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March 28 - April 2, 2019
All the greats shared something else in common: An unrelenting drive. An eternal hunger. An inability to be satiated. Passion.
“Nothing is as important as passion. No matter what you want to do with your life, be passionate. The world doesn’t need any more gray. On the other hand, we can’t get enough color. Mediocrity is nobody’s goal, and perfection shouldn’t be either. We’ll never be perfect. But remember these three P’s: Passion plus persistence equals possibility.” —Jon Bon Jovi, 2001 commencement address, Monmouth University, West Long Branch, New Jersey1
passio was dedicated exclusively to describing the suffering of Christ. To wish passio upon anyone, or to instruct anyone to pursue it, would have been viewed not as supportive or inspirational but as toxic and harmful. Over time, however, the definition of passio broadened. By the eleventh century, passio had expanded outside of religion, its usage now referring to all suffering and pain—both physical and psychological—and in all people.
It wasn’t long before the European Renaissance brought about a literal transformation of the word from passio to passioun to passion. With each turn, the word assimilated new meanings, transitioning from suffering to rage to love and, finally, to overwhelming desire.
Dopamine excites and arouses us, focusing our attention on whatever it is we are working toward. Under
And yet when you’re under passion’s spell, the reward you think you’re chasing—usually some sort of contentment or satiation—is merely an illusion.
When you’re under passion’s spell, the reward you think you’re chasing—usually some sort of contentment or satiation—is merely an illusion. We don’t get hooked on the feeling associated with achievement, we get hooked on the feeling associated with the chase.
We’re not wired to simply be content. We’re wired to keep pushing.
The latest scientific research supports Trason’s hunch. Some studies show that up to 40 percent of our personality may be inherited.
The more dopamine someone needs to feel good, the more willing she is to strive for and chase after ridiculously challenging rewards, even if doing so turns out to be detrimental to her in some way.
A part of what we experience as passion is rooted in our genetic code and amplified by our neurochemistry. Some of us may be born with a persistent disposition, yet all of us can get hooked on the repetition of meaningful activities, whether this means seeing progress in training for a marathon, learning to play guitar, building a company, accelerating in one’s career, or falling deeper into a romantic relationship. When we experience an intense urge to pursue something or someone, dopamine is flooding our brain, causing us to feel good in the moment and making us want to come back for more in
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It’s not surprising that so many great athletes, creatives, and entrepreneurs, following their retirement, struggle with substance abuse and gambling addiction. If we don’t move on from our passions thoughtfully (a topic we’ll discuss later on), the same underlying biology and psychology that give rise to excellent pursuits can also give rise to harmful ones. Passion and addiction are close cousins.
“When starving, when in love, and when parenting, being able to persist despite negative consequences—the essence of addictive behavior—is not a bug, but a feature, as programmers say. It can be the difference between life and death, between success and failure,” writes psychology and neuroscience journalist Maia Szalavitz in her book Unbroken Brain.
“However, when brain pathways intended to promote [positive attributes] are diverted into addiction, their blessings become curses. Love and addiction are alterations of the same brain circuits.”
Passion has not only biological roots, but psychological ones, too. The subjective feeling of struggle or “trauma” can be channeled into productive passions.
Individuals we praise for passion—who go on to experience huge successes—are often those who have a found a way to turn what could be seen as biological and psychological weaknesses into strengths.
In the small but growing world of passion research, this is called a “fit mind-set” of passion, and it very much parallels the destiny belief system of love. According to the latest research, 78 percent of individuals hold a fit mind-set, meaning they believe happiness comes from finding an activity or job about which they are immediately passionate, something that feels intuitively right from the get-go.3
A better approach to finding your passion is to lower the bar from perfect to interesting, then give yourself permission to pursue your interests with an open mind.
He had simpler ambitions: “I don’t think the studio executives believed it, but I wanted to make Titanic because I wanted to dive the wreck. I thought: How can I dive the Titanic and get somebody to pay for it? I’ll make a movie.” Cameron was simply pursuing his interest; the end product, perhaps the most popular movie of all time, was an afterthought. As Cameron told Men’s Journal, it was a side effect of a “personal quest.”
a form of resistance that we call “I couldn’t possibly do this” syndrome. Common examples of “I couldn’t possibly do this” syndrome include: “I went to and paid for business school, why should I be concerned with art?” “I’m a physician, not an essay writer.” “I’m sixty-four years old and I’ve never worked with my hands, why start now?”
Interest is an invitation to exploration, drawing your attention toward activities that have the potential to grow into something greater.
You must resist the temptation to pigeonhole yourself into any one box, regardless of your prior experiences.
