The 7 Tenets of Core Passion
And a Gene Keys Approach to Mastering It, in Order to Live Your Purpose
I spent years chasing what I thought success looked like. Corner office. Fancy title. Big salary. Then I realized success isn't a destination - it's alignment.
It's when:
Your skills match your dreams,
Your work fills a real need,
Your heart says 'yes' every morning
The sweet spot isn't out there somewhere. It's right where these pieces overlap.
This alignment is what I've come to understand as our Core Passion - that innate calling that, when honored, transforms work into purpose. In this post, I'll share the 7 tenets of Core Passion I've discovered, along with how Gene Keys can help illuminate this path that's uniquely yours.
I recently watched an interview in which writer Isaac Asimov said “A day is lost in which I don’t type.” It made me wonder how many of us can claim to know what our one core passion is- the thing that on days we don’t do it, the day feels wasted. Lost. And, if we do know what it is, if we can positively declare that we commit at least a small portion of our days to following it.
For a man who authored over 500 books that transformed science fiction and popular science, writing wasn't work—it was his compass. Each day at the typewriter wasn't a task to be completed but a territory to be explored. His prolific output wasn't just the result of discipline, but a pure alignment with an internal drive so powerful that a day without typing was a day squandered.
I’ve been contemplating these words and digging into my extensive research on passion, creativity, motivation, purpose and goals and would like to pose to you something profound in its simplicity.
Our core passion maps our life’s journey.
We all come into the world with a core passion.
For some of us it reveals itself before we can walk and talk, for others it shows up slowly and at the time it is needed. Sooner later, though, your core passion is revealed to you.
My core passion is learning. I have always been a naturally curious person, with multiple passions, yes, but the common thing across my life has been my unfettered love of learning. Books were my toy store. I learned to read when I was 3, information-seeking has been an insatiable hunger.
This isn't something I chose. It chose me.
And I suspect something similar has chosen you.
The Core Passion
Let me define what I mean by Core Passion. Passion is a word that has myriad uses and I want to make clear what I mean by Core Passion.
Passion as I am describing here is something you cannot help yourself but do. And if you don’t do it, you feel incomplete and your life begins to take on a dullness about it.
It’s the fire within that powers your motivations and without which you would not be able to achieve your life’s purpose. You see, without that core passion activity motivating you to keep going when things get boring, challenging, and scary it makes you want to quit.
So when folks say follow your bliss, follow your passion, they were actually right. Current mindset is that you shouldn’t turn you passion into a business and that you shouldn’t make that be your provider 💰. And I agree with that . AND also I believe that without following your passion. Dedicating time to your passion. You will not achieve that which you agreed to do in this lifetime. For it’s passion that fuels vision.
The 7 Tenets of Core Passion:
1. We all have one.
Each of us has an essential drive or quality that serves as our internal compass. This isn't something we choose—it chooses us, often revealing itself early in life through what naturally captivates us.
It’s internal. It fuels your drive, motors motivation. If you want to have peace in your life and be intrinsically motivated, your core passion is the key.
2. Core Passion drives human development.
It is the unbridled power to move our lives forward at a faster tempo than ever before. Why? because it is what you came with. That’s why I say it maps our life’s journey.
Our core passion creates a virtuous cycle of growth that compounds over decades. The more we engage with it, the more it develops us, leading to mastery and prolific creation not through force but through natural alignment.
3. Core Passion is evolutionary preparation.
I believe that our core passion is something we were created with to help us overcome challenges we would be facing in our lifetime. Think about how your core passion has gotten you through your toughest moments.
I now know that when I emigrated to the U.S., at age 11, learning was my compass. While others saw a child struggling with pronunciation, I experienced myself as a detective decoding not just a language, but an entire cultural framework. My love of learning accelerated adopting my new culture and language.
The refuge of books, libraries, learning provided a sense of self during a time of profound displacement, and it built bridges to my new world faster than would have otherwise been possible.
Our core passion and its supporting cast equip us with exactly the tools we need for our life journey, often long before we understand what that journey entails. They are clues to our purpose and the challenges we're uniquely equipped to face.
4. Core Passion is our experiential lens.
Your core passion isn't just something you enjoy- it's the lens through which you experience everything else. It's the engine that drives you, the question that never stops asking, the hunger that can never be satisfied.
