people created the software programs I used every day. How could I save a file to Microsoft Word and have the computer know exactly where to store it? How could I press a button in Super Mario Bros. and cause my character to attack the short, brown, mushroom-like monsters kidnapping the stereotypical blonde-haired, blue-eyed princess? I had to know, so I picked up computer programming. In two weeks, I learned how to make my own calculator (with basic functions like multiply, divide, and add) and a simple electronic form. However, I soon quit programming. Like all other activities, I became bored quickly. Instead of programming Super Mario Bros., I only had enough knowledge to program a simple calculator. I guess I picked off another piece of hay from the stack. Only a few billion left to find that needle.

Fortunately, my Computer Information Systems teacher dragged me back into the world of programming during my freshman year in college. He asked me and three classmates to solve a problem using a mobile application for a school assignment. Thinking of common, first-world problems that plague the United States today, we decided to address waiting in line at the Motor Vehicle Division. When a potential driver wants to receive his or her driver’s license in Arizona, the person stands in line for a form, fills out the form, and then stands in line to turn in the form. In order to make the second action the only necessary one to get a driver’s license, we decided to create an app where a user fills his or her name, date of birth, address, and other information, which generates a QR-code that stores this information. The user scans their QR-code at a kiosk, and no longer has to wait in line. However, thinking of this idea and developing it were two completely different actions. Thinking about the idea took about an hour. Developing the idea took sweat, blood, tears, and much more time. For two months, I spent endless nights learning to code in Visual C# for Windows Phone 7 and 8. Instead of getting a good night’s sleep, I obsessed over whether the application would run, whether it would be easy to access for the end-user, whether there would be any bugs or potential exploits. Finally, the application was built. It was a piece of art, but that didn’t matter. It turns out that the professor didn’t actually need the application built; he only wanted the idea.

However, what seemed like wasted work was actually a blessing in disguise. I learned more about programming and became genuinely interested in the subject. I learned there is no inherent passion. I learned that the haystack was only filled with hay. There was no needle. Like my CIS professor, the idea of the needle in the haystack misled me; I couldn’t actually find a needle if it didn’t exist!

The endless nights I spent programming the MVD application taught me an important lesson: passion is the payoff for putting in a lot of work, and it’s not something that one is born with. Famous athletes, musicians, artists, and business people developed their skills until they were respected by the world. When I programmed in the sixth grade, I didn’t find it very interesting. However, after extensively learning about the subject, I realized that it was something I could do for the rest of my life.

Some of the most successful people in the world give advice to follow passions instead of fostering skills. I met an upperclassman who owns a multi-million dollar company, gives inspirational speeches to low-income families, plans to finish his degree at the Honors College in two years, and maintains a 4.0 GPA. Like other successful people, he advises me to find my passion. Even so, I’m not convinced. Most successful people—Steve Jobs, Michael Jordan, Picasso—developed their skills first and became passionate later. Even this particular upperclassman had no idea that he wanted to get into website marketing when creating his business. He made website marketing his passion after learning so much about the industry that people needed his expertise in that area.

Searching for one’s passion need not be a struggle. It’s not necessary to find a hidden needle inside a haystack with a billion pieces of hay. Instead, all one has to do is select a piece of hay and sharpen it until it becomes a needle; in other words, one can create their own passion in anything by spending time and effort developing a skill.