Passion Is Not Enough

I have been attempting to understand why it bugs me to hear professional motivators talk about the necessity for "passion" to be successful. Perhaps I'm just getting too old and lazy to be interested in jacking up my emotions about anything. Getting passionate about something usually seems to me like hard work. Or perhaps it's the fact that jacked-up emotional states are not something you need, or even want, to be successful.

Emotions seem much too unsteady to be associated with anything or anyone I consider truly successful. As fast as they go up, they can come crashing down. Just try to hold only a single feeling for any extended period.

I think I know what the motivators are referring to. There is a quality of intensity of commitment that resides with successful people. But rather than "passion" I would suggest the word "identification." When you really identify with something, whether it is some intended outcome or some internal standard about your reality, it creates a true motivational energy to make it happen. But that does not at all mean a hyperemotional state. There can be joy, to be sure. And identification will create incredibly focused energy when that energy is required. But most often it will manifest as calm and deliberate thinking and action. Heart and passion are different things.

How do you create that kind of "identification" that you can use to achieve success in whatever you choose? By consistently focusing on whatever you want to identify with. Running five miles in forty minutes. Having a nurturing work environment. A positive cash flow with a growing healthy reserve. Quality time with your family.

Continual focusing - and then refocusing -- on desired outcomes is the master key to success. So beyond passion, try peaceful purposefulness.

"Nothing contributes so much to tranquilizing the mind as a steady purpose--a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye." - Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

"Sober perseverance is more effective than enthusiastic emotions, which are all too capable of being transferred, with little difficulty, to something different each day." - Vaclav Havel

Give it a try this week. Choose any successful outcome that has meaning for you. Practice identifying consistently with your successful outcome. You can do it in small, simple, easy ways. You could create a visual affirmation with pictures. Or a verbal affirmation with present-tense statements in which you state that you are already living that successful outcome. Or just close your eyes and see, hear, feel yourself in that reality. It's what Olympic athletes do for a significant portion of their training. And it can work for you!

Comments

[ShawnMichel]

True passion can only come from true -personas-, as Gracian called them, or the authentic human being. Most aren't. Most are cogs for the corporate police state; and thus "passion" is relegated to consumption or blind greed.

True passion is choiceless. It does not require "jacking up one's emotions." To do is, by implication, a sign of inauthentic passion, the passion of the cog.

Getting all rah-rah'd for your corporate taskmaster as he gets all rah-rah'd for his, on up the line to the planet-killing CEO, is, besides, immoral.

SMdM

[JaredGoralnick]

Identification is a really great technique for accomplishing goals, and I applaud your, as always, dead-on advice for how to visualize and identify one's objectives. But I disagree that identification equates with passion and that passion is mostly emotional.

* Passion is the steadfast excitement and headstrong commitment to an idea. It’s first and foremost what you keep inside and how you hold onto your belief
* Identification is a technique for how to make a passion or any goal into a success.

Passionate is not something that you can necessarily plan for or become—it’s just how you are when it comes to certain ideas. When we’re passionate about those ideas it comes forth in the way we talk about and act upon them. Passionate actions can be emotional or planned and cool-headed.

For instance, you’re passionate about productivity and empowering people to organize their lives. There’s something about that passion that resonates through your writing, and it makes others want to follow your path and achieve similar personal freedom/pr­oductivity­. That doesn’t make you any more or less emotional on the topic.

But that passion is different than whether or not you happen to have visualized having a company that holds seminars or publishes bestsellers. Those things may be byproducts of your passion, but they are not passion itself.

I don’t mean to quibble about this. Like you, I don’t agree that passion is required for success. But I do believe with professional motivators and others who say that passion can be a vital ingredient to achieving success. It’s similar to saying that one ought to find their muse and work on that as opposed to just finding something that’s going to make money but isn’t in line with what excites them: when one is passionate about their path, the obstacles seem so much easier to overcome as the means often become as worthwhile as the end.

If one is wise enough or lucky enough to be acting upon things that they’re passionate about, then identification would be a great technique to help them realize their goals.

[Cathexis]

How can anyone maintain "passion" for a job which:

* Enriches your CEO while you tread water, at best?
* Can be terminated at any time, on some exec's whim, despite even your most stellar performance?

"Passion for your job," unless you are fortunate enough to be self-employed and/or in a steady position to do something you truly enjoy, is (IMO) just one more attempt to get average workers to put out more (without additional compensation) and complain less.