Seeds planted will grow,
Let it ripen perfectly?
Or take a bite now?
So I was watching Oprah the other day (yeah, yeah, whatever) and something caught my attention and has held it ever since. On the show she interviewed George Lucas and they briefly talked about what makes a person successful. That thing – which has been echoed on replays of Steve Jobs interviews lately – is passion. “Follow your bliss, follow your passion is the way for you to be the most successful and empowered person.” That's what Oprah said. George basically says to listen to yourself, not to peers, authority figures, or culture. You only need to listen to yourself, something shared with cartoonist and writer Hugh MacLeod. Interesting of course, nothing new, but then Lucas went on to talk about how you can find what your passion is. That's what caught my attention.
Lucas described it as, “when you wake up at 7 in the morning and start working on something then when you go grab a bite to eat you realize it's 7 at night. That's your passion.” Ok. Awesome. There's some sort of baseline to figure it out. So I thought about it in hopes of having some self-discovery about what my passion could be...one problem: I've never had a day like that with anything in my life, ever. Damn! So what's that mean? Am I passionless? Am I some heap of flesh with no drive to apply myself to anything? That would suck...
But no I don't think so. Not accepting that. Mainly because I rarely have that much time to work on one thing of my choosing. There's my job, errands, social plans, and other obligations. Perhaps taking Lucas literally isn't the way to go. So I thought of a different way to look at it: The few times I do have an entire day for myself, what do I do with it?
The last free day that comes to mind was a Friday. I had the day off of work. I slept in to 9 or 10am, made myself breakfast, then went to Starbucks to work on my story. I was there for 3 or 4 hours. I finished the chapter I was working on and did some editing on some previous chapters. Then I went to train jiu-jitsu. After rolling I went home and read a book.
Another day I had to myself was a Monday, another day off of work. Again, I slept in, went to Starbucks and worked on designing a blog and worked on my story a little. When I got home I read a book.
When I think about other days I had off along with free time on the weekends there's one common thread: I work on my story. But is this a passion or is it being diligent on an endeavor I began a year ago?
This brought me to another question: Is passion something that one discovers for themselves or can it be chosen?
I've been pondering the questions in this blog for over a week now (dang Oprah, so thought provoking!) and I can't come to any answers. I can't positively say writing is my passion, or storytelling. What I can say is that I choose to spend my free time engaging in those things. As for passion being discovered versus a choice...that may be too deep to tackle in one blog. Plus I've been pondering it for so long that I may never post this if I wait until I come to some conclusion. Maybe it's one of those the question is more important than the answer things. If anybody reading this has any thoughts please share. I'd love to know your thoughts.
No comments:
Post a Comment