I feel like passion is a widely misrepresented idea. We often hear the idea, “do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life.” Now, I don’t disagree with the sentiment. In fact, I love it, but passion without discipline often implodes upon itself, and it takes a great deal of work to develop that discipline. Writing is my passion. Throughout the years, I received massive amounts of inspiration, leaving me in a passionate fervor, but with that fiery energy, those same ideas often burnt out before their completion. The initial inspiration would come and go, and I didn’t possess, at the time, an internal drive and focus that could maintain the projects beyond that initial bright moment. Things would slow, and I would get discouraged. As my life went on, I began to question whether writing was truly my passion. Deep inside, I knew it was, but there were so many sources out there telling me that I will know that I’m following my true life’s purpose because it will be easy, and I will be filled with joy by the mere act of doing what I love. If I had listened to those sources, then I may never have found the fulfilling life and work that I am pursuing now.
Now, I’m not going to say those voices proclaiming this “passionate life, easy life” maxim are completely wrong. As I sit here today, writing has become one of the easiest things for me to do in my life. I literally do it every day. It now brings me great joy as well, but there was a time not long ago that I had to struggle to write anything. Keeping a consistent writing practice was very challenging, just five years ago, but it was at that time that I dedicated myself to the pursuit of becoming a writer, my dream from an early age. I began to work the long atrophied muscle of discipline. I set out to develop a daily personal writing practice. I started the first journal that I ever filled cover to cover around that time. It wasn’t a straight shot. I didn’t all of a sudden have a daily-journaling practice. It took a great deal of hard work and focus to develop that level of consistency. If I had believed that it was supposed to be easy, as I would hear from so many sources out there, then I may have given up in my pursuit, but in truth, I gave up on easy, acknowledging that it would be a truly mythic challenge to step into true power. When I gave up on easy, I began to forgive myself for the failures along the way, and I began to learn from them. Every time that I would fall off my writing practice for a few days, I wouldn’t sulk about my incompetence. Instead, I mustered up the will and motivation to return to the practice. Eventually, I found the streaks of my daily practice growing, and the days of falling off diminishing. Over the course of about a year and a half, my discipline was honed.
I also found this soft skill permeating into other aspects of my life. Suddenly, I dedicated myself to Acro Yoga, a fusion of partners acrobatics and yoga. Within two and a half years of beginning the Acro Yoga practice, I was helping to teach the class. I achieved this by dedicating myself to it and never missing a class. Consistency was king.
I don’t believe that our lives suddenly become easy the moment we begin pursuing our passion. If that were the case, I don’t believe there would be a person out there that wasn’t pursuing their passion. Our passion gives us the strength to come back, day after day, and put in the hard work that becomes easier as we go along, not because of passion, but because of discipline. “Do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life,” can become your reality, but it’s not likely to start that way. First, work at what you love because it’s what you love, not because it is easy, but because it is true. In the long run, it will be far more fulfilling to do what is hard and true than it will be to do what is easy but inauthentic or uninspiring. At the end of your life, you don’t want to look back with regret because the hard path intimidated you into a small life. Live big my friends! No matter how hard it is, live big!
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