Dan Pedersen asks a few questions that can help you land on a more useful definition of “passion”: “What problems do you find easy to solve? In what way are you most creative?” If you’re doing something passion-y, it might feel like you’re cheating because it feels easy — or if not easy, at least interesting enough to keep doing even though it’s hard. In Harvard Business Review, Dan Cable calls this “following your blisters.” Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham calls it “following your curiosity.” Either way: What challenges do you keep returning to, what walls do you actually like banging your head against? Another lens on passion: the Japanese concept “ikigai.” We’ve touched on this before, but it’s the idea that genuinely great work feels elusive because it’s the intersection of four things: what you love, what you’re good at, what the world needs, and what you can get paid for. “Passion” is only the intersection of the first two (love + aptitude). Purpose, or ikigai, is all four. When you can find true purpose, you’re not only happier. You’re also healthier. “People with purpose in life sleep better and have more gray matter in their brain’s insula, lower levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines, and less of the stress hormone cortisol in their saliva,” wrote science journalist Marta Zaraska on Medium a few years back. So, what is happiness? It’s not just “passion.” It’s purpose. Something you love that people around you actually need.