Follow your passion

The self-help number 1 catchphrase to get you to buy all the best-sellers around the world, and the go-to line of inspirational quote…but if you are like me, what the hell is a passion?

Here is my attempt to talk about how I started experimenting with the fountain pen hobby and may be, just may be turning it into a passion.

The difference between “interests” and “passions”

We humans, we like a lot of things, and a few of them become interests.

There are so many aspects of life that excite our minds and senses, and of course, we develop preferences to some of them. The way social media and self-help books phrase them however, coincidently put a really bad overlapping idea of interests being thought of as passions.

An interest, as the dictionary calls it, is the state of wanting to learn or know more about something or someone. The whole process is to absorb information and knowledge, to know and to understand, and an even higher level is to critic or analyze a thing base on our individual scope of knowledge on it. We consume contents in many ways, and retain a bit of them at the end; we dwell upon them a bit before a good night sleep - that’s an interest.

However, a passion is something completely different - it’s not just about liking a thing, oh no, it’s so much more intense and powerful, and the urge is to make you want to do things and suffer. The idea is in the word itself: passion - as in the passion of Christ, the facing of adversity and misery.

Now, the modern day people wouldn’t go out there and hang themselves up on a cross and call it a day. The hardship itself comes in a more subtle and vile form: each and every choice we make throughout our day, each action we take, and thus passion it not something we can easily have or get rid of.

If you were like me and I know I like a lot of shiny things, still the hormones inside my brain would make me like a different thing each day: some days I play around with my pens, write a bit, post a few photos on instagram with quirky captions - or sometimes I just like to sniff a bit of whisky and sit with a book or binge netflix (House of Cards anyone?)…but at the end of the day, these are things that I can drop and it wouldn’t make me want to kill myself because I cannot get a good dose of dopamine from the things I enjoy.

Nonetheless, it is a completely different story with passions. If I have to give the process a name, the closest thing I would call them as “habits with a lot of obsession”. Passions take interests into accounts, and then with all of the skills and knowledge you know from just about any other fields, mix them all up and spit out some form of products, and this could be anything: a drawing, a bar of music, a few lines with random words patched together, or a youtube video, who knows…

Here is the worst part of passions: they are addictive little buggers. The idea of creating a thing is one of the most masochistic activity ever, as it is such a difficult thing for us to do, to invent stuff, because seemingly we incidentally have been given ourselves the idea that everything has already been invented, but it’s not the case. I can tell you this from experience, that after the first time you made a thing, and then compare yourself with others, you’d be so pissed that either quitting or trying again becomes really tough choices to make. If you were to try again, and again, and again, finding yourself struggling to sleep, to find a better way to do things, to learn from past mistakes, and to create another one would become a constant cycle that keeps us up at nights.

Interests are external and passive, passions are internal and active -  to put it in a somewhat philosophical way…well, that’s my take anyway.

How do you find your passions then?

Notice the “s” there at the end of the word “passions”?

Self-help gurus often tell us that we only get to keep one of those and run with it, but do our homo sapiens brains work the same way?

We are quite easily stimulated by just about anything, and given the new ways we interact with life through social media, it is only going to be harder from here to test out each one of the potential passions-to-be extensively. Here is a video from one of my favorite creators that gives an idea on how to truly find likely candidates for your passions-to-be:

How to actually follow your passions

to sum that one up:

•  write down a list of many things you enjoy in life

•  passion trial ( I’ll shamelessly take his words for this step): commit to one of those for a week or so, and see how you like the process

The key to this step is to set up SMART goals for them:

Let’s say you want to start improving your handwriting, instead of shouting out loud first thing in the morning “I”LL IMPROVE MY HANDWRITING” and run with it, write down something like this:

For the next 7 days, at 8pm, I will be sitting at my desk, with a lined notebook and my fountain pen, following each of the first 7 lessons in the ABC book for 15 minutes each.

At the end of the 7 days, I will reflect on my progress and decide if I would like to continue improving my handwriting in this manner.

This is what … called “future envisioning” and this is a really good way to start putting the idea of committing to an activity into your head. It might sound weird to talk to yourself like this, but the more tangible the goal, the easier it is to actually sit down and do it, and to future proof yourself from not knowing what to do and give it a sort of direction.

•  after the set amount of time and actions, give yourself a chance to decide if you want to continue for another week, or moving on to something else.

It is really helpful at this point to really sit with the idea of continuing by writing down as many things you felt during the activity, and actively looking at both sides to see if it is something you could see yourself continuing or not. Your personal awareness is really the key here, and I cannot give you a definite answer, so…you’re on your own.

•  the most important thing is, actually DO SOMETHING. ANYTHING.

The more actions you do, either right or wrong, the more likely you would be able to eliminate the things you dislike, and that would get you closer to the right path for you, as president Theodore Roosevelt put it:

In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.

It does not really matter at the beginning if you got it wrong or right, because the point is to get your mind into the state of doing something. Inactivity is often caused by perfectionism or possession of too many choices to pick from. Passions stem from actions and hardship, so it is inevitable that you would have to get yourself to work and dwell on them sooner or later. Do not give yourself the slightest chance of regretting not starting sooner.

Where to go from here?

The process is really subjective but in all honesty, keep doing the things you start with and adjust as you go. Constant learning and improving upon previous works, as well as being a good consumer of content to pick up ideas and things to try along the way.

Looking back at my own progress with the AWG project, I’ve learned so much and changed a whole lot more. I do not want to call AWG my passion yet, because I’m still like you, struggling everyday to do something I enjoy, and the results I produce would be meaningful to at least 1 person around the world. All the skills I picked up would come in handy sometimes in the future, even if one day I stopped AWG, the skills and knowledge and especially the connections I’ve made would be incredibly valuable for the next big thing, the next “passion-to-be”. Hopefully in a few years time, it will turn out into something I would be proud to show to the world and finally be able to call it my passion.