Chasing Purpose Instead of Passion

Purpose > Passion

Passion often gets all the glory (yep, Eye of the Tiger baby)...but purpose is what keeps us grounded when the initial excitement fades. Passion is the sweaty athlete on the cover of the magazine, but purpose is the editorial letter about why the magazine exists. Passion is the sexy few months after getting married, purpose is choosing to love someone through thick and thin. Let's dive into why choosing passion is always the better choice...besides being a pain in the ass sometimes.

Shortcuts are more fun.

Making a choice for passion instead of purpose is the easy way. It's the path of least resistance, it's what everyone is doing and it feels less sucky in the moment. If you choose shortcuts you might get a frown or grunt somewhere, but the overwhelming sentiment would be "Ah, it makes sense." The larger population won't judge you for taking an easier route, in fact sometimes they will even welcome you into that space, giving you a seat and a nice bowl of melted hot chocolate and a blankie...

I chose shortcuts A LOT in my life. Heck, some days I still do. I understand doing the fun thing now, because in a world full of difficult things and challenges from every which way, choosing parts of our lives to take the easier route just feels better. Here's the thing...how long will this last?

Shortcuts can sustain you forever.

The answer: forever. You can keep choosing shortcuts over and over, and even if you notice they suck, you can move on to the next one or pause them for a while before defaulting back to their warm and comfortable Netflix watching Fatsak (no hate for the brand here, I love Fatsaks, they are super comfy). The mind boggling thing here too, is that shortcuts can be filled with passion sometimes. They can get you excited and make you feel all fuzzy inside, they live for the impromptu and for the YOLO...they've got passion written all over them, but where is the purpose?

Is passion the enemy?

Not at all. Passion is good: think world cup winning moments, think America's Got Talent, think reaching the top of a mountain. Whether you were a participant or supporter in moments like these, you felt the passion. We need passion and it's beautiful; what I am challenging here however is when the stadium's empty and the crowd leave or when you have to climb back down again...what keeps you going then?

We need passionate people in the world, but more than that we need purpose driven people, teams and organisations more.

Sustainability - the Key in chasing passion instead of purpose.

The bigger issue here is the problem of sustainability. Whether we are talking about shortcuts or doing it the hard way; choosing passion or choosing purpose...it's all about what we'll be able to do consistently over time. My greatest nugget I want to leave in this post is to have you think about what you can do for years and years with the same vigor than day one...or at least the same determination. If you have that thing, do it...and damn it sprinkle some passion on it too.

If there is something that you can do with purpose, whether it's your job or not, please do that. You will see how much more you get out of life when doing this as apposed to taking the easy way out, or just doing a bunch of smaller projects with passion and then abandoning them later on. The greats of the world, I believe had a knack for mixing the two to create magic, so if you can do that, even better. Chasing passion instead of purpose at this level, might not even be the question...it will be how to balance these two to achieve the most impact.

The point is: let's do an audit of our efforts to see which of our efforts involve passion, purpose or neither...and then slowly start to introduce a little bit more purpose in what we do. More on this next week. Thanks for reading!

TF