What life can be great without great passion? Having something in your life about which you are passionate is a great start, but consider this: Why not create an entire life that you are passionate about - start to finish, top to bottom? Can it be done? Yes, and it's not nearly so hard as you might think.

Of course, the first task is to figure out what it is that you're passionate about. One of the easiest ways of doing this is by figuring out what it is you do when you can do whatever you want to do, such as when you go on vacation, or what you stalk off to do when you're mad, hurt, frustrated or otherwise needing to "get away" and make yourself feel better. Another way of discovering your passion is to visualization such a situation. What are you looking forward to doing when you retire? What would you do with your time if you had unlimited supplies of money, support and resources?

Once you have found your passion or passions (most of us have several to choose from), spend some time auditing your life to see where it includes these passions and where it denies them. Then weed out everything in your life that leads you away from or denies your passions and replace them with work, hobbies, activities, habits and possessions that reflect them.

Of course, the hue and cry goes up that not all of us can pick and choose our jobs and where we live. But to a great extent, this is fear speaking. It is scary to pull up stakes and move to places unknown because your current residence in slowly killing you inside. It's abjectly terrifying to follow your heart when it leads in a different direction than your head. And it's sheer folly (in the eyes of many who do not dare) to announce to the world that you're giving up everything you ever worked for to pursue a dream that might fail miserably.

But the truth is that it is far better to fail doing what you love than to succeed at a life of mediocrity and regret. This is not a dress rehearsal and you do not get a chance to "use what you learned" to do it over right - even if you believe in reincarnation, you know that you will enter the next life bereft of all the lessons you learned in this one. You only get one shot (or one shot at a time) to live your life as if you meant it. Are you?