One morning while I was working in New York, I walked over to Starbucks with a senior banker with whom I met from time to time for one of our semi-formal mentorship sessions. I always enjoyed meeting up with him because since the first time we’d met, he’d always said at least one thing in each conversation that resonated with me. This particular morning, he asked me the typical “how things are going” questions as we walked past the security guards flashing our badges and I replied with the typical young banker responses, all variations of “pretty well… I think”.
As I finished updating him, I reflexively asked, “And how about on your end?”
By this time we were in line at Starbucks standing side-by-side at the pastry case. He turned and looked at me with a bit of a grimace, “I’m worried about my daughter.”
No market update today, I guess. I returned his grimace waiting for him to continue. His daughter was around 10 yrs old, but I didn’t know much more about her.
“She wants to try swimming this year for the first time.”
“That doesn’t sound all that bad?” I wondered aloud.
“We let her stop piano to take up soccer a couple years ago and now she wants to do swimming. I think she’s just switching because its popular with some of her friends.” He looked up at the menu with concern, as though he couldn’t find his go-to drink.
It seemed insensitive to say, “Still doesn’t seem terrible,” so I waited for him to go on after he ordered and nodded to me for the same. As he handed the barista his credit card and politely waved off my thanks, “If she doesn’t stick with anything, how will she ever develop a passion?”
We started towards the door, “I just want her to be good at something before she moves on to the next thing.”
I thought of that conversation this week when I decided to write a post about pursuing your passion. In that conversation I learned why I thought (and still think) so highly of that senior banker. In a five-minute catch up, he had crystallized for me what was – up to that point – only a feeling in my gut. Passion is more than an interest, it is the result of an investment you make, paid in time, effort and perseverance. In this regard, passion is a lot like expertise, some say it takes 10,000 hours to master a skill. I think passion is similar, your interest may be born of a whim or something more innate, but passion comes when you marry that interest with a commitment to explore, develop and refine that interest into something more, something that is now a part of who you are.
There’s a lot of discussion about passion and entrepreneurs. When I hear the advice to pursue your passion, I often think it is a bit of a cop out or at least naïve. Not that I think experienced entrepreneurs are not passionate about their company, mission or product, but because I expect that the depth of their passion early on would seem shallow relative to the love they now have for their business after spending years sacrificing, learning and growing to make their pursuit a success. Its impossible to feel as strongly about an – as yet unexecuted – idea as you might feel about the successful business, which you spent years or decades devoted to building. I re-interpret well meaning advice about following my passions to advice to try to find ideas that are big enough and interesting enough to keep me engaged while supporting the values in which I believe. Hopefully, with the right investment of effort and perseverance, that interest will blossom into a passion that I will one day consider a success.
How do you think about passion?