Beyond Passion and Success

Over and over my students tell me that they yearn to have passion in their work, but they just don’t know how to find it. This must be true for many people, because books on finding your purpose and bringing it out into the world seem to proliferate in bookstores everywhere. Still, people complain they haven’t been able to find their passion the way others have.

I trace the difficulty and anguish to the human propensity to make comparisons. Instead of diving into who they are and what that means for their work, people look to those who seem to be successful and seem to have passion in their lives. Instead of discovering how they resonate with the highest goal and applying that to their life, they put themselves down and sink into frustration when their life isn’t the way others’ lives seem to be.

Once I got so tired of hearing this wail about lack of passion that I told my class that it was overrated. I thought I would give them some peace because they wouldn’t have to keep worrying about other people who had the passion that they didn’t. They could just concentrate on themselves and what was really happening in their lives. They could begin to build on their own experiences.

But my “magnanimous” gesture didn’t seem to help. They filled their papers and presentations with diatribes on the importance of passion. They told me in many ways that I had let them down. Like all of us, these students desperately wanted something in their lives, but they didn’t know how to get it.

The students’ angst about passion represents something we all feel, particularly when we act in accordance with the way we have been socialized to act rather than from what is right for us. We get our dream job and then find out it just doesn’t give us fulfillment. We take a class or enter a course of study that we think is sure to give us what we need to be a success and find that it has just brought us new questions about what we want to do with our life. We don’t get as much pleasure doing the things that we have staked our lives on. We get excited about something for a while, but then it becomes humdrum and doesn’t give us sufficient reason to get out of bed. We feel inferior when we see other people who seem to have such energy for life, while we wake up too many mornings without any zest. Or, even worse, we start thinking that life has passed us by, that it is meaningless, and that we’ll never make the contribution or have the life we imagined when we were younger.