Deci and Ryan found that, contrary to common wisdom (both then and, to a large extent, now), one’s drive to pursue activities is not predominantly reliant on external rewards like money, fame, or recognition. Rather, enduring motivation comes from satisfying three basic needs: competency, autonomy, and relatedness.6
When you begin to experience such a feeling, the temptation is to fully dive in. Yet, as you’ll soon see, that would be a mistake. Because the best way to fully develop passion is gradually.
Pay special attention to activities that meet your three basic needs: competence, autonomy, and relatedness. Meeting these needs is critical to sustaining the motivation required to turn an interest into a passion.
The best route to making your passion a bigger part of your life is often not to choose must over should, but rather to choose must and should.
Those who go big or go home often end up going home. Those who go incrementally over a long period of time often end up with something big.
But for the vast majority of people—at least according to the research—the best route to directing more time and energy toward a passion is to follow the barbell strategy, incrementally shifting more and more weight away from safe and stable (i.e., your day job) and toward what makes you tick (i.e., your passion).
While nearly all passions can lead to feelings of obsession, Vallerand’s obsessive passion refers to those that become motivated by achievement, results, and external rewards more so than by internal satisfaction. It’s when someone becomes more passionate about the rewards an activity might bring than about doing the activity itself.
Being passionate about—or, perhaps better put, a slave to—the achievement of an external result that you cannot control creates a volatile and fragile sense of self-worth.
Those who are most focused on reaching some external barometer of success are often the same people who struggle most to enjoy it. That’s because they’ll always crave more. More money. More fame. More medals. More followers. As discussed earlier in this book, once we become passionate about something, our biology makes it nearly impossible for us to feel content, and our psychology only further attaches us to the pursuit. It becomes easy to get sucked into a vicious cycle. “Vicious,” because eventually we’ll experience a negative result. And when we do—well, you don’t need us to tell you how
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Hedonic adaptation says that we quickly adapt to a state of happiness or contentedness, and it’s not long before we’ll want more. The Buddha called this suffering.
No amount of success is enough. If you crave external validation, you’ll always want more: more money, more fame, more followers. Behavioral scientists call this cycle of endless desire hedonic adaptation. Long before that, the Buddha called this suffering.
Passion that is rooted in fear comes at quite a cost. And rarely, if ever, is it sustainable.
As a long-term motivator, fear of failure quickly becomes toxic.
Under a prevention mind-set, we are focused on doing whatever we can to avoid loss—to protect what we have and play it safe. Sometimes a prevention mind-set can be effective, but it often holds us back from fully self-actualizing. Under a promotion mind-set, however, we stop taking the safe route, or the route someone else wants us to take, or the route we think someone else wants us to take. Instead, we become willing to take constructive risks because we aren’t afraid of failing. In doing so, we open ourselves up to breakthroughs.
“It’s all about fear. If you kill fear, you win. If you kill fear, you have your best year ever. If you kill fear, you train like a mad man. If you kill fear, you go to college for free. If you kill fear, you stand on the podium, you get paid, you have strangers walk up to you and call you by name. When fear dies, you begin to live.”
Your passion should not come from the outside. It should come from within.
Individuals on the path of mastery are driven from within.
Perhaps the simplest and most effective of these actions is showing up and doing the work, every damn day.
Doing the work has a special way of putting both success and failure in their respective places. After a massive achievement or a devastating failure, getting back to work serves as an embodied reminder that external results aren’t why you are in this.
In other words, when you reflect on your core values, you literally change your brain in a productive manner. Perhaps even more meaningful is that these effects weren’t just confined to the brain. The study participants who reflected on their core values went on to overcome challenges in real life.
Someone who embodies the mastery mind-set judges herself based not on whether she accomplishes her specific goal but rather on how well she executes her process.
Focusing on the process creates daily opportunities for little victories. These little victories serve as waypoints on the path of mastery, helping to sustain your motivation over the long haul. Process spurs progress, and progress, on a deep neurochemical level, primes us to persist.
You don’t define yourself by any single moment in time; you define yourself by an entire body of work in service of ongoing growth and development.
For many of the most passionate people, getting better is about becoming stronger, kinder, and wiser.
Failure sets off a cascade of changes that help you evolve so you can meet a greater challenge next time. In other words, your body can’t really grow unless it fails. This principle holds true far beyond your muscles.
Super champions are characterized by an almost fanatical reaction to challenge.
No one becomes a master after a single, perfect attempt. Mastery is the product of many failures, each serving an important lesson. If you think of your goal as a direction, not a destination, then failure should be embraced. Each failure provides you more of the knowledge you’ll need to continuously get better. What feels like failure in the short term is often essential to making long-term gains. There’s an old Eastern proverb that says, “The master has failed more times than the student has even tried.” We’d all be wise to take it to heart.
The path of mastery is almost always very hard and requires lots of time and unyielding commitment.
