Passion?

May 1st, 2008 Posted in Personal

I’ve been thinking about this subject a lot recently. I have seen enough to understand that having passion in whatever you do will produce great results. It may be a combination that you’re motivated to go the extra mile while others are only thinking “good enough”.

However, what is passion?

My best definition so far is that it is doing something you get never tired of.

If you look at great artists, they have this innate drive to create. The ones who are great absolutely love it and they really never seem tired of doing it.

To a stressed out corporate worker, it doesn’t make sense that an artist can be an artist for the rest of his life. After all, it’s like having the same job for the rest of your life. What’s the next step on the career ladder?

However, this is through the lens of the stressed out corporate worker. He or she never took the chance to jump completely in various subjects to really see what sparks their interest. Usually, it requires a luxury of freedom that might have not been possible.

There are also people out there who love whatever they are doing in their corporate environment. The only ones I’ve met are the ones who were in very high positions.

So what is something I’ll never got tired of?

I’ve personally taken to step to become an entrepreneur. I found that this environment a million times better than working for any company or for anyone. I really enjoy calling all the shots, and being directly responsible for all the good and bad that come from my shot calling.

So is being an entrepreneur my passion?

I really don’t think so because it’s not an end in itself for me. I’m more interested in what I create out of being an entrepreneur. If working in a corporate environment helped me create what I wanted, than I would be still working in a company.

Since I am very purpose driven, I need to find meaning out of everything. This drives everything I do. However, the problem is my goals end up being incredibly large, which makes it harder to see the direct connection with what I’m doing day to day to the bigger goal.

So I’m still fairly driven to do a lot of dirty work to get there, but is this REAL passion?

I’m not sure. Having done a lot of web development recently, I’ve realized that I really enjoy design. Even though I make sure I don’t spend too much time on it, I find that I could almost fiddle with design for hours on end without getting tired.

Does this mean I might be passionate about design or maybe art? If so, why I am not doing more to cultivate this?

Then I think I must be practical. A part of me believes that painting for the rest of my life is overly selfish and contributes little to the world. I feel like I have to go the rough path to accomplish more. This is not to discredit artists, but I really believe I can make a great positive contribution to humanity.

It’s strange because I can somehow relate to eastern cultures in that I am willing to give myself up to my society, but the thing is, my society is not my community, city, or country.

My society is the universe, and I’m willing to go through a lot of pain if it’s necessary, but is it necessary? Maybe following my bliss is what really allows your great contribution to humanity and beyond?

Who knows.