My goal is to try to be as objective and scientific as possible in this process. How do you sort out the first step? Axioms come to mind like “If you do what you love, you'll never work a day in your life.” or “Build a life that you don't need a vacation to get away from.” That is the sort of thing that I'm shooting for, something that I'm passionate about. Something that I'm excited to get started on every day. The problem is finding something that I'm legitimately passionate about. I'm into a wide variety of things but nothing rises to the level of getting a tattoo of it.

I need a scientific method of determining what I love. I need something with clearly stated objectives and well-defined criteria. I'd prefer to do as much of this research in a lab environment instead of the Mike Rowe approach of trying to hundreds of jobs.

I'm trying to figure out what I'm passionate about or at least the types of things I like. My first idea is to make a pair of lists.

• 50 things I want to do more of
• 20 things I want to do less of

I set the number at 50 for the “Do More” because I want to make it challenging to complete the list. It would be easy to list 10 things that you'd like to do more of. I felt that there might be some revelation in the final few items if you have to struggle to come up with 50. Maybe 50 isn't enough.

The “Do less of list” is only 20 because you'll never escape all the things you don't want to do. This list is primarily to balance out the other list and to illuminate any mutually exclusive paradox situations.