Boiling Passion
How Unleashing Your Personal Prowess Boosts Professionalism
Boiling Passion
So we’re sitting in Harley’s one Saturday morning, a couple of close friends and I, enjoying brunch. I was tearin’ up my plate of smoked salmon hash, marveling at how succulent each flake of fish flesh was, and how the melted cheddar oozed off my perfectly scrambled eggs and dripped warmly down my throat. Imbibing gleefully, I pondered with wonderment at how well the meal paired with my second complementary screwdriver, itself expertly crafted by our generous, heavy-handed bartender. I vaguely recall the segue but, we began discussing goals, maturity, and the respective minefields we’ve traversed to reach those milestones. Our conversation soon transitioned to a fiery (yet respectful) debate about passion; it’s abstraction and semantics.
For such a common term, it’s bewildering that we have such disparate interpretations of of the concept; each as varied as our personalities. The dictionary defines passion as a desire that’s so intense, and so intrinsic to its host, that they are willing to suffer, even to the point of martyrdom [read: death]. As a matter of semantics, passion can be likened the the process of boiling water. At sea level, water boils at 212° Fahrenheit. A pot of water that is 0° would never be considered boiling. The same pot at 211° wouldn’t either. In fact, any temperature below 212° will never produce boiling water (under normal* circumstances). Likewise, it would be a gross misrepresentation to describe pot of water that’s 500° as boiling when, in fact, it would then be a pot of water vapor (gaseous) and no longer boiling liquid water. Passion works in a similar manner.
How someone develops passion, what they’re passionate about, and the methods by which they express their passion, are highly varied, and deeply personal. However, once that pinnacle of piping desirous heat is achieved, that is, once passion is boiling, it’s a powerful thing. When most say they’re “extremely passionate”, it’s as vague as referring to a pot of water as “very/mega/ultra/super/extremely boiling”. This is too powerful concept for unnecessary adjectives and qualifiers! We should be mindful when before we deploy such a loaded term.
What Makes U Rock?
Information technology is thrilling to some especially, virtualization. The process of stripping down computing to its core, digitizing physical resources, and augmenting efficiency and scalability is nothing short of riveting! Some love food especially, new foods. The desire to discover and devour diverse, delectable delights can be dominating! Many love music, especially R&B! Its sultry, sonic serenades sensuously stroke the soul; sinking into symphonic stupor.
Take some time regularly to (re)discover your passion. That thing you cannot live without, the strong desire so intrinsically “[your name]” that, if you lost it you’d cease to exist as yourself, the one thing you’ve done through heartache and pain, elation and triumph, sickness and health. If you haven’t considered this in some time, you ought to! Too often, while we’re playing ‘I-gotta-fit-in’, we unwittingly check our passions at the door so as to not stand-out.
That morning at Harley’s, after I had gorged every tender morsel of my meal with acute cognizance, allowing the pink of the salmon to gently glide across my tongue, so that I not only tasted its subtle smokiness but, its character, its hue, even its very essence, it dawned on me that the same thought processes, methodology, and problem solving required in birthing beautiful, impactful images from the womb of my mind’s-eye in order to satiate my creative passion, will set me apart as embark on the next leg of journey that is my IT career.
Head In The Clouds
Originally, this piece was written while deploying a private cloud through Windows Server 2012 using Hyper-V and System Center. This was a “from scratch” implementation requiring bare-metal installations of Server 2012, switch configuration, and deploying the virtual servers which are he backbones of the cloud. Due to the time constraints, this was a gargantuan task requiring technical ability, meticulous planning, hours of troubleshooting [read: problem-solving], and execution.
That process has many parallels in creating digital art specifically, in Adobe Photoshop. There’s the same degree of project planning involved before one can flatten a .PSD. In 2020, a graphic designer is expected stay abreast of version changes in design software which may impact productivity much the way the same would be assumed for a system administrator regarding Microsoft patches for Windows Server 2019. Planning out subnets, organizing domains/sub-domains, even creating System Center templates for cloud computing, is analogous to what’s needed for working with hundreds of layers across several .PSDs for any given project. A seasoned designer must maintain/create a batch of templates, preset actions, and scripts (yes, scripts), much in the way an IT pro does to boost efficiency.
Milk The Clock, Boost Professionalism
There’s more than one way to solve problems. You may not be drawn to the the vast, exciting, and cutting-edge field of cloud computing. You may not be good at drawing. It may be that in 5th grade, you were really good at math, and loved doing it. Somewhere down the line you stopped bringing that into your interactions because, as a 19, 21, 25…30 year old, it wasn’t always trending. Anytime you find yourself doing algebra on a napkin to figure out if you were charged the right tax rate, you should remember, even this ‘hidden passion’ can enhance your career.
Whatever your long-term hobbies are, whichever dreams you haven’t been able to let go of since childhood, don’t stop! If you haven’t been blessed to make a career (yet) out of these things you love, you still can. Any activity you’ve spent time nurturing, especially from before you profited from it (as when you were a child), is something that is genuinely you. Take some time to explore what your mind goes through while you knit, while you cook, while you sing, while you sail; anything you love to do that too often work gets in the way of. All of your favorite things to do, are work too!
The same mental processes can be extracted from your passions and applied right into your “day job”. The more of those skills and talents that you’re able to recognize and try to incorporate into your career, the more your job will feel like a part of you and not merely an inconvenient burden, en-route to riches (that may never come). As you consciously hone in on those aspects of your own thinking, you’ll realize you can actually play out an element of your dreams in your day-to-day.
More of the time you spend in your 9–5 will feel like your own when you see yourself in your work. The more you’re able break down your passions to their elements, virtualize your passions, if you will, the more you’ll find in yourself new skills and talents which benefit your employer. The more you put these abilities to use, even for a company you don’t own, the sharper they’ll become. In a cut-throat corporate world, anything you can do to stand-out, is a plus. The magic is, your passions travel with you, if you change employers or start your own thing one day, those talents you started honing, even while at work, are yours to keep!
