Having Passion And Not Forgetting Why

When you look up the word passion in the dictionary there are a few definitions, but the one I'm thinking about is, "an intense desire or enthusiasm for something." It seems that few people feel passionate about their job or about school if you are a kid. You know these people, the ones that seem to go to work to do as little as possible to get by, to not get fired, to show up to class just enough to pass so they can ultimately graduate and be done. There probably aren't as many of them as you think, the problem is that they are the loudest, the vocal minority. They are passionate about telling others how they have no passion for their job.

One of the things I'm trying to teach my daughters is to find something to do in life that they love and truly understand why they love it. No matter what job or career they choose there will always be difficult people to work with. There will always be those coworkers that have no passion. There will always be challenging days and those moments that you feel like you want to quit and do something completely different. That can build up at times and make you want to give up, to feel burned out. As Jon Gordon says, "We don't get burned out because of what we do. We get burned out because we forget why we do it." Knowing why we are there in the first place is vital in the times that are challenging. Knowing our why gives us something we can focus on, to fall back on when we things get hard. We were not created to just get by, to survive, we are created to thrive.