Our core passion is the lens through which we experience everything else in life. It colors how we perceive challenges, relationships, and opportunities, creating a unique perspective that only we can offer.
Your passion creates a unique lens through which you see the world. What you perceive through that lens—the insights, the beauty, the solutions—is your gift to offer.
Your core passion is how you mold your unique perspectives.
5. Your other passions, support the core passion.
"But I have many passions," you might say. "How do I choose?"
For years, I misunderstood my own nature. I saw my wide-ranging interests as disconnected pursuits. I may have been told I had “whims” by an ex. Like all multi-passionates out there, I worried that my refusal to specialize was a liability in a world that rewards focus.
For Asimov, writing was the core passion. Science, history, and literature, were the territories his writing explored. His areas of interests are the supporting passions.
My core passion is learning. Engineering, my kids and family, cooking, spirituality, esoteric tools, nature activities, music, my industry are territories my learning explores.
Our other interests and loves are supporting cast members to our core passion. Like planets orbiting the sun, these secondary passions keep our core passion fresh, providing new contexts and challenges for its expression.
Remember to think of your core passion as a process that you do. A core passion is more teaching, than child literacy - the area in which your teaching can thrive, for example.
6. Your Core Passion evolves, while also remaining constant.
Though the expression of our core passion evolves as we grow, its essence remains consistent. The writer remains a writer, the researcher a researcher, the connector a connector—though the specific subjects and methods may transform over time.
You don’t all of a sudden fall out of love with your core passion. You may repress it, ignore it, leave it for another day. Pretend it’s something you’re just not into anymore. I believe that our core passion evolves, yes, but it never changes. In order for us to realize our full potential it must evolve. Mastering our core passion could also be considered as our life’s magnum opus. Which leads me to the last tenet of your core passion…
7. Achievement reflects honored passion, not pursued goals.
Core passion is not a means to achievement. Rather, achievement is the evidence of a life lived in alignment with our core passion. Fame, fortune, and commercial success may follow, but they are by-products of a life spent following, honing and mastering the core passion.
What’s your core passion?
What's the one activity you can't go a day without doing? Not because you should do it, but because not doing it makes you feel disconnected from yourself?
The core passion is more a process than a thing or topic.
It may be the process of:
I created a 25-page workbook for my paid subscribers to identify your core passion via a variety of methods.
And if you want to dive deeper, message me to
schedule a session.
Core Passion and the Gene Keys
Since becoming a Gene Keys guide, I've gained a framework that helps explain this process. My essence, what I radiate into the world, is Gene Key 62.1. This is where the sun was at the exact moment I was born. It is my core.
The shadow of the 62 is intellect—the tendency to get stuck in accumulated knowledge, to know without understanding, to collect information without wisdom. I've certainly experienced this shadow: times when my learning became an escape rather than an exploration, when I used knowledge to create distance rather than connection. When I hid behind intellect to stay safe, or to put others in their place.
The gift of the 62 is precision—the ability to distinguish signal from noise, to distill wisdom from information. Learning becomes not wasteful accumulation but focused exploration. It's about quality rather than quantity. It is the synthesis of intellect and intuition. Of using the mind to understand the no mind.
The highest expression—the Siddhi— of the 62 is impeccability. It's the art of embodying knowledge so completely that it transforms into wisdom.
I think a great clue to know your core passion is right there in the open if you know your personality profile in human design (mine is Investigating Opportunist), or in the line of your Life’s Work sphere in the Gene Keys. For me that is line 1: the
Here is a cheat sheet I made for my Gene Keys Explained post that shows the lines descriptions as pertains to the Life’s Work. See if any of these ring a bell for you.
Your passion has both shadow and gift aspects. When misaligned, it can become an addiction or escape. When aligned, it becomes your unique offering to the world.
The Paradox of Passionate Work
There's a popular narrative that says "follow your passion and you'll never work a day in your life." This oversimplifies a complex truth.
Following your passion doesn't mean work never feels like work. It means that work, even when challenging, contributes to a deeper sense of purpose. A surgeon may struggle through a difficult operation, but that struggle connects to their passion for healing. A teacher may exhaust themselves preparing lessons, but that exhaustion serves their passion for illuminating minds.
What's more accurate is this: When aligned with your core passion, difficult work feels worthwhile rather than wasteful. The struggle itself becomes meaningful.
