Gary Vaynerchuk seems to know a thing or two about passion. His book - “Crush It” - details the application of his passion, and how he built his family wine business into a multimillion dollar empire. In a talk tonight at Changing Hands bookstore in Phoenix, AZ, Gary thought that finding one’s passion lies in what they consume. In response to an audience member’s question, Gary said that to find one’s passion for work, he might try looking to what he was already consuming - t.v., media, hobbies. What was he already doing?

I think that says a lot, because when work isn’t work, it’s flow. Time seems to take a backseat, and one’s passion and creativity get unleashed. The passion begins to flow, and the line between work and play seems to blur.

I’m interested in two things: finding what you love to do, and then figuring out how you stop that forward progress. What negative messages and roadblocks do you experience on your way to meeting that love?

Sometimes the “I’m not good enoughs” or “Someone is already doing that - I can’t do what they’re doing” get in the way. “Time is limited” or “I need more training” or any number of other folkish aphorisms get in the way. An invisible ruler starts to dictate behavior, comparing yourself to this and that.

Passion is there, where you listen to it or not. Passion for the work you do, or for the people you help. Passion for the play that you invest in, or in the relationships you built. Passion for the new ideas that germinate in your brain, or passion for the way you do seemingly trivial or mundane tasks.

by Morgan Neill
CNN

TOKYO, Japan (CNN) — They are young, earn little and spend little, and take a keen interest in fashion and personal appearance — meet the “herbivore men” of Japan.

Former CNN intern Junichiro Hori is a self-described ‘herbivore.’

Author and pop culture columnist Maki Fukasawa coined the term in 2006 in a series of articles on marketing to a younger generation of Japanese men. She used it to describe some men who she said were changing the country’s ideas about just what is — and isn’t — masculine.

“In Japan, sex is translated as ‘relationship in flesh,’” she said, “so I named those boys ‘herbivorous boys’ since they are not interested in flesh.”

Typically, “herbivore men” are in their 20s and 30s, and believe that friendship without sex can exist between men and women, Fukasawa said.

The term has become a buzzword in Japan. Many people in Tokyo’s Harajuku neighborhood were familiar with “herbivore men” — and had opinions about them.

Shigeyuki Nagayama said such men were not eager to find girlfriends and tend to be clumsy in love, and he admitted he seemed to fit the mold himself.

“My father always asks me if I got a girlfriend. He tells me I’m no good because I can’t get a girlfriend.”

Midori Saida, a 24-year-old woman sporting oversized aviators and her dyed brown hair in long ringlets, said “herbivore men” were “flaky and weak.”

“We like manly men,” she said. “We are not interested in those boys — at all.”

Takahito Kaji, 21, said he has been told he is “totally herbivorous.”

“Herbivorous boys are fragile, do not have a stocky body — skinny.”

Fukasawa said Japanese men from the baby boomer generation were typically aggressive and proactive when it came to romance and sex. But as a result of growing up during Japan’s troubled economy in the 1990s, their children’s generation was not as assertive and goal-oriented. Their outlook came, in part, from seeing their fathers’ model of masculinity falter even as Japanese women gained more lifestyle options.

Former CNN intern Junichiro Hori, a self-described herbivore, said the idea goes beyond looks and attitudes toward sex.

“Some guys still try to be manly and try to be like strong and stuff, but you know personally I’m not afraid to show my vulnerability because being vulnerable or being sensitive is not a weakness.”

Older generations of Japanese men are not happy about the changes. At a bar frequented by businessmen after work, one man said: “You need to be carnivorous when you make decisions in your life. You should be proactive, not passive.”

Fukasawa said the group does not care so much about making money — a quality tied to the fact that there are fewer jobs available during the current global economic recession.

Japan’s economy recently saw its largest-ever recorded contraction and has shrunk for four straight quarters. Blue chip companies Sony, Panasonic, Toyota and Nissan all reported losses in May, and most are forecasting the same for the current fiscal year. Though still low by international standards, Japan’s reported 5 percent unemployment is the highest since 2003.

Hori agreed economics has played a role. When he finished university, “a lot of my friends were trying to work for a big company that pays well and I wasn’t interested in that. I am kind of struggling financially and my father is not very happy about it,” he said.

Fukasawa estimated some 20 percent of men are what she would call “herbivorous” and said their attitudes were influencing others. Indeed, she said, it was a return to the norm for Japanese men, rather than a departure.

“It was after World War II and the post-war economic growth that Japanese men gained the reputation as a sex animal through the competition with the West. Looking back beyond that time, older literature talks a lot about men with the kind of character we see in the herbivorous boys.”

Will these men simply grow out of this? Fukasawa said it was anyone’s guess.

Some of them may, but Japan’s image of masculinity is nonetheless changing.

“The men in dark suits are changing, too,” she said. “Today’s young people in dark suits are different from the baby boomers in dark suits. They are evolving, too.”

