The Passion Forces – Part 1

The Passion Forces

Caren Glasser

What drives passionate people to work so hard? Where do they get their energy? Passion can be fueled by many factors. Let us examine 6 most important Passion Forces.

Passion Force 1- Curiosity

Curiosity. One of the most powerful triggers of human invention has been curiosity. Why does something happen? How does lightning occur? What happens if you mix two chemicals? Which route will discover new lands? The human mind is programmed to question everything around it.

Discoveries take place when this curiosity becomes a passionate driving force. It takes on a relentless unstoppable energy, which will not rest until a solution is found. Thomas Alva Edison tried out thousands of versions of the electric light bulb until he came up with one that worked. Madame Curie and her husband Pierre Curie spent all their lives unlocking the secrets of radioactivity. Steve Jobs’ search for a better computer user interface finally gave us the Apple computer with the now familiar graphical user interface using icons, which eventually spread to the whole world of computing in the form of Microsoft’s Windows.

Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama, Roald Amundsen and all the great explorers of the world travelled passionately in the quest of conquering new land for humanity. After centuries of looking up at the moon, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin actually walked on the lunar surface. Nothing can stop the force of curiosity and the determination that it fires up.

Success stories in the workplace often arise out of sheer ignorance. An employee may find he knows nothing about a particular field and begins learning it to satisfy his own curiosity. Pretty soon he has mastered it and is teaching the world a few new things about it.

So step out of your ‘known zone’ and venture into the unknown. There just may be a discovery waiting there, with your name written on it.

Passion Force 2 – Challenge

Our search for the sources of passion brings us to yet powerful factor – Challenge.

Without challenge in your life, you could hardly make the most of what you are passionate about. Infuse your passion with the right quest and you will do much better at it.

A challenge can be posed by a person upon himself or by external forces. A personal challenge can arise from adverse circumstances of poverty or deprivation. Rags-to-riches stories have been told for hundreds of years now. Even Presidents of countries have arisen from humble beginnings and risen to their positions of power by the sheer force of their passion.

Family prestige and a desire to prove one’s mettle to one’s elders and to society can also act as a challenging force. When a son inherits a business built by his father, he is propelled to expand that enterprise and thus demonstrate his own prowess. While most companies have boards of directors and public equity, in many traditional societies, it is the family-driven businesses that persevere, even over the centuries.

Targets set by corporate leadership also act as challenged to work teams. A keen competitive spirit between rival groups can set off a passionate chase of the markets. Pepsi and Coca Cola, Nike and Adidas, are a couple of examples of passionate rivalry, with each seeking to outdo each other in the pursuit of a better product and more sales. In these mega rivalries, passionate employees move quickly up the corporate ladder. Belief in the company’s goals and ideals is essential to engender passion in employees.

Sometimes the source of the challenge may lie closer to home. The love of a woman or one’s children can drive a man to succeed with the intent of providing better care and education for them. We are motivated to buy a larger and better house, a bigger and faster car, the latest cell phones and clothes. All these must- haves also act as challenges and rewards for our work.

It is up to each individual to determine what challenges him or her and then as Nike’s motto says – Just do it! Your natural challenge instinct will push you through. When a mountaineer was asked why he climbed a mountain, he answered – Because it is there! Its very existence as an insurmountable peak was a challenge to him!

Passion Force 3 – Legacy

When tapping on your passion, one thing that should be uppermost in your mind is that you need to leave a legacy for others.

When you are young, your motivation for working and living lies in larger income, better standards of living and in general having a good time. But as you grow older, your priorities change. You want something more fulfilling. You seek to achieve goals that you will be remembered for. A sense of urgency begins to set in as time passes. And the source of your passion arises from wanting to leave behind a legacy.

That legacy may take the form of social change brought about by your work. It can be in an enterprise or institution founded by you. Many successful businessmen set up foundations and trusts in the pursuit of noble causes. Thus they seek to perpetuate their name or family name for posterity. An invention or a new process or a novel product can also enshrine the maker’s name in the books of history.

Temporal pleasures and petty rewards do not satisfy someone working at this level. His or her passion seeks loftier goals. The greater the goal, the more fervent the passion. Revolutionaries and freedom fighters like Mahatma Gandhi and Che Guevara struggled all their lives for the liberation of their countries. Their ambitions encompassed the lives of millions of their countrymen. The sheer magnitude of their legacy consumed their entire lifetime, but it was a passionate lifetime, with every day spent in pursuit of that goal.

How do you set about leaving behind your legacy? What is it that you feel strongly about?

Write down your strongest emotions and issues. They may even lie outside your present work area. Start working on those issues. Educate yourself and acquire new skills if you have to, and get to work. It may be a simple project like improving your community, or a major reform of state laws. Remember that all the great men and women who have brought about change were ordinary men like you and me, but they had the power of conviction and passionate belief in their dreams.

If you’d like to learn more or chat with me, visit connectwithcaren.com