Finding passion is important for a fulfilling life but it is difficult. However, there are people who have been lucky enough to find and live their passions.
We have put together few insights from luminaries like Steve Jobs, Paul Graham on how to find your passion and live it.
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PAUL GRAHAM ON HOW TO DO WHAT YOU LOVE
Paul Grahm is the co-founder of famous Silicon Valley based startup incubator Y Combinator. Paul is well-known for his mind-bending essays on startups and life. In one of his most interesting essays he wrote:
[blockquote source="Paul Graham"]Prestige is especially dangerous to the ambitious. If you want to make ambitious people waste their time on errands, the way to do it is to bait the hook with prestige. That’s the recipe for getting people to give talks, write forewords, serve on committees, be department heads, and so on. It might be a good rule simply to avoid any prestigious task. If it didn’t suck, they wouldn’t have had to make it prestigious.[/blockquote]
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Alain de Botton, modern philosopher and the founder of School Of Life, is a keen observer of the paradoxes and delusions of our cultural conceits. In The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, he takes his singular lens of wit and wisdom to the modern workplace and the ideological fallacies.
[blockquote source="Alain de Botton"]One of the interesting things about success is that we think we know what it means. A lot of the time our ideas about what it would mean to live successfully are not our own. They're sucked in from other people. And we also suck in messages from everything from the television to advertising to marketing, etcetera. These are hugely powerful forces that define what we want and how we view ourselves. What I want to argue for is not that we should give up on our ideas of success, but that we should make sure that they are our own. We should focus in on our ideas and make sure that we own them, that we're truly the authors of our own ambitions. Because it's bad enough not getting what you want, but it's even worse to have an idea of what it is you want and find out at the end of the journey that it isn't, in fact, what you wanted all along.[/blockquote]
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HUGH MACLEOD ON SETTING BOUNDARIES
[blockquote source]Art suffers the moment other people start paying for it. The more you need the money, the more people will tell you what to do. The less control you will have. The more bullshit you will have to swallow. The less joy it will bring. Know this and plan accordingly.[/blockquote]
[blockquote source]The best way to get approval is not to need it. This is equally true in art and business. And love. And sex. And just about everything else worth having.[/blockquote]
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Work is what we do by the hour. It begins and, if possible, we do it for money. Welding car bodies on an assembly line is work; washing dishes, computing taxes, walking the rounds in a psychiatric ward, picking asparagus – these are work. Labor, on the other hand, sets its own pace. We may get paid for it, but it's harder to quantify… Writing a poem, raising a child, developing a new calculus, resolving a neurosis, invention in all forms – these are labors.
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STEVE JOBS ON NOT SETTLING
Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle."
Image: Steve Jobs, Paul Graham, Alain De Botton [from left to right]
