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Dilbert creator Scott Adams blogged about passion a couple of weeks ago.
“You often hear advice from successful people that you should “Follow your passion.” That sounds about right. Passion will presumably give you high energy, high resistance to rejection and high determination. Passionate people are more persuasive, too. Those are all good things, right?”
Well, as you know from reading this space, there’s a downside to passion, too. Passion allows you to pursue something (or someone) that may not be good for you in the long run. But at least you have your PASSION, right?
That’s what I told myself when I was a struggling screenwriter in my 20’s. That’s what Adams concludes as well.
“It’s easy to be passionate about things that are working out, and that distorts our impression of the importance of passion. I’ve been involved in several dozen business ventures over the course of my life and each one made me excited at the start. You might even call it passion. The ones that didn’t work out – and that would be most of them – slowly drained my passion as they failed. The few that worked became more exciting as they succeeded. As a result, it looks as if the projects I was most passionate about were also the ones that worked. But objectively, the passion evolved at the same rate as the success. Success caused passion more than passion caused success.”
Every blue moon, I’ll get an email from a reader who “just knew” that her man was her “soulmate” because they had “electric chemistry” and “immediately slept together”, and here they are, 35 years later, and they’re still just as “passionate as they were the day they met”.
Sometimes giving up on your original passion is the key to opening up to true happiness.
This becomes the argument for following your passion. While littered at the side of the road are the THOUSANDS of people whose passionate relationships ended in tears, devastation, confusion, and frustration, causing years and years of heartbreak.
I, for one, am THRILLED that I gave up my “passion” of being a Hollywood comedy writer, and “compromised” into my current career, which, while not as lucrative or titillating as being Judd Apatow, provides me with a consistent income, no office politics, the ability to set my own hours, no commute, and the ability to make a genuine difference in people’s lives.
In other words, sometimes giving up on your original passion is the key to opening up to true happiness.
Read Adams’ blog entry here and share your thoughts on the power of passion below.
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