Passion: strong, enthusiastic devotion to a cause, ideal, or goal
Passion: your heart’s one true desire or the deepest desire of your heart
It is impossible to think about passion without reference to the heart.
Deep within your heart, there is a desire, the pursuit of which will bring you all the happiness, success and fulfilment you really want. To find your passion is to identify your own unique purpose in life; to live your passion is to achieve the Deepest Desire of Your Heart.
You can achieve whatever you want. You can be the person you were meant to be; and you can really live the life of your dreams. Those are bold statements but they are true; and more and more people are discovering this wonderful truth for themselves. But if this is indeed true, then why is it that so many people – we think the figure is around 80% – are pursuing jobs and careers they don’t really care about?
For our parents and grand-parents, growing up in a world with comparatively few opportunities, it is true to say that their lives were consumed with the whole business of ‘making a living’ – looking after what Abraham Maslow called their physiological and social needs. They worked hard and never really enjoyed the luxury of considering what might be termed the ‘higher needs’ of the human condition.
Many people in today’s workplace are indeed seeking to reach higher and often people think they have reached their peak when they have started to meet their ‘esteem’ needs, that is, the basic human need for respect, recognition and responsibility. For many people, this means pursuing an interesting career; rather than just getting a job.
However, for very many people, there is still an inner emptiness. Often, this emptiness is experienced more starkly when they have actually become successful in their chosen careers. They start to wonder exactly what life has been about. The trappings of success: promotion, automobile, house did not bring about the happiness they anticipated. This is a consequence, as Stephen Covey puts it, of climbing the ladder of success only to find when they reach the top that, all along, the ladder has been leaning against the wrong wall.
To really achieve success in life, you must be bold enough to go even higher: to consider what Maslow called. Self Actualisation. This means becoming the person you were meant to be; and living the life you were meant to live. Only by doing this, can you possibly hope to find the true success you really desire.
