A few words on what finding a passion really means

You can live to own. Or you can own what you live. That’s the choice.

It’s the choice to decide to stare down the future and say this is mine or to look at the present and only want for more. It’s the choice to wish or the choice to dream. It’s a decision we make every morning when we get up and every night when we lie down. And it is the easiest decision you’ll ever have to make, and the hardest thing you’ll ever have to do. And it will be hard. But it’s the most glorious type of hard you’ll ever find.

Too often, we see it all backwards. We see passion and self as things to be found. As if there were someone inside of us, waiting under the surface to crawl into the light after you peeled all the layers away.

I think it’s the other way around. The layers are the life. They are us. We are what we do. We can afford to give up and discard nothing. No moment, no second, no part of who we are. There’s no super-secret, special self waiting in the wings. And there’s not some boring, mundane self who lives your everyday life. We make our way along, sometimes getting it right, sometimes missing the mark, always with that lingering decision to do or not to do.

HOW PASSION WORKS
It’s not passion, then, that leads to need. It’s need that leads to passion. Or to put it a better way, if you’re waiting for passion to fall on you like a ton of bricks as an intervention of the divine, it’s just not going to happen. You can spend your time chasing fun, but you can only develop passion. It comes when you wrench yourself out of bed and commit to getting every little thing out of all you’ve got.

Passion is born out of curiosity, it becomes interest, and it grows into dreams. But that only happens when we allow ourselves to pursue it fully. People who don’t get things done don’t find their passion. Doing creates challenges. It finds solutions. It offers insight. But most importantly, in all of that, it creates a cycle of care that attaches our present to our future. We start to look to tomorrow when can live in today. It comes when our beliefs in the things we do become so important, they bind themselves to all of our activities. That’s what it’s all about.

MAKE IT PERSONAL
And this is why it’s so important to make things personal. Whether it be your projects by night or your business by day. Let each thing you do mean something to you. Because curiosity and interest are things only found in the heart. Logic and explanation are not the source of care. They undermine interest. If you do something for its own sake, you find its value. If you do it because you are paid, its value is income. Tom Sawyer had it right when he let the other kids paint the fence.

Dollars and bottom-lines, more often than not, destroy passion, because they feed on the logic of need. And logic will tell us that the best way to satisfy a need is always in the most direct, efficient way possible. Except life is not logic.

For this reason, the lure of money is antithetical to doing. Because when we think of money as a lure, we are, more times than not, thinking of easy money – something rooted in the logic of efficiency. Hard money is something wholly different. It’s an activity rooted in character and the idea of continuous pursuit and effort. But easy money is about doing little for lots for no particular purpose other than to not have to do anything at all. This puts it at ends with passion and dreams, because these are activities that come out of doing for itself.

TAKING THE PICTURES
In the simplest terms, I would suggest taking some pictures for yourself. Anything. Everything. I believe in the power of personal projects. I believe in the power of a point of view. If you’ve been away from taking anything for yourself, how do you know what personal is to you in the present?

Find something. Pursue it for a little bit. Sift through the pictures, and dwell on them. Print them out. Print them fast and cheap to remove barriers and move quickly. Let the process pull you into the situation. Sort through them to see what feels right together. Put them in order. Lay them all out. Let them seep into your conscious and let a picture of yourself emerge.

Keep at this. Let this form into its own thing. Don’t stop, just because you know it will work. Don’t stop, because the most exciting part is through. Move on. Go into the part that’s slow and tedious. And watch it transform, as it will, from a hard and sterile process to something rich and meaningful. Watch how your pictures keep changing. Watch how the ideas come to you.

Then ask again, “Who am I?”

Now go back to what you take for others. See how it’s different, and see how it’s similar. And ask why it’s similar and why it’s different. Then ask what you can bring from what you’ve learned about yourself into your work. How can you make the images you create for work mean more to you?. Because meaning more to you isn’t an act of ego. It’s evidence of a deeper connection you’ve found with your subject. Find it. Make it part of what you create for others. And let that grow.

Then rework that as part of your portfolio. Bring it into your words, take it into your business, and just like your personal work, don’t stop when things are fun. Push through that same slow, tedious climb, until you get to the top, and see how your business grows. See how you grow.

Because at the end of it all, it really comes down to getting off your ass and getting something done. To not worry about what will and will not pan out. To stop thinking about what’s really you and to go find out. You can find that in business, you can find it in leisure. You can find it everywhere, all the time. But you’ll only find it when you ease off on the pedal and stop listening to the voice that tells you not to do whatever you do until every sign in the universe points the same way. By then, it’s too late. Proven always starts as unproven. And those who go somewhere start with the unproven. It’s that simple. Now get moving.