Passion

I like to listen to podcasts and radio, mostly about science, comedy and football. The other day, I was listening to a football podcast. I listen to this podcast to entertain myself while I work, and it helps me concentrate. It’s something that I don’t have to pay much attention to in order to understand it and follow the subject. Normally, you wouldn’t think that you could learn something from four guys talking about football, about the latest football match and pretty much anything related to the last weekend of football. However, through the years, I have realised that you can learn something from anyone, and sometimes from unexpected sources. I love when this happens.

They were discussing a national team that has made a lot of mistakes picking their manager. They always hired a foreigner, thinking that a different methodology was going to achieve greatness, and don’t get me wrong, this usually works. But for this team, that formula was not working, and they kept repeating it. So they were arguing whether it had to be a national or a foreigner. Three of them were saying that it had to be a national. One guy didn’t care about the nationality, he cared about passion.

I agree with him. The national team changed the manager to a man who was a successful footballer, who was prepared to be a manager and, above all, who had passion. He only had two games of experience, and they chose him at a very difficult time for the team. He won the following two critical matches, and he has now been picked as the manager.

He was prepared and he had passion. This story is still unfolding before my eyes. Hopefully we are right: passion was the missing ingredient.

So what is passion really about? I think we have the notion that passion requires a loud approach to things, a ripe your clothes and run free in the wild kind of feeling, but is that really all it is? Can we find it in the details of an elaborate sculpture, sitting silent.. Can we find it in that violin that when played makes us feel what cannot be put into words? Or can it be defined by what drives us to suffer and struggle and choose to show up when we don’t want to in our everyday life. Can it be the thing that is behind us choosing consistency and discipline, to repeat tasks until we learn them to perfection? I personally think it can be so much more than what we have thought it to be, and I would like to call upon anyone that has ever felt that because they are not loud or eccentric enough, they lack passion. If you keep showing up day after day with a goal, no matter how small or big it is, no matter how silent it is, I would say my friend, that you might have a lot of things that drive you but one of them, must be passion.