Journey to Discovering Your Passion

I look around and I see way too many people not listening to their hearts.

Before going after something, before aiming at anything, before chasing any goal, whether personal or professional. How do you know what that is? How do you know it’s worth your time, your effort and your sacrifices? How do you find what's your thing? And yeah, you probably guessed it by now. This article is about dreams - my most favorite topic. But don't worry, I'm not going to be just another guy to tell you go follow your dreams. I mean I do, but that's not exactly the point here.

Following you dreams is easy, yeah it definitely takes time and a lot of effort but at least you know what and why you're doing it, you have a reason. My point is, I bet it was way more fun for Eminem to live in poverty without a father and a drug addict mother for ten years before becoming one of the most successful rappers of all times, than it was for me to write my persuasion paper. I even paid a random guy from India to do it for me - that's how much I didn't want it. But how do you know what's your dream? How do you find your passion? Well, to be honest, I'm not entirely sure. But I have an idea, that’s why I’m here – to share it with you and hopefully it helps you find yours. Fortunately for me, I found mine without realizing that I was doing it. I just listened to the voice in my head. Thank god it was talking and thank god I was listening. But what if that voice is silent and it has been silent for a long time? What if you've never listened? Maybe you didn't listen because your parents' voice was louder. Or your friends' voice was louder:

"Man, how many actors you know that made it? How much do you think a painter makes?"

* a bunch of other random cynical quotes

Sometimes, these voices are very loud. So loud, they deafen everything else and end up becoming your own voice. But now, we forget about these voices. Now is only about your own authentic inner voice. And, for many of you this voice might be hiding somewhere very deep inside your mind in a place where you haven’t been to many years ago. But you’ve been there. And we want to go back to that time when it happened. Back to the time when we were kids and this voice was the only thing we had.

For this purpose, I’ll use Robert Greene’s book “Mastery”. It’s an amazing, eyes-opening, self-discovering book and I urge anyone to read it. Anyone but kids, right. Because they know.

Basically, what Robert Greene talks about is “discovering your calling”. It’s the same thing, however you want to call it – a calling, a passion a dream. And what he says is:

“In childhood this force was clear to you. It directed you toward activities and subjects that fit your natural inclinations that sparked a curiosity that was deep and primal. In the intervening years, the force tends to fade in and out as you listen more to parents and peers, to the daily anxieties that wear away at you. This can be the source of your unhappiness— your lack of connection to who you are and what makes you unique. The first move toward mastery is always inward— learning who you really are and reconnecting with that innate force”

So, further in the book, Robert tells us how to discover our calling. It’s simple but crucial - go back to your childhood. Search in your past for signs of you being pulled to do a certain activity out of pure curiosity and interest. “Look for an underlying pattern, a core to your character that you must understand as deeply as possible.”

When I read that, one evening a few weeks ago, I felt a bit skeptical at first. Like, man when I was a kid all I did was run around the neighborhood with a bunch of other kids not doing anything, just having fun, screaming and running wildly. Is playing with kids my calling? It could be, my first ever job was an English teacher to two little girls, but that’s not the point. I started thinking deeper about certain moments when I could’ve shown signs of pure curiosity towards something. And then I remembered one summer when I was spending a long time at my great grandmother’s house. There were no friends, there was no pc, no video games, and barely any toys so I was pretty much left with myself only. Now when I think about it – that was the perfect environment for a kid to show his passion. There were no distractions, nothing to pull my mind from what I would naturally do. And in today’s world distractions are piling up every day. So what did I do? I started drawing comic books. I remember by the end of the summer I had like 30 of them. Yes, they were ugly. I remember my idea was not to draw them nice, but just to tell a story with a series of drawings and a bit of text. Then I remembered all my high school notebooks, all the pages in the back are filled up with series of stick figures fighting, cutting their hands and legs off, blood flying around, I’ve always liked that. But it was about telling a story. I remembered that even when I would play with toys back in the days, the idea was always to tell a story, I imagined it like a movie and I have my villain, my hero, a master that teaches him and then dies by the villain's hand, you know the usual thing. So the puzzle started arranging in my head. I was like okay, so I like figuring out stories, I like using my imagination and creativity to tell a story. Pretty broad but definitely a starting point. Okay, what else?

