Understanding Passion and Profession

In my early post, I have talked about pursuing passion and ambition in life. I pretty much stand with the statement.

Recently, I got lots of DMs about how people are confused and cannot find the passion in their life. I am no different. I am still struggling about what my actual passion is. After a lot of mental exercise and introspection and my biggest question was,

 How do I identify my passion in life?

People advised me to go with flow, go where life takes you and you will find your passion. I would always get distracted in life. If I see someone dancing on TV show, then I would get passionate about dance and start working in that direction, eventually I would quit because I had to concentrate on my other serious things in life. The same thing happened with guitar, football, skateboarding and the list goes on and on.

Overtime, I realized main confusion was choosing between my Passion and Profession. We often don’t understand the difference between the both. This is the biggest root of confusion in the life.

Passion and Profession

We need understand Passion and profession are both different things.

Before you start fuming about how this statement is so much wrong and deceiving, please read ahead.

Except for few people, Passion and profession are both different things. Few as in one in thousands or millions are kind of people who share common thing as passion and profession. In few rare cases, their passion becomes their profession. Practically, all of us cannot be so lucky.

We, as a stupid common man, get excited on listening to success stories of celebrities, followed by the most common thought, if he can do it – then I can do it too! Maybe you are right, maybe you can achieve it too, but don’t get fooled by that 5 – 10 min AV on their life that you saw on YouTube or television. It took them their whole life to do this or an exceptional talent.

I personally know a guy, who had great passion for dancing and everybody praised him because he was actually good at it, but only in his surroundings.  Nobody knew a thing about dancing around him and thus he was best amongst them. He left his ongoing career to pursue dancing and he participated in competition on state level. Unfortunately, he couldn’t even in clear first round of it, that’s when reality hit him, he was good but there were thousands of people who were better than him.

So there is no need to mix passion and profession in your life, which means if you have a passion for football or cricket, and then by all means go ahead and play it. Take out time from your professional schedule and play your heart out. Just keep doing your job or business as profession.

You need to understand this, if your passion is to become a dancer and earn lot of fame, money and to become a celebrity then your passion is not to become a dancer but your passion is to get famous and earn lot of money.

Firstly, define what passion means to you.  If your passion is dancing then you will be happy dancing even in a completely empty room with no one watching you.

For passion you don’t need approval from any one.

You don’t need anyone to praise you or agree with whatever you are doing. Do it like you are just doing it for your own pleasure and satisfaction. If you are passionate, really passionate about something then do it in such a way that doing that thing is your ultimate goal. Whatever you are doing is your outcome, your ultimate goal. No dependencies.

If my passion is dancing, then doing dance should give me so much joy that I would forget all the other things. That’s what everyone says right; dance like no one’s watching you. That’s it. That’s the real way of living a life. I don’t need anybody to tell me how I am dancing. I am happy because I am dancing and living my passion.

Blindly following your passion is not a solution. Learning and understanding what real passion is, is a permanent solution.

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This article was based on a video of an Indian motivational speaker, Sandeep Maheshwari. You can find the video below to watch it.