One item of lore about the great Tony Robbins is that he once devoured over 700 books in a short period of time in order to become an expert on a subject he needed to understand more fully. You can say a lot of things about the man and this kind of effort, but there’s one thing that’s clear: he’s got passion, drive and commitment for the things he cares about most.
Now, it’s worth noting that people rarely become passionate about things they aren’t passionate about. Passion, by nature, is a force and pull that eclipses conscious thought in most cases. It can be difficult to cultivate out of nothing, though in many cases we do have to remove obstacles that stand in the way of our passions. At the core, though, passion is most often something that is burning within us, not something we create out of thin air.
The way to fan the flames of a budding passion is to feed your knowledge of the subject. This is great news, because it rarely feels like work to feed a passion. In fact, one reason people don’t dedicate as much time to their passions as they might is because they don’t feel like it qualifies as “work”. Indeed, it can feel like a distraction from a “day job” in some cases to spend time on a passion at all.
Yet, the most successful people in the work all got there because their passion and their “day jobs” were one in the same. To invest the kind of personal energy, creativity and enthusiasm into one’s work that is necessary to achieve great success, we have to have something more driving us than just the idea of money alone. It’s critical that we have a burning passion for what we do if we want to be the best.
Passion, then, is one of the most critical characteristics of the best presenters. It takes passion to become an expert on anything, because expertise is but the gradual outcome of year after year of dedication, effort and complete obsession with a subject. For experts, the delineations between work and play are often blurry at best and completely intertwined at, well, even more best. To achieve that quality that some presenters have, that absolute and complete authority that rivets the audience and enthralls the crowds, you have to follow your passion.
You’ll never muster the energy for expertise if you’re trying to be an expert in something you don’t truly care about. You’ll make some progress for a time, but ultimately you’ll abandon your efforts for lack of purpose and drive. So if you’re going to spend the time on it at all, try to spend time on your passions, even if for a time you can’t see how your passions relate to your “day job”.
Once you have clarity here, it’s easy to fan the flames. Google it, buy books on Audible and listen in the car and at the gym, book personal development time on your calendar every day, etc. There are millions of ways to fuel your passion once you’ve found it. And once you fuel your passion, you can feel good knowing you’re becoming an expert—and it won’t even feel like work!
Question: How do you balance your passions and the day-to-day responsibilities of your job?