I've had days of learning that left me mentally exhausted, but never empty. The fatigue of passionate work differs qualitatively from the fatigue of misaligned work. One depletes while the other, paradoxically, fills.
Beyond Productivity Culture
Modern productivity culture often frames passion as a means to achievement.
Your passion—whatever it may be—isn't a tool for productivity; it's the fundamental expression of who you are. Achievement isn't the goal but the evidence—the footprints left by a life aligned with its natural direction.
Asimov's 500+ books weren't his goal; they were the natural by-product of thousands of days spent doing what he couldn't help but do—type. My understanding of diverse fields isn't my goal; it's the natural result of decades spent following my particular passion for learning. Someone else might achieve greatness through their passion for connecting people, creating beauty, solving problems, or countless other core drives.
What treasure might accrue if you spent decades following your core passion? Not as a hustle, not as a productivity hack, but as the natural expression of your essence?
The recent Bob Dylan movie "A Complete Unknown" tracks the early years of his career. Dylan was perfectly fine couch surfing and later living off his girlfriend in Greenwich Village. He dedicated himself entirely to the craft of writing. His supporting passions were music, performing, playing guitar, traveling, and perhaps activism, but his core passion is, undisputably, writing—and he became a master because he gave himself wholly to it. He had notebooks and papers everywhere, and not a day could go by without him writing. Crucially, he was not afraid to share his work in the face of ridicule, which I'd say is where most of us fall short of achieving our dreams—not sharing our passions with others.
The Service Your Passion Provides
Your deepest passion isn't just for you.
That thing you can't stop thinking about? The hobby that makes you lose track of time? The work that energizes instead of drains you?
It's not random.
Whether you believe in God, Buddha, evolution, or pure chance - that drive was planted in you for two reasons:
To light you up inside
To light the way for others
Your fulfillment and your service are two sides of the same coin.
The universe doesn't waste energy on accidents. My passion for learning serves others when I share—not everything I know (that would be overwhelming and imprecise), but the distilled essence, the patterns I've recognized, the connections between seemingly disparate fields.
Nothing lights me up more than witnessing that moment of recognition in a client's eyes during a session together—when the puzzle pieces of their life suddenly shift into meaningful patterns.
The Day Not Lost
What would it mean to live so that no day feels lost? Not by striving for perfection or productivity, but by honoring the core passion that makes you who you are?
For me, it means ensuring that each day includes some form of learning, even if brief—a conversation that shifts my perspective, a paragraph that illuminates a concept, an observation that connects previously separate ideas.
What would it mean for you? What single thread, woven through each day, would create a tapestry that feels distinctly yours?
The Originals: Channeling Passion into Impact
History offers us numerous examples of people who, like Asimov, created extraordinary bodies of work by simply honoring their core passions:
Jane Austen couldn't go a day without observing and writing about human relationships. Though she published only six novels in her lifetime, her keen insights into social dynamics created works that have remained relevant for over two centuries.
Frida Kahlo couldn't spend a day without expressing her reality through art. Despite physical suffering throughout her life, she produced 143 paintings, 55 of which were self-portraits, creating a visual autobiography that revolutionized how we understand identity and pain.
Charles Darwin was a keen observer of the natural world. His passion for cataloging and understanding nature's patterns led to his theory of evolution, transforming his world’s understanding of life itself.
Richard Feynman couldn't spend a day without playfully exploring physics. His curious, childlike approach to complex problems not only earned him a Nobel Prize but also made him one of the most beloved science educators of the 20th century.
Ina Garten’s recently published biography is a testament to following your passion with courage. Her unabated passion for cooking, design, entertaning and her husband along with a courage to do the hard things led to her amazing success. The title is perfect: Be Ready When the Luck Finds You.
Each of these individuals followed their unique passion—not as a means to fame or success, but because a day felt incomplete without it. Their achievements weren't goals they set but rather the natural by-products of lives spent in alignment with their essential natures.
When I look back from the vantage point of 80 or 90, I suspect I won't regret the paths not taken nearly as much as the days my passion went unexpressed—the days lost to distraction, conformity, or fear.
Charge toward your passion, despite challenges no matter how big. If you push for extraordinary outcomes luck will find you.
No day is truly lost when spent in the company of your core passion. It becomes, instead, another step on your authentic path—the journey only you can travel, guided by the map already written in your heart.
What's your version of "A day is lost in which I don't..."? Find that, and you've found your map.