Your passion in life (I): what should you do?

| Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Damn you Vaynerchuk, and damn your book Crush It! As I was reading, I felt like I already knew about and identified with most of what he was saying in his first book—and doing a lot of it too—but one question kept gnawing away at me as I turned the pages: is the thing you think is your passion really your passion?

Is what you’re doing—or have been doing—really what you’re supposed to be doing? In this post you can read some ideas about passion and how to identify it in your friends and in the next post I’ll tell you about my situation and dilemma.

To start with, here’s a great clip about passion from a great Argentinian film “El Secreto de sus Ojos” (sorry, couldn’t find it in English, but the key quote is below):

”A passion is a passion.”, “Can you see it, Benjamin? The guy can change everything: his face, his house, his family, his girlfriend, his religion, his God, but there’s something he can’t change, Benjamin: he can’t change his passion.”

Some clues in the etymology of ‘passion’

Most of us start out thinking about the modern idea of ‘passion’ —romantic passion, love and sex—but clearly we’re not talking about that kind of passion here.

Then we might think of the something other than love and sex that induces in us ‘a strong emotion or desire’; that would be the fourteenth century meaning. This would be the “What gets you excited about life?” that is closest to what Gary Vaynerchuk is getting at in Crush It.

Going back further, we discover that ‘passion’ is more traditionally synonymous with ‘suffering, enduring, hurt’ (think of the Passion of Christ). So another way to ask ‘what’s your passion’ would be “What do you suffer with?” “What won’t go away in your life?”, “What keeps coming back, again and again, however much you try and ignore it?” “Which cross is yours to bear?”

Other ways of thinking about your passion

What can’t you shut up about? What do you bore your friends with at the bar? What do you find yourself reading about all the time? What do you spend your time and money on?

Is it what you’re currently doing as a job as way to earn a living in this life? Or is it something else that really gets you excited about life? What would you like to host a weekly live ustream.tv show about? What do you get that enthusiastic about in your life?

What content would you LOVE to produce for your readers or listeners all day long? Live blogs? Podcast interviews? Opinion? Analysis? A weekly ustream.tv show? And about what, exactly?

It’s easier to do this for your friends than for yourself

If you think of your friends and ask yourself what their passion is, you’ll probably get it right. It’s so obvious to you. Much more obvious than trying to work out your own passion.

We all learn to do things to get by, to survive; we acquire skills which allow us to earn a living and perhaps even a good one at that. But is that really what we’re here to do? Are we being true to ourselves, or do we make excuses for ourselves, kidding ourselves it doesn’t matter?

I talked about these ideas yesterday with some students and friends: in less than five minutes, we could identify in every one of them a passion which they got really excited about and which they weren’t doing or hadn’t done enough of in their lives. Their faces even changed—and lit up—when they were talking about their passion.

There was the biologist who has dreamt about the sea and boats since he was a child; there was a receptionist who in theory wants to become a high school English teacher but who is really, really, REALLY passionate about Michael Jackson; there was an accountant who—in her free time and on FB—already posts tons of stuff about Reiki and esoteric thought; and there was a former computer engineer and IT start–up investor who thinks he really should have become a chef and spent his life cooking.

The Michael-Jackson-loving receptionist is already doing most of the stuff Vaynerchuk mentions in his book. She even knew what ustream.tv was before I showed here chapter six: they do a Michael Jackson fan meet up on ustream.tv TWICE a week. All around the world, fans are right now collecting money together to have planes fly over the courthouse demanding a fair trial: “The World Wants a Fair Trial For Michael. Justice for Michael.”

If they want, they can even send money to the L.A. based fans who then buy flowers and physically put them on the grave on behalf of the person in Spain or Argentina or Zimbabwe who wants to show their respect in that way.

That’s passion.

I know I’ve already recognised this in some of my friends and encouraged them to follow their own passion for years…

Pedro Moya

Pedro Moya

The best example I can think of is a great friend of mine here in Murcia called Pedro Moya. Pedro did a first degree in Spanish philology. Then he joined a political party—the Spanish Partido Popular—and started working in the mayor’s office in Murcia Town Hall.

He loved combining writing and politics but this was before blogs really existed, so he used to—and still does, sometimes—write magnificent letters to the editors of newspapers about things he thought were important. They were so good that letters editors at both regional and national newspapers also frequently decided to publish them.

Then Pedro decided to study for a second degree—in political science. I bugged him about setting up a blog for almost two years and he finally did it: now he has nearly 3000 Facebook fans and writes regularly on his blog—Notes from Freedom.

Now I want him to get his own domain name…

The point is, anyone who knows Pedro in real life also knows that Pedro’s passion in this life is politics, specifically right-wing Spanish politics, although he often looks at examples from other countries.

And that’s great; that’s Pedro being authentic. That’s him. Really.

Why is Pedro like that? Why is politics Pedro’s passion? Who knows. It doesn’t matter. The important thing is that Pedro knows and has done something about it. The world is a better place because of that.

So what?

So what? Well, ask yourself: what’s your passion in life? I’m asking myself that question this week. What should we be doing with our time here? Are you already doing it or are you wasting time doing something else? In the next post, I’ll tell you about my dilemma…