If you don’t have a purpose in life, what’s the point in being alive? I’m with Marie Forleo (www.marieforleo.com) on this one – the world does need that special gift that only you have.

If you’re lucky, you (a) discover your passion and (b) it becomes how you earn your crust. This is what has happened to my son, Hugh. He’s a political journalist and loves what he does.

Do this now. Find on YouTube a piece of video of Sir Richard Branson and watch it for 30 seconds. He’s clearly having a ball – he loves what he does. Read bestselling author, Manda Scott’s biography on her website http://www.mandascott.co.uk/ – the piece that begins ‘Writing is the best job in the world’. Watch a video of your favourite band. These people love what they do.

Find your passion and spend time on it and you’ll bounce out of bed in the morning eager to face the day. Those days will fly by happily. You may tumble into bed at night dog tired because of the hours you’ve put in, but it won’t have seemed like work at all. The difference between weekdays and weekends will blur. You’ll feel a joy and a satisfaction that you could never have even remotely imagined clocking in or working for the man.

I don’t earn all my crust from my books but I absolutely can’t complain. I’ve discovered my passion – writing fiction – and I’m spending more and more time at it and making increasing amounts of money from it every year.

So there are two things you’ve got to do. They are:

• Find your passion.
• See if you can make a living from it. Failing that see if you can spend more and more time at it.

This, more than anything else, is the thing I wish I’d know when I started working.

Find your passion

Here are two ways to do that.

First, figure out and write down how you’d like to spend your days. Don’t put any limitations on yourself here. It’s really the what-if-I-won-the-lottery question. Yes, sure you might take some holidays and buy lots of ‘stuff’ and eat and drink in the best places but sooner or later you’d get tired of that and then you’d have to decide what you’re going to do with your time. What is it you’d really love to do every day if you could?

Secondly – and this is the best and perhaps the only real way to find your passion – simply go and try things and see what you like best.

I’m a perfect example of this. I love music. All kinds of music. I’ve even come to like country music (if you’re interested, it was a song by The Notorious Cherry Bombs²³ that converted me). And so ever since I was a teenager I’ve thought I’d love to play music; I thought music might be my passion.

Over the years I’ve tried drums, the guitar and the piano. But each time I found that I felt no passion to play. I didn’t rush home from school thinking of nothing else but wanting to sit at my drum kit and practice. I didn’t look forward eagerly to the next piano lesson, practising for hours on end so as to impress my teacher. I realized that while I might have had a passion for listening to or discovering music, I really had no passion to play it. If I am going to be a concert pianist it’s not going to be in this life.

But ask me to write a story – to start creating a setting and imaginary friends and situations and I’m off. In parallel with writing this book, I’ve just begun to get a new novel off the ground. It’s my passion and I could hardly be happier. And if I did win the lottery I probably wouldn’t be spending my time much differently from the way I do at the moment.

So no problem if you’re not really sure what your passion is. You’ll have a hunch – some possibilities. So just try something. Engage with it. Give it a shot. You’ll find out quickly enough if it excites you or not. If it does, you’re in business. If not, then that’s no problem. Just move on and try something else.

You can try lots of things. And you would find this book – The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything Fast²⁴ – a great help. It would mean you could power through lots of things until you find the one that you like best.

Great book this. It may indeed be true that in order to master something you have to spend the supposed 10,000 hours on it, but this book shows you that you can acquire a working knowledge of something in as little as 20 hours. A completely how-to book as the author tests his theory on skills as diverse as yoga, playing the ukulele, programming a web application, touch typing, windsurfing and playing ‘Go’, one of the world’s oldest board games.

See if you can make a living from it

Life isn’t a rehearsal. You get one shot at it. It’s going to be an unhappy life indeed if you’re not living your passion. But the mortgage has to be paid, the family fed and you want to be happy.

So can you find a way to make money from your passion? With the internet it’s more possible than ever. The most unlikely things have become businesses on the internet. If you’re in any doubt about that statement, check out the website, ‘America’s Weirdest Businesses’.²⁵

And if you want to see how somebody looks and behaves and feels when they’re pursuing their passion and making money from it, check out http://www.marieforleo.com/. Like her or loathe her, when’s the last time you were that buzzed up about what you do?

Almost certainly there are other people who share your passion. Is there something you can make or do or sell that they will pay for? As I said at the beginning, if you’re lucky you’ll find you can make a living from it – or even become rich. Plenty of people have done that.

Here’s a person who made a living from what they loved. Richard Gough is former Scotland international and Rangers captain. This is what he said. ‘I was fortunate to play football for my living which was a childhood dream. So in all honesty I would not have changed much’.

(As an aside, he added, ‘One thing I would have changed was to not be as stubborn as I was in certain situations and definitely to have been more politically correct. But to be fair, that was not my personality so I don’t really know how that would have worked!!’)

But even if that’s not what happens and you don’t get to earn your living from your passion, it’s not a problem. You can get yourself a BJ!²⁶ ‘BJ’ stands for ‘bridge job’ – something you do to pay the bills while you pursue your passion.

I started ETP, my company, not to be rich but so that I could spend more time on my passion. It’s worked. ETP is my BJ (and has been since 1992) while I continue to write fiction. And happily my bridge job is something I like doing too. And indeed since writing is a very solitary occupation, it’s probably good that I am out in the real world meeting lots of real people which is what my bridge job causes me to do.