Here's a sneaky way of getting people to reveal their true passion. Have them make a list of two things that they most want to do. Then have them cross off the item that they listed first. I once read that on any list of two things, the item that you place first is the one that you mention because you think that it makes you look good to others -- it's the one that you list for them. The item that you place second is your true passion -- the one that you want to do for you. So strongly do our defenses block us from our passions that we have to be tricked into revealing what those passions are.

Over the years, in unguarded moments, I've gotten to hear what successful leaders have put on their lists as their number-two items. One leader told me that his dream was to write a multivolume fantasy novel. Someone else said that he wanted to be alone for days on end with an all-black Rothko painting until he could see light shining through it.

And then it was my turn. A group of us were undergoing a kind of psychological open-heart surgery -- a sort of bypass to our passions -- at an executive-reinvention seminar a few years ago. It was a matter of life and death because each of us was suffocating within our organizations. We carried lofty titles but suffered from underappreciation. We were COOs, respected creative partners, or organizational healers. But we were not lead dogs -- even worse, it didn't look as if we would ever become lead dogs -- and we were beginning to think that there was something wrong with us.

The seminar leader asked us what we would do if time, money, and status weren't governing factors. My mouth was the first one to open, and, in a voice that sounded possessed, I heard myself say things that I had never before consciously thought. I was like Carrie, and my words were like something out of a Stephen King novel. "I want to burn all my panty hose," I recall saying. "I want to buy a one-way ticket to Florence, and I want to read Dante's works in their original Italian." As if all of that wasn't embarrassing enough in front of a group of about a dozen strangers, I added: "And I want to learn how to make sausage."

With sausage out there for everyone to consider, other people in the group -- which included a retail executive, a Hollywood-studio vice president, and a president of a computer company -- were less inhibited about letting fly with their own number twos. One person listed gardening, another person wanted to start a kindergarten, and a third person hoped to become a comedian. What were we doing talking about such dippy passions? And what were those passions doing to us? Were they responsible for subtly pushing us away from top spots in our companies? By voicing them out loud, were we running the risk of letting them carry us off in new and possibly dangerous directions?

To find out the answers to those questions, I traveled to Dallas on a dust-bowl-hot day. I needed some literary psychoanalysis, so I took my Dante passion, which I barely understood (it had been years since I'd read any Dante), to a teacher who could help me to understand it: Dr. Larry Allums, 55, director of the Dallas Institute of the Humanities and Culture. Had I found the answer to the question, What do I want to be when I grow up? And, if I had found it, what was I supposed to do with it?