Passion

Am I following my passion and doing something that I really want to do in the rest of my life? The moment I graduated from University, I didn’t know what I exactly wanted and how I was going to do with all the time that I had but deep inside my mind, I had a simple thought to earn sufficient money to buy my parents a better house in which they could enjoy their retired lives. I achieved it after a few years working in an industry that I never thought I would be working in. And until today, I am still in the same industry and with all interests and passion to bring my career further. In fact, I always believe that interests are triggered by interactions with the outside world. The more we interact with others,  the more we absorb new ideas that help us to know ourselves better what we are interested in, even though the process of interest discovery can be messy, serendipitous, and inefficient, in large part because we simply cannot predict with certainty what will capture our  attention without giving it a try. However, my past experience told me that lots of things seem uninteresting and superficial until I take my initiatives to learn and discover. After a while, only I realize about the different facets which I didn’t know at the start and the eagerness to know more push me forward to dig deeper. And after a period of years, it eventually helps me to foster my passion. The process is not a passive discovery, like unearthing a hidden gem in my psyche, but rather of an active construction over time.

“Passion for your work is a little bit of discovery, followed by a lot of development, and then a lifetime of deepening.” I really agree with this sentence, something that one has passion in should be something that one never get tired of doing it and something that one allows to occupy all the waking moment. However, some time people are just overwhelmed with all kinds of goals that they want to achieve and cannot exactly tell what their real passion is. For them, perhaps the metaphor of passion as firework is correct – erupt in a blaze of glory but quickly fizzle, leaving wisps of smoke and memory of what was once spectacular. It is understandable that a human being always has the desire to learn new things, to seek novelty, to be on lookout for change and variety – it is a basic drive that we, as a human being, have. However, the more important thing is how we commit to something we have passion in and stay there for a very long period of time to achieve mastery, instead of moving from a place to another doing different kinds of new things that look more appealing.

**With ideas and lots of quotes from Angela Lee Duckworth: Grit: The power of passion and perseverance

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