Passion

When I was 17 my parents had me in therapy. They wanted me to get help figuring out why I wasn’t getting straight A’s when I had the potential to do this with ease. Looking back I could have saved them their money. The simple truth was that I just wasn’t interested. I had no passion, no enthusiasm for academics at that time in my life. The second therapist did give me something that I took with me and still carry with me today. In fact, ironically it was the seed that I believe grew into the intense passion that I do have today not just for my business but for life on the whole. He told me that the key to succeeding in this life was to first figure out what I loved to do and then second figure out how to make money doing it. So the money was strictly secondary and because I am doing something I love I would inherently become a master at what I was doing. Then of course any time we are that good at what we do, it will always be easy to make a living at it. I think many people make a mistake and go after something first because it will make them a lot of money, and only second because they like doing it or maybe they don’t even really like doing it. They just do it for the money and ultimately wind up unhappy. This is why we often hear that money can’t buy happiness. It can’t. On the other hand when the money comes in plentifully because we are doing something we love, happiness is the inevitable bi-product and it is unlimited. People are attracted to that which helps us move forward with even more passion.

So how does one find passion? I believe there are 2 worlds here. In one world you have people that have hit some sort of “rock bottom”. I had an experience like this. By the time I was 28 I was sure my life had ended – just not in the physical sense. In this world you literally come to a place where you have to do something, anything because the only other choice is too gruesome to bare. What happens here is you find humility because you recognize through the experience that you are not all powerful. If anything the opposite is true – it seemed to me that I was powerless to do anything. Coming to this place of true humility I began to recognize first that I was willing to do anything to build a new life – an amazing life. I had nothing and nothing was the place of infinite possibility. Suddenly instead of being a dark place, this was a place of light. This was an opportunity to start over and begin to create a whole new existence for myself and the one thing that became clear was that it could not be in any way based on my past experience. It had to be completely new. So I began to visualize the kind of life that I wanted to create for myself and this was in April of 1999 before The Secret was written. The second thing I began to recognize was that because I had no power on my own, I was going to need help. This was true in every area of my life. I had to find some people who had the experiences I wanted and then go to them to find out what they did – what they were doing – what they are doing.

The second world consists of the people who haven’t hit any sort of “rock bottom” at least not to their way of thinking. In these cases it will actually be a little more difficult. The driving force that goes with the fear of death (emotional, spiritual, or physical) is a strong one – strong enough to cause us to want to change at the core levels. So in these cases it is a matter of simply coming to a place where you want to change badly enough to want to make it “as though” your life depended on it. It may be a matter of first doing what I described above – figuring out what you love to do and then changing your direction to pursue that. Little by little (or a lot by a lot) you will fall in love and find your passion simply in your pursuit of doing something you love. The point is to get yourself to a place like the one described in the preceding paragraph without having had a traumatic experience of any sort.

I have found passion –I am excited about life and what I do and people are attracted to that. The humility I have found through my “passion” experience has taught me that I can’t do anything on my own. I am always going to need to seek the guidance of others. The end result is that I very quickly begin to create the exact kind of life that I want for myself with the exact kind of people that I want to be surrounded with. I cannot and do not want to be surrounded by everyone. For me it is a matter of being surrounded by positive, motivated, and influential people and then looking to help anyone who asks for it, because they are doing what I do. They are asking for help which is a reflection of a positive, motivated, and influential person.

By recognizing that I was powerless, I found power and in that power there was passion.

Passion

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