We’re always being told to do what we’re passionate about. If you’re passionate about something, we’re told, then you should make a career of it. But, passion is fluid and isn’t conducive to being the bases of a life plan. You might be passionate about crafting vegan lasagna one week and memorizing Bob Dylan lyrics the next. There’s likely a long road between a career as a vegan chef and as a Bob Dylan impersonator.

Better advice might be to follow your bliss. Better still is to just do something, anything, while keeping your blissful dream in mind.

I woke up to a phone call this morning. Someone very close to me arrived in Bali almost exactly one week ago. The purpose of her going there was to study wellness tourism and holistic therapy. Bali is the place to be for these experiences.

Once equipped with this knowledge, her goal is to start her own wellness and holistic center to help and to heal women in need.

On more or less a whim, she decided to volunteer while in Bali. She applied to several organizations. She immediately heard back from a nonprofit which provides almost the exact services she hopes to provide in her own venture.

Her reasons for wanting to do this work are varied and personal, in essence, it makes her happy to participate in a network of support, understanding and love. She left a well-paying job to pursue this dream. Within a week, she’s living out her goal.

She boarded the plane with a clear idea of what she wanted to do, she was confident and positive about her ability to do it, and now she’s well positioned to succeed.

This is positive suggestion. Some call it autosuggestion, or the law of attractions. Pick your own verbiage—the general idea is that you put a desire out there, focus on it, and opportunities arise for you to attain your goal.

In my case, I knew that I wanted to use my knowledge of communication, media, culture and society to help disenfranchised people. Trans women of color are one group that I particularly honed in on to support, because their level of oppression is among the highest faced of any group in the United States. I graduated, took a month to work out my goals, started a totally unrelated job, and within two months, I was approached and hired on to help build a nonprofit with the mission of providing transitional housing and opportunities to LGBTQ young adults.

Naturally, not all opportunities come to us just because we want them to. We all also face different obstacles in our opportunities based on the social experience formed by our race, class, gender, and other aspects of our identity. Nevertheless, good becomes of good.

Putting your best intentions out in front of you often leads to the best results.