What’s keeping you from doing what you love…
It may sound naïve and idealistic but I believe that everybody has a dream. Everybody has a project they want to launch, a wrong they want to right, or art they want to create. Everybody has something that presses their buttons and calls out deep from inside them. I believe this is a unifying truth for all of humanity.
With so many dreams though, if breaks my heart when I realize how few people are actually living them out and seeing them come true. If we’re honest, most of us settle into whatever is “convenient” or “pays the bills” today and we put our dreams in the folder marked “someday.” The only problem is that dreams have a tendency to stay stuck in the someday folder and our attention has a tendency to obsess over the today folder.
Why is it that so few people today are living their dreams? I believe it is because we fail to combine two simple components in our lives, passion with perseverance. The stigma of un-hatched dreams has its roots in these two characteristics, but it looks a bit different then you might think.
All you have to do is watch the audience at a political rally, playoff game, or a Beyoncé concert to discover that there is no shortage of passion in this world. Strangely enough, persistence is the same way. To work the same job for ten, fifteen, or even thirty years takes incredible persistence. There are bound to be good days and bad days and even horrible days, yet our culture is filled with men and women who have persevered in their careers through all of it.
To me, the cultural problem is not rooted in the absence of either of these two components. The problem is in the disconnect between them. Our culture is overflowing with passion and perseverance, but unfortunately, the two rarely are intertwined. We don’t take our passions seriously enough to persevere within them. We just view them as hobbies that we turn to during our illusive “free time” which rarely ever comes. Instead spend all our perseverance on jobs and careers that we couldn’t be less passionate about. We have passion where we don’t persevere and we persevere where we have no passion.
In 2014, with the world at our fingertips, why would not combine our deepest passion with persevering work in the hopes of doing something meaningful that we can be proud of? You have all the tools you need. Stop wasting your perseverance on things you don't care about. Live the life of your dreams. Combine your passion with perseverance today and start making a difference.
With so many dreams though, if breaks my heart when I realize how few people are actually living them out and seeing them come true. If we’re honest, most of us settle into whatever is “convenient” or “pays the bills” today and we put our dreams in the folder marked “someday.” The only problem is that dreams have a tendency to stay stuck in the someday folder and our attention has a tendency to obsess over the today folder.
Why is it that so few people today are living their dreams? I believe it is because we fail to combine two simple components in our lives, passion with perseverance. The stigma of un-hatched dreams has its roots in these two characteristics, but it looks a bit different then you might think.
All you have to do is watch the audience at a political rally, playoff game, or a Beyoncé concert to discover that there is no shortage of passion in this world. Strangely enough, persistence is the same way. To work the same job for ten, fifteen, or even thirty years takes incredible persistence. There are bound to be good days and bad days and even horrible days, yet our culture is filled with men and women who have persevered in their careers through all of it.
To me, the cultural problem is not rooted in the absence of either of these two components. The problem is in the disconnect between them. Our culture is overflowing with passion and perseverance, but unfortunately, the two rarely are intertwined. We don’t take our passions seriously enough to persevere within them. We just view them as hobbies that we turn to during our illusive “free time” which rarely ever comes. Instead spend all our perseverance on jobs and careers that we couldn’t be less passionate about. We have passion where we don’t persevere and we persevere where we have no passion.
In 2014, with the world at our fingertips, why would not combine our deepest passion with persevering work in the hopes of doing something meaningful that we can be proud of? You have all the tools you need. Stop wasting your perseverance on things you don't care about. Live the life of your dreams. Combine your passion with perseverance today and start making a difference.
