A big thing with time management I've learned over the years is that we've all been brainwashed. We think we need to spend "X" amount of time, like an hour, for example, or we've wasted time. Spending 2 minutes or less on something is a waste of time, yet its in that tiny window that we could get hooked into that activity, and the end up in positive psychology's idea of "flow" or relaxed effort, and spend much more time with that activity. The internet has also made this more applicable to us, because its warped our brains to multitask more and shift our focus more, which it is generally been found more effective not to multitask. This is something I still struggle like hell with because there is always that gnawing feeling of pointlessness or possible pointlessness keeping us from just starting with something, which takes me to my next point about where that feeling comes from.

I think that there's always going to be some sense of social meaning we feel in whatever we are doing, and we love that feeling. So I think that human beings are going to gravitate towards actions they find are socially meaningful. Say you are an artist of some sort, and your art repeatedly bombs, or you put a lot of work into a small business that bombs, this lack of social meaning can seriously crush that passion. But what trips people up is that there are times you need to form meaningful relationships with people first, before you can get them to acknowledge and give meaning to your passions.

So when you struggle with pursuing a passion, it seems like its primarily struggling with reframing your passion to have enough social meaning. The psychology of risk-taking which goes along with success says that irrationality helps risk-taking, like taking the risk on your passion, but we also need rationality and trying to ignore it too long with irrational optimism won't work for everyone. So this is a huge problem facing human beings, we are in control of each other's potential and don't fully realize it, and our potential is often being squandered because we fail to find ways to grow the social meaning behind our passions.