Passion as a Key Ingredient for Success

I was attending a course today and it talked about Passion as a key ingredient for success. This is actually nothing new, as we constantly hear about successful people advocating the importance of embarking on something we are passionate about. With that thought in mind, I flashed back to my own personal experiences and think about whether I have been truly passionate about my job or anything else that I embarked on.

I relate particularly to the experiences that got me recognized as being the top in my game with tangible recognition such as awards and so on. I realized that a lot of the times, my passion isn’t directed towards the tasks in itself. I don’t particularly like or dislike the tasks that I was allocated, but nevertheless, I still passionately work towards completing any task that I was given, even mundane stuff like data entry and so on.

In fact, I find quite a lot of circumstances where I practically snatch for work that most people would not even want to work on, for example, filing or doing photocopying work. I think it’s because the task itself isn’t the source of my passion, but my passion stems from something indirect, like the desire to contribute and be of help to others, regardless of how insignificant.

In the course, we learnt that passion can start to run out after we get to become experts in what we do. I think that it may be true if our passions are directed towards the task itself. However, would our passion run out if we are doing something that is fundamentally us? I think it would take a lot for me to change my personality that has the strong urge to help others. I have been like this since primary school, where I even got a helpful badge to prove it. This trait has stuck with me for a big part of my life so far, even though it may have appeared in different forms. I’m not saying that the passion is always there though, there can be instances where I’m not as passionate, maybe due to being sick or something.

However, my point may very well be that I believe that passion should not be tagged to our roles or tasks, it should be something from within us. It should ideally not be something that goes away just because we get bored with our tasks. Tasks get completed and new tasks arrive, there’s no guarantee that the next task that we get is going to be a perfect fit of what we want to do, but it is definitely possible to change our mindset when we approach tasks.

Of course, I’m not some career expert or personal success expert, so I can’t tell for sure if that’s going to work. However, judging from friends around me, a lot of them are already losing passion after just barely 4 months into the work. The main reason for their lack of interest is that they find their tasks boring, therefore I believe that if our passions are tagged to tasks, it’s going to be incredibly difficult to maintain a passionate life, which can affect us in our careers and even day-to-day life.