I thought that this article could relate nicely to the article on “yes men.” It’s about getting what we really want with our lives, and our jobs.

Can you see yourself not at your job in six months? Are you experiencing that dread, that low level chronic dissatisfaction that starts to snowball into anger and general irritability?
I’ve totally been there. I used to let “life” happen to me, meaning that I would kind of wait it out, for that “right” moment or opportunity to come in and whisk me away. Guess what. It didn’t happen.

I had to come to the conclusion that, in order to be happy in my work, I had to take the bull by the horns and start to activate. The hardest part, for me, was taking responsibility and ownership for the fact that I am the only author or my life, and other people, situations, and job settings were merely the supportive or background players. It was up to me to start to make the leap over time.

So, with that in mind, if you are not enjoying your current job and want to get out, consider these 5 questions to help:

1. Consider happiness/money formula: Can you live with the money, or is the money getting old and you want some “soul satisfaction”? Is the money all that great, that you sacrifice other things, like your time, happiness, relationships, stress, whatever?
2. What can you really see yourself doing for work? (This is a tough question, so sit with it). If you’re not doing what you really love doing, then what keeps you in your current job, and how does it keep you? A lot of times, guys I counsel don’t know what they want, but they just get attached to the suffering in their current lousy job. If you found your passion, what would that look like? Sketch out that plan on paper, and share it with someone close.
3. What resources will you need to start to put your plan into action? Money? Time? Family/friends/partner support? A new resume? A vague sense of what you really want to be doing? More education? There are lots of possible resources that you might need, and the trick is to identify them and get them down on paper.
4. What are the pros and cons to staying in your current job? List them out. Do a massive brainstorm to list out every possible factor that contributes to your happiness or misery, and then weigh them against each other. Rank them according to importance.
5. Lastly, what are the barriers to your professional “end zone”? Look closely and carefully now. What walls, fences, blockades do you put up in front of yourself mentally, that end up undermining your own success? This is a harder question, so I want you to sit with it for longer. Sometimes, we don’t even know how we keep ourselves imprisoned. Sometimes we play the victim. Sometimes we make excuses. Sometimes we wait for the world to happen, like me.

With these 5 questions in mind, start to consider making the change that you’ve wanted and thought wasn’t possible. Start to “live your bliss” and do the work that you were meant to do, and the world was meant to have you do.

What is this, you ask? How can I possibly love my life if I hate my job? I hear you, and wondered that same thing for so long.I ended up leaving my job three months ago to do my counseling private practice three months ago, but was miserable at my previous job. I hated it, but got through it. And survived. And am here to tell you that there are things you can to do help yourself mentally cope, as well as build action steps to get the bat hell out of there and do what you really want to do.

So, two categories come to mind: coping skills, and action planning. To cope with a bad job, it’s important to see the job for exactly what it is: paid employment. It gives you a check, and you check in everyday and work, or feign working, or whatever you do there. To know that it’s pay for your time reframe it a little bit.

Also, it’s really important to get a good support system, which includes plenty of friends, family or your significant other that make it better. My friend, Mark, was an incredible source of support for me, and he worked there, too. It made it all seem like I wasn’t the only crazy person there. It helped to know others were in it with me, and saw the same things that made me hate my job.

Getting out of the building for lunch always helped me, because I could then saw the day into two distinct halves, which kind of helped me see it all as less overwhelming. Exercising and eating well, as well as getting 8 hours of sleep a night, cooled my anger and frustration, and helped me deal with the experience much more. Mindfulness meditation helped me to deal with a negative experience, so that it felt just a little bit less negative and more neutral.

Lastly, not putting in 100% was something I did to cope. Being a 100% person, I found it challenging to actually do less superior (quality or quantity) work, and accept doing a so-so job. I found that I pressured myself less, because I really just didn’t want to work that hard at a job I hated. I started to work less hard, and pressure myself less.

In the action planning stage, I worked hard to market my practice, set deadlines as to when things would happen, and, most importantly, set a 90-day target date to leave the place I couldn’t work at anymore. I started to realize that the job wasn’t going to leave me, that I needed to leave the job. Empowering myself was scary, because I had operated under the premise that I could lazily allow my job to tell me when it didn’t want me, which was never. I had to take the bull by the horns and make the jump. I had to start to pack away savings to make the jump, and verbalize my intentions to myself (journalling and planning) and to others in my life. This legitimized it all, and made my intentions reality. Now that I told others, it forced me into a situation where I had to back up my words with actions.

So, there is hope to get out of a bad job. I know there are a lot of external factors - such as money, family, and severe lack of jobs during the recession. But, when the recession ends, you won’t have the same old excuses for staying in a job you hate. But, we can control the inner factors, such as how we think about our situation and what we really want for our lives, that we have a lot of control over. It’s all about how bad you want it.