The problem is that we’ve lost any real sense of what “passion” means.
It’s not what gives you bliss or makes you happy 24/7, but what you’re willing to suffer for – what you genuinely believe to be worth the sacrifice.
The next time you feel energized and strong and like the best version of yourself – the you that you wish you could be all the time – pay attention to what you’re doing *in that moment*. Write it down. Do this for as long as it takes until you see a pattern emerging. It won’t necessarily be the activities themselves – but they will have something in common. Look into them and behind them until you find what dramatists call a through-line: the essence of what you’re good at and what drives you.
I spent most of my life thinking my passion was for coding, and later for writing about tech. But when I stepped back and looked at the other things that light me up and make me feel whole – building ForGoodCode, training hard in CrossFit, even the hours I spend on social media – I realized my real passion is for connection. Not just the DM or the comment, but that moment when something from my world collides with someone else’s and it lands. A spark of recognition, a shift in perspective, a laugh that sticks. It’s the best feeling. Writing is still my main way of chasing that, but every time I find another space where I can create that overlap – whether it’s a post, a conversation, or just sharing a hard workout – I feel more alive.
We confuse the activity with the value behind the activity. It’s the value that compels us – and which we can transfer to paid-income work in a way that changes lives (and the industry itself).
What Steve Jobs was passionate about was not computers per se, any more than it was calligraphy or Japanese gardening. It was simplicity.
Simplicity drove the Apple identity: the strategy, the products and marketing and branding, the presentations. Simplicity enabled a computer company to connect with mass culture on a deep, emotional level, when Jobs himself was not exactly Oprah (even if he also made people teary-eyed).
Jobs brought it home just as fiercely: the complications of a couch, for example. His living room didn’t require one.
Passion matters – given that you’re likely to spend more time being deeply, truly involved with work that energizes you instead of depletes you – or makes you want to stab your eyes out with your boss’s mont blanc pen.
When you can put in real, focused, quality time, you’re a lot more efficient and can maybe also have a life. Imagine that. 🙂
