“Nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without passion.” – Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Passion can easily turn into a word that is so often thrown out into the world, uttered by people who seem to have a distinct lack of passion or by people who say it so often, that it loses its meaning. The word is, to me, so woven into my vocabulary that I have to be careful not to over-use it. I need to keep my “passioning” in check so that people don’t think I am a hippie who has gone off the deep end. To me though, passion is my heartbeat, my life-blood, the thing that keeps me moving.
I believe with everything that I have that if you have passion, you have a unique road to walk down. If you have passion, you are already five steps ahead of the game. Passion breeds motivation. To be passionate about something means that you want something, and to have desire is the one thing that will push you to succeed. I believe that the most successful people are the ones who have passion for what they do, or for their end goal.
There are people who believe that they have no passions in life, that they are simply coasting. I marvel at how untrue that must be. To think that a human being, with so much intelligence and will to live, could not have a single passion. The only answer must be that they simply have not yet found it, given the amount of things to explore in this world. I have always had passion out the ears, not for photography but for life in general. As a child I would climb trees in the back yard, talk to bumble bees like they could hear me, look out at the view from a tall tree and just be in awe. From that very young age, probably 8 or 9, I would sit in trees in my yard and write in a notebook, writing down little stories here and there, and just feeling so grateful that life existed. I’m sure I didn’t think anything so meaningful back then, but the sentiment was there. I was happy, content, full of love, and, as much as an 8 year old can be, full of passion.
I know that finding passion isn’t so easy for everyone. In fact, I might even say that I am a serial “passioner”. I am passionate about being passionate. I love to love. In this way, it was and is easy for me to find things to be passionate about. Sometimes the desire to find your passion will lead you to it. Sometimes simply asking yourself what you love is enough to guide you. I have done that three times in my life. The first time was when I was about 16 years old. I thought I wanted to be a writer. I thought, specifically, that I wanted to be a journalist. However, I only thought that because I was under the impression that only journalists make a living from writing. At that point a light bulb went off. I realized that even if that statement were true, it didn’t matter. I realized in a flash that even if journalists were the only paid writers (what a silly thought now!) then I would make my own path and be a full-time fiction writer.
A year later things changed and I re-evaluated my passion. Yes, I loved writing more than anything but I had recently found filmmaking. It was a new and exciting path, and I eat, breathed, and dreamed about filmmaking. It became my obsession, and I went on to study it in college. I also studied English and creative writing, but I felt a visual medium was my way to go. The entire time I was in college though, filmmaking never felt right. I felt passion for thinking up ideas for movies, and for the final product, but not at all for the process. I tried to force it, but forcing passion only leads to a distinct lack of passion. Three years later I graduated college and found myself with an opportunity…photography.
I had never properly tried photography before, and suddenly (overnight, really) found that photography checked all of the boxes that I was looking for. It was visual, it was a solo-endeavor, it allowed me to “write” stories every single day for new images…it was my heart beat in life. It became my obsession just like filmmaking and writing, but this time it was different…it felt real, it felt right. It gave me energy and it ignited something in me that I didn’t know was possible: meaning, purpose…
Edgar Allen Poe once said, “With me poetry has not a purpose, but a passion.”
I understand this sentiment and I feel similarly, despite what I just said. You see, putting those stories into the world gives me purpose in life, but the act of creating is a whole other thing entirely. The act of creating is the driving force in my life. To create is to explore myself and my inner-workings. To explore myself and discover what makes me tick is not my purpose in life, it is my passion. My passion fuels my purpose, and that is the best reason I can think of to pursue your passion as your career. I try to allow every decision I make to come out of passion. That is not to say without reason, as so many people think they are mutually exclusive. Passion is what makes me tick, what keeps me going; reason is what keeps me afloat…how do I say, financially.
It isn’t always easy mixing passion with your living. I think the number one thing stopping people from making the move is fear of finances. You get out of school, you have a job, and your lifestyle becomes reliant on that job to live. How, then, does one move away from that steady income to simply jump head-first into your passion. I wish I had a good answer to that, but all I can do is share what I have done. People often say to me, “So, you just quit your job and started photography?” The answer is not so simple, but almost. When I graduated college, I worked two jobs in the following year. First I worked as a receptionist at a production company, and then got hired as a legal assistant at a big movie studio. Better pay, gut-wrenchingly un-passionate work. I knew I wouldn’t last because my heart wasn’t in it…in fact, it was so far away that I had to rip myself out of my car each morning to walk into work.
However, I knew it was temporary. I never once entertained the thought that I would not be an artist. Instead, I looked at it as a fact. I had been doing photography for a solid year at that point, and I wanted it badly. So for that first year I was out of college I lived on as little money as I possibly could. We scaled down, we did what we had to, and all so that I could become a full-time photographer. I saved as much money as I could and after one year of working in the “real world” I stepped out into my fantasy and I became a photographer. I made sure to have enough money saved that I could live for a year, assuming I wouldn’t make any money as a photographer.
It seems strange to write about passion and then write about money. I mean, isn’t it taboo to put those two words in the same sentence? The fact is that I really would just be a crazy hippie if I only said that passion is all you have to have. If I shouted from the rooftops for everyone to just up and quit their jobs with no plan, only passion, I’d have a whole lot of people angry with me for giving such illogical advice. Money won’t get you to where you need to go, this is a fact. Passion will get you to where you need to go, this is a fact. Passion is the end-all be-all of life. If you have it, you will get there. I knew while working a job that I hated that I had enough passion for art to withstand it. I set goals for myself, gave myself deadlines, and did everything in my power to get there.
Passion carves the road for you in life. If you let passion guide you, the road might be bumpy and untraveled, but by the end of it the journey will have been glorious.
The road that you take in life should not be one that is already paved, but instead one that you carve yourself. An adventure.