I remembered, when I was 13, this was the point in my life when I really started to care a lot about the clothes I wear. Before that I would wear anything my mother or grandmother bought for me. I wouldn’t care. I wouldn’t care about matching colors, wouldn’t care if the clothes are dirty, sweaty, smelly, none of that thing. But then, because of friends, girls, you know, the teenage years started coming, body hair started growing and I started caring about my looks. So what I would spend hours and hours in doing was just browsing US online stores for clothes. I knew I couldn’t afford them but I enjoyed just looking at them and figuring out different ways to match clothes. I would look out for sales, collect all the clothes I liked the most and calculate how much it would cost to get it to Bulgaria and yet, there was no money. So yeah, my second calling was clothes, streetwear, and fashion, whatever you want to call it. It definitely wasn’t shopping because I wasn’t buying anything, I was just admiring them and thinking about ways to get them.

And this is where the third thing I discovered in my childhood came about. Probably only a few months later, after the clothes-browsing period, I came to the realization that my parents couldn’t afford those clothes. So, I will buy them myself, I will find a way to make a few bucks and pay with my own money. This thought excited me to my bones. The idea that I could find a way to hustle some money and get me some clothes. So I started looking for anything in the house that we weren’t using and try to sell that thing in whatever was the Bulgarian eBay thing back then. I remember Googling stuff like: “How to become rich from home, How to make money online, How to make money under 18” etc. And what I figured out after all the research and what I have heard around me was the following. Back in the days a lot of people from my hometown would do collective orders from a website called Sports Direct. The thing about this store was that it offered unimaginably low price clothes and shoes from popular brands (Nike, Adidas, Puma, you named it) but the shipping cost was pretty big, so people would gather and do one collective order for 10, 15, 20 people. So I figured, hey, I would create a Skype profile for collective orders and put like 10% on each person’s order for shipping and then will just pray that enough people gather so those 10% from each not only cover the shipping, but also there’s some profit for me. Well, nothing happened. I think I only had like one person texting me and they wanted to order a 3 pound t-shirt, so yeah. But anyways, the point here is somewhere, deep inside me there was a voice telling me about having my own money-generating thing. So I assume, a part of me is passionate about business.

Six years later, during a random lazy day in my second year at AUBG, I’m lying on the couch at a friend’s place in Blagoevgrad and out of the blue I go: “Hey, it would be cool if we had a clothing brand.” At that moment I remembered myself saying many times: “Hey, it would be cool IF…” and it would always go this far. So I told myself this time it would be different. I felt like I wanted to take an action right then. And I did. I went outside. It was during the afternoon hours of a working day so everything was opened and there were a lot of people hanging around. I literally went to a random elderly couple and asked them if they know where I could buy fabric from. I don’t remember if they immediately showed me the place or just told me where else I could ask but I found one small fabrics store. I went in and I asked them if they have any black fabric suitable for t-shirts. They pulled out a couple – I had 0 experience or knowledge of fabrics or anything like that. All I knew was if I liked the touch of certain fabrics or not. So I liked this specific one which felt very soft and the color was blacker than the rest. I asked how much do I need for a t-shirt. They said two meters. I got the two meters and went back on the street. Found some other old people and asked them if they know any tailors around (old people is just more friendly and I assumed they would rather know more about these things than the younger generations). I went to the tailors, pulled out the fabric and asked them to sew one t-shirt for me. I went home, found a few t-shirts that I really liked and brought them to the tailors and just showed them what I want in the rawest way possible. But they got me.

Three years later there’s MELANIN, a conceptual clothing brand which tells a fictional story. A story that is told through multiple media: illustrations, narrative, videos, animations, probably even a movie one day.

But the funny part is, and I realized that when I was writing this article, that this clothing brand combines all of the three passions which I discovered in my childhood: telling a story, fashion and having my own business. And I wasn’t aware of those when starting the brand, they just came, I just listened to my inner voice and I wasn’t even aware of that. It just felt right.

And here we are, three years later and we are still working with the same tailors. Three years later and MELANIN is part of the business accelerator program in AUBG, Elevate. We received a nice amount of investment to kick start the whole process – and that used to be just a thought while lying on the couch. Still, of course, there’s yet a long way to go. It’s really not that impressive right now but we are on the way of making something huge - and are blessed to be here, to have that mindset at such an early stage of our lives. Some people grow old and realize they've wasted half of their lives working what their parents wanted them to or what their friends advised them because there's money in it, or because it's not much work and there's free time or whatever. No, friends, the truth is there's no time. Life is too short not to do what you like. And working a job you don’t like will take a good 40-50% of your life. So, you better be in love with what you’re doing.

My point is, listen to your hearts. If they’ve forgotten how to speak, go find the kid in you. They will tell you the truth. You just have to listen. I sincerely wish that to all of you.