What My Younger Self Wish He Knew About Passion
By: Paulus Reinhard Jonathan
Tags: Passion, Self Improvement, Life Lessons, Motivation

These past few days I’ve been binge watching Simon Sinek on Youtube. I knew him from one of my colleague from work. One video, “Where Passion Comes From” struck me so much. It relates a lot on so many events that defines my life experience.

The Never Ending Search for Passion

Finding your passion in life is a common struggle. I’ve been in this position before and still the word passion begs me to question myself whether I am already done with searching. Cambridge dictionary gave a very vague explanation of passion : a very powerful feeling, for example of sexual attraction, love, hate, anger, or other emotion. At least we understand that it is a form of feeling. Some types of feeling are indeed so powerful It can drives people from the inside, no matter how the situation arises. People believes it can even fuel you to do things that you normally wouldn’t do.

Most people that I know still believed they have to find their passion before they are deciding critical choices in their life. Choices like do they must resign from their current job and look somewhere else or do they are ready to get married and have a child. However, not many people around me are blessed with defined passion in their early 20s. It arouse another question, are all people fit to formulate their own passion?

My Past Frustration On Vision

Photo by Rahul Bhosale on Unsplash

To be honest, Sinek’s “passion is an output not an input” sounds about right to me. Passion is the feeling that comes after vision. But not all people are visionaries, Sinek even described visionaries as a rare breed. What he recommend us to do is to grasp other people vision and make it our own. After all, creating ideals unique to yourself is almost impossible given this universe has been around for more than 2,000 years.

I’m not a fun guy to talk to in New Year retrospective. I don’t know how it goes in your society, but main discussion topic in most of my peer group’s end of year gathering is the next year resolution. I seldom be able to answer what I wanted to achieve, how I will run through with it and when will it be finished in the next 12 months. Whereas people around me always seemed to be insightful in their yearly plans. However, I rarely found a person that always meet all of their resolution criterias.

The reason why I never fascinated by resolution is because I felt that It is unimportant to me. According to MBTI, an ENTP is uninterested in sticking with the plan, they are more comfortable to go with the flow. If you ask me to plan things, I would gladly do it. But don’t be surprised if I am the one that deviates from the plan if I found ways to hijack the circuit and still getting to the destination.

Early on, It frustated me so much, I even thought that I am directionless. But as I am getting older, I experienced so many things that did not went exactly like I wanted to. I refused to call it failures and I choose not to blamed situation. I decided to let go of the past and focusing on the lesson learned along the way.

Only for the past few years I getting to know my vision in life organically. My one and only higher aim is to lay a meaningful legacy in this world. I want to passed through something that left a mark. Without being narcissistic, I need to be remembered, be it as a startup founder, as a loving husband and father or as a finance guru. The option are limitless, after all, we will never know what we will be in the future. What I choose to belief is I will feel accomplished when I know that my legacy is lives on.

Same Passion, Different Outcome

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

I always feel passionate when learning new things. In 2019, It was SQL and Python. In 2020, It was learning how to play a piano, how to cook and learning about Scrum and Agile. I am more than excited to learn more skills in 2021. Before I knew what my vision was, I tend to lose focus before I finished the learning process. But now, if I knew that what I am learning is moving me towards my vision, I will commit to it more than before. I believe learning anything new will help me to bring my vision, legacy, comes to life later on.

Sharing insights and brainstorm ideas with others also one of my forte. I’m not much of a theorist, but when I know matters better than other people, I rarely held back to sound my opinion. Before I knew what my vision was, It is common for me to push my ideas too much. I also felt neglected if others disagree with me. But now, it is actually helping me to better understand people to by listen more what other people said. I’ve come to the simple fact that I simply found out that words can change people life from both sides of the table.

What I learned recently is I am passionate when I am the glue guy, the one that embrace people to commit together cohesively as a team. I never been comfortable in my previous Project Manager role. Even though the role pushed me to learn new things quickly and brainstorm ideas (two things that I passionate about), I often felt like I am not empower teamwork enough. I have never been a traditional leader, I dislike giving direct instruction to anyone. But I believe leadership can be executed in other form, with facilitating people and working together as a team. This cause is important to fulfill my vision because anything that I will deliver in the future will not be meaningful without help from others.

The Video That Inspired This Story: