• Meinung

It's about purpose

Michelline Nawatises



We've heard the advice, “just follow your passion” again and again, as a cure to life's problems.

This advice never felt right, but we could not figure out why. Passion often fuels new endeavours, but is not enough to sustain them.

Here is the thing about passion: It's an easy thing to tell people to follow it. It sounds like inspiring advice when one says: “Go do what you're passionate about. Find your passion.”

But here is the problem: It is a bad cliché. Because following your passion is dangerous. Your passion should be beneficial to you and in the same vain, you should be realistic as well.

In life, we will face complex problems. These problems need skill, patience and understanding. In attempting to solve them, breathlessness and impetuousness and franticness are poor substitutes for discipline, mastery, strength, purpose and perseverance.

What we really require in our ascent is purpose and realism. Purpose, you could say, is like passion with boundaries. Realism is detachment and perspective.

When we are young, we feel so intensely and passion runs strongest; it often seems wrong that things happen at a slow pace. This is just our impatience.

This is our inability to see that burning our­selves out or 'blowing ourselves up' is not going to hurry the journey along.

Passion is dangerously self-centred. Your passion may be the very thing holding you back from power, influence or accomplishment. Purpose is about pursuing something outside yourself, as opposed to pleasuring yourself.

Optimism is wonderful when it comes to our dreams. However, when it comes to what is next, the nitty-gritty actions that will get us there, optimism can kill. Infected with passion, our plans lose touch with reality.

We overestimate our strengths and underestimate our challenges. Beyond the “real data and real-world options,” we build castles in the sky.

Do not follow your passion, follow your effort. It will lead you to your passion and to success. You must understand what passion for life is and what it can do for you.

The things I ended up being really good at were the things I found myself putting effort into. A lot of people talk about passion, but that is really not what you need to focus on. You really need to evaluate and say: “Okay, where am I investing my time?”

Find things where you can reap successes quickly.

This idea that anyone can do anything if their dream is big enough and they work hard enough is a lie. There are things we cannot do.

There are seasons of life we cannot do them in. We have responsibilities and have made choices that limit our freedom.

Welcome to the real world. Does that mean we cannot live passion-driven lives, even if we have kids at an inconvenient time or have a job that ties us up or we caring for an aging parent or are physically unable to climb mountains or get outside of a reasonable radius from our healthcare support team?

In a word: “No.”

My uncle taught me a lot of things, but perhaps the most empowering lesson is that my greatest limitations are within my own mind. There is almost always a way around the physical issues or a compromise that can be made; the key is to apply strategy to the situation and free our minds to think about things in a new way.

Why, if you're doing all of the “right things”, does it feel like something major is missing?

Why do you lay awake at night wondering if this is all there is?

One of two things just happened: Either inspiration started pouring forth in the form of one and two word answers that are miles deep, or there were crickets in your head, chirping silence.

If your brain is exploding with thoughts, get a pen and start writing down everything that comes to mind. Make lists, write paragraphs, delve into what is on your mind at that moment and explore it. Find your purpose!