The benefit of not getting your way

Want to know what you're passionate about?

PAY ATTENTION.

Specifically, pay attention to how you feel when you are denied something.

Do you get upset?

Are you relieved?

Don't care one way or the other?

Whatever the feeling, pay attention to it! It's telling you what you should — and shouldn't — pursue.

Here are a few people who learned how much they loved their respective crafts after brief periods of deprivation.

Warren Buffet

When he was 14 years old, Warren Buffet was a prankster and shoplifter who did poorly in school.

Having reached the limit of his patience, his father played at Warren's love of money and gave him an ultimatum:

"You can either keep behaving this way or you can do something in relation to your potential. But if you don't do it, you have to give up the paper routes," Howard Buffett told him.

Warren Buffett was a changed man from that day forward.

And while he credits the weight he placed on that conversation to his father's general disappointment, there's no doubt that the idea that he couldn't make money anymore was a big deal to him.

After all, this was the boy who started selling gum at just 6 years old and has never stopped earning an income since.

In fact, at the end of the same year that his father gave him that ultimatum, he made enough money from his paper route to file tax returns.

Making money was Buffett's vocation AND avocation.

Without it, he realized only after almost having it taken away from him, he would be miserable.

Anthony Bourdain

When he was in the 4th grade, the eventual world-renowned chef Anthony Bourdain took a family trip to Europe.

But Bourdain and his brother were much more interested in the comic books and lifestyle kids in Europe led, not the food. So they spent the first week complaining about the undrinkable milk, "cheesy" butter, and repetitive meals.

His parents were foodies who had come to Europe largely because of the cuisine, so this behavior annoyed them.

But one day, his family took a trip to La Pyramide.

At the time, La Pyramide was the "culinary center of the universe," so that experience would surely be formative for any future chef.

Here's how Bourdain recalls that evening:

"They pulled the gleaming new Rover into the parking lot of a restaurant called, rather promisingly, La Pyramide... and then left [my brother and I] in the car!"

Bourdain spent the next few hours in the car fuming with anger.

By leaving them in the car, his parents were sending a clear message:

You need to be more appreciative of food to enjoy such a privilege.

Bourdain looks back at this event as his clear genesis as a food lover:

"It was a wake-up call that food could be important, a challenge to my natural belligerence. By being denied, a door opened." (emphasis mine)

It became his mission from then on to outdo his parents and try EVERY food he could find, no matter how strange.

Just as it did for Buffett, it took a door closing for Bourdain to realize that he desperately wanted to explore what was behind it.

Eiichiro Oda

The manga(Japanese comics) industry is worth around $14 Billion. So it should come as no surprise that its authors are skilled workhorses who are as prolific as they are brilliant.

Eiichiro Oda, author of the best-selling manga series of all-time One Piece, is the best example.

A typical day for Oda involves waking up at 5:00 AM and working until 2:00 AM the next day, leaving only 3 hours to sleep.

His day involves little to no breaks, as it's not uncommon for him to forget to eat regularly or stay inside his apartment for days or weeks at a time.

This pace, unfortunately, has a steep price.

Oda has been hospitalized several times due to overworking himself.

His rival, Masashi Kishimoto (author of Naruto), paid him a visit at the hospital during one of these hospitalizations, and what he found shouldn't come as too much of a shock:

Eiichiro Oda was in his hospital bed working on the next chapter of One Piece when he should have been resting!

If his insane schedule or manga sales weren't proof enough, this story makes one thing clear:

Eiichiro Oda's One Piece is a passion he is willing to die for.

Conclusion

Anthony Bourdain's words are worth revisiting:

"By being denied, a door [opens]."

If you have trouble figuring out which things or people matter most to you, pay attention to how you feel when they are taken away.

If the opposite of love is indifference, then torment can help reveal the things you love.