I ever had this conversation with a friend about ‘passion’. I
put forth that passion is something that you have to work on to ‘make yourself
like it’, otherwise it’ll falter away after some time. He was slightly
dumbfounded: “What do you mean by that? If you truly am passionate about
something, why do you need to ‘make yourself like it’?” A logical extension to
his point would be “maybe you aren’t really passionate about it after all”,
often from the mouths of the energised souls who have found their passion.
And he's one of them.
My friend is passionate about teaching. He earns a decent income as a tuition teacher and from what he shared of students who
showed improvements over the years and the years his ‘disciples’ have been
following him, I know that he’s making a difference. And his passion was genuine, not a duplicate of his counterparts and certainly nothing
near NATO (no-action-talk-only).
He's clearly passionate because he's working on his passion. Some of us could wandering at a stage prior to where he's at, try to make sure what we are trying is what we really like to do.
And that's a stage of affirmation which I feel is a necessary one. Why? Because we are not born with our true calling. Because we are not born knowing what we are exactly good at. Because we are born into a world without the luxury of having to do one thing in our whole lives. Because we are born to explore. There's a reason that got you started on something. If you drop it solely 'cause of work involved, that's failing to try, which is worse than failing to succeed.
A state of uncertainty about our passions could arise from a lack of enough time for it to unfold its possibilities. Passion needs time to take form. And that duration is way more than it takes to swipe a page on our smartphone.
How to affirm our passion? Here are what I feel we could try which I hope could mean a thing or two to finding what you truly love to do.
Try a crash course. Say you're passionate about farming. Try heading to Choa Chu Kang on a Saturday morning and engage in some farming activities. See if you like what you learn. After that, if you'd rather laze in bed or go cafe-hopping with your buddies, maybe farming is not the thing for you.
Take up a regular course. If you like an activity, naturally you'll want to be good at it. Because excellence gratifies your efforts. The more you practice, the better you are, and if this betterment makes you happy, you're on the right track.
Or try doing it yourself. If your interest is a slightly isolated craft lacking in available courses (such as kite-flying), the way to affirm your interest for it is to try it out yourself. Count on yourself, and do the next step.
Read up and network. Like skills betterment, knowledge makes a pursuit of a passion interesting. Say you like cycling, and derives deep fulfilment from it, hit up a library or meet new people to exchange insights and learn what is it about cycling that keeps them going. Their motivations could resonate with you too.
Share it after you've tried the above. Passion rubs off people. If you could talk about something, it's an indication.
But don't share it before. Contrary to the advocates to share with your close friends and family about your business idea, I would suggest the opposite when you're exploring your passion. "I want to try out scuba-diving", so say you. How many people would douse you with well-meaning safety precautions (which would better be advised by the professionals)? Unless, of course, support from your loved ones mean a lot to you, but I feel that the key support and strength should come from within yourself. After all, you're trying out your passion for your own sake.
Let your passion fight it out with priorities. Spend 10,000 hours and you'll be truly good at something. How much time are you willing to invest in crafting your passion? Are you willing to put it before your hangout times with friends or Sunday afternoon me-time? If you engage in your passion daily after work or burn a weekend for it, you have definitely have my respect for it =]
Perhaps there isn’t much of a difference between making yourself like something and working to sustain your own passion. Whether you're affirmative about your passion already, there's work to be done to start and carry on that passion.
I like to think that we're born with a few baby bonfires to sustain throughout our lifetime. Fire needs oxygen and flammable materials to burn. Without throwing in more firewood, we'll never know how bright could the bonfire raze up to. We have to try out a few bonfires before we know which lit-up view are we most comfortable with.
Passion is a lifelong work. The purposeful ones would put in some work first before snuffing out the flame.
