Passion

The world today is driven by passion. “Find your passion” and “Follow your passion, the rest will attend to itself” have become normally accepted ways of living life. However, is passion the best way to get to the “good life”? Today, we will discuss this emotionally charged facet of life.

“If you don’t love what you do, you won’t do it with much conviction or passion.”

— Mia Hamm

Small Celebratory Announcement

Before we start, I want to take a second to celebrate a small win of my own. I have been consistently writing on Facets of Life for the better part of 5 years now. This is my 75th article, and 24th in consecution, having picked up some consistency in July 2024.

I have been going back and forth with maintaining my writing habit, and I feel like I am finally in a place where I can confidently state that I love writing, and can say with pride that today Facets of Life has hit 3800 views, with 1976 unique visitors.

I want to take a second to thank everyone who invested precious minutes out of their day to read my content. Even if I have been able to make even one of you think and wonder about the subjects I share, I would feel fulfilled, and that would drive me to continue writing (apart from my own, inherent need to write).

For many of my fellow writers, these numbers would for sure be meagre, but these numbers have been a long time coming for me, and I would rather celebrate them for five seconds before starting to compare myself with the established writers in the world.

I guess this sense of appreciation for these numbers has come to me solely because of my passion for writing and sharing uplifting and thought-provoking content on the internet, which let’s face it, has the tendency to be an overly negative place at times. This brings me perfectly to the topic that we have at hand today.

Coming back to Passion

Now that passion has come up in the discussion, let’s discuss the subject matter. Today, almost everyone has the capability to share their stories with enormous audiences, through the marvel that is social media. We see people in all walks of life talk about their journeys through this complex puzzle called life.

There is a subject, which all these people, who attain a following big enough (or small in my case), talk about eventually. That subject is passion. Now what is passion? Passion can be defined as a strong and barely controllable emotion. An energy so strong that drives us to the ends of the earth to get an outcome.

Every successful person in the world has at some point in time credited the passion for their craft to be a driving force for them to reach the epitome of their respective field. I am thinking, sports persons, actors, singers, entrepreneurs. They talk with conviction about their voyages, which led them from the trenches to centerstage.

Passion is contagious too. Every so often, I fall prey to a passionate speech about how someone somewhere in the world survived a crap load of hardship solely through their relentless will and achieved something I think I would like to achieve. It incites tremendous, but temporary, action in me. And then I am back to square one.

I feel, however, it isn’t just me who falls for this phenomenon.

Many so called successful people or those who market themselves as such, are of the opinion that one should pursue whatever they are passionate about, sometimes at the cost of what appears to be rational decision making based on current circumstances, which I feel is more dangerous than interrupted progress.

This made me wonder, is passion the best driver for one to achieve happiness and success in life? And based on this question, I went and did some digging around this subject.

If we look at the established business people, they do have a tinge of passion in them, but they usually have a calmness in their demeanours, especially when they are executing tasks of value. Be it creating strategy, undertaking acquisitions or just speaking in public, they reflect restfulness and tranquility.

We have all heard about the Tata Motors’ acquisition of JLR, which for the longest time was marketed to be Late Shri Ratan Tata ji’s revenge over Bill Ford, who at one point demeaned him by saying he wouldn’t partner with a sub-standard Indian brand, highlighting Ford’s global car company status.

However, this, to me, doesn’t really make sense. A sensible, patient and respected business person like Shri Tata wouldn’t simply buy a COMPANY, just because of a passionate response to a statement made to him years ago. I am sure he took the decision after deep thought and consulting the hundreds of experts around him.

In effect, what I am trying to emphasise is

We may start from a place of passion, but the execution should always come from a place of calmness.

If you stuck around this far, thank you for your time. If you enjoyed this, share this with one friend of yours whom you think will benefit from reading this. Thanks for reading, and I will see you in the next one. 🙂