Passion
I like passionate people.
I really don’t care what it is you’re passionate about—cars, computers, space, music, whatever. It’s not about what you’re passionate about, it’s about being passionate. It’s about discovering what makes you giggle and jump with glee, and making it what you do for a living.
When we’re young, the sky’s the limit. We can dream of being whatever it is that we can imagine. Astronaut? Oh yeah. Batman? You bet. But then we grow up and get caught in the rhetoric cycle of life, with people telling us what we can and can’t do and become. A sequence of events ends up finding most people in college, going with the flow, and not knowing what they want to do with their lives.
Doing things just for the sake of doing them doesn’t make much sense.
Our society is shaped around the “one-hit wonder” philosophy. Today, success is determined by how many CDs you sell in the first week, how much money you make in the boxing office the first weekend, and how fast you can get your startup bought by Google. It’s all about getting rich quick, and hey, if it doesn’t work out in the first couple months, declare it a failure and move on to something new.
Whatever happened to hard work? Whatever happened to working endlessly at something you believe in, even when everyone around you is declaring it impossible. We’ve been bombarded with stories of celebrities and those on top of the heap that have happened to get lucky, and we wish for the same. I like how Seth Godin describes the difference between luck and effort:
And that’s the key to the paradox of effort: While luck may be more appealing than effort, you don’t get to choose luck. Effort, on the other hand, is totally available, all the time.
So what keeps the very people that swore they would never work at a job they hated, from working for things they’re passionate about? Fear, disbelief, discomfort?
There are more people doing the things they love as hobbies rather than jobs. I have nothing against having hobbies, but it’s ironic that the things that people willingly put time and effort into are the things they do for pure satisfaction. For free. The money I’d pay for employees with that kind of drive…
When I look at the people that love what they do, I don’t see a man or woman that got there because of some degree or formal education. I don’t see someone that everyone believed in on day one. I see someone who was reckless enough to believe the impossible, and crazy enough to pursue it.
And that’s the sheer brilliance of passion.
