How Passion Actually Works
I discovered the game of chess in my early twenties. My passion for the game was off the roof. I bothered anyone who had time to play. I enrolled in chess classes.
The height of my short lived career was when I played against an international master and won. I was on the path to stardom. My friends encouraged me, saying I was born for chess.
I took the game to another level and enrolled in competitive tournaments. The going got tough. Younger players beat me to the game. In no time my confidence crashed. My sky-high passion soon became frustration and annoyance. In no time, I gave up on competitive chess.
Success Stimulates Passion More Than Passion Stimulates Success
There are many misconceptions about how successful people make it. Most successful people will often advice you to “just follow your passion” and you will mint gold.
You’re made to understand that passion is like steroids to propel you into a future of success and bliss. There’s some truth to that and according to Author and Cartoonist Scott Adams, passionate people are likely to take big risks in the pursuit of unlikely goals.
I had such feelings when I first started playing chess in my twenties. Never mind that I came to the game late, I was positive to be an International Master at some point,despite being right in the middle of a demanding course in University.
What is interesting, is how we never hear of passionate people who fail so they can give us some advice. Mr. Adams believes most of the successful who are passionate and get to write books, give talks, and start popular podcasts, are being humble about their success.
They do not want to come out up front to say they made it because they out-smarted the competition. It easier and more socially acceptable when they say passion brought about their achievement. In his own words Scott Adams writes:
“Passion sounds more accessible. If you’re dumb, there’s not much you can do about it, but passion is something we think anyone can generate in the right circumstances. Passion feels very democratic. It’s the people’s talent available to all. It’s also mostly bullshit.”
After The Passion You Have To Do The hard Work
And that is how my dream of being a chess grand-master crumbled. The time came when I had to plan, read books about chess and play even when I was not cut out for it.
The time came when I had to manage my day, oscillate between my conventional studies and my passion.
Rather than just playing chess for fun, I had to be disciplined about the way I managed my time. Then I understood that for most of the great chess players I saw, there was much work they did behind the scenes, and most of that work is not sexy.
I realized that the best way to succeed is to treat what I’m passionate about like a job. To find the time, show up, and do the work.
Passion May Not Be Enough To Overcome Resistance
At some point in my short lived passionate chess career I met with resistance. Suddenly I had to push myself to play chess. The mental energy required to think about the correct moves seemed to give diminishing, if not negative returns.
I was deeply frustrated because I sensed that with some effort I would actually become a good chess player, probably even gun for major tournaments but it began to feel like very hard work.
Chess was just a hobby for me and the stakes did not involve life and death although I was pretty obsessed with becoming some sort of chess champion.
Looking back, I’ve learned a thing or two about free will and determinism. As Zat Rana writes, we have as much free will as is demanded of us. We have reserves of free will and determination but we’re never exposed to circumstances hard enough for us to release that reserve energy.
From a Darwinian perspective, the fact the you and I are alive means we carry survival genes of our hunter gatherer ancestors. They were put in rough circumstances in life for survival. Chasing big game wasn’t a hobby or passion for them. It was a matter of survival.
Running away from a hostile tribe was not a game. I can join a marathon If I so fancy and walk away when the running gets tough. That was not the case for our hunter gatherer ancestors. For them, it was a matter of life and death.
Civilization has made life easy for us, and I’m not complaining. But life is about trade-offs. The cost of an easy life has been the erosion of much of our natural determination to overcome resistance. We’re rarely exposed to the hard times of our past to be able to access the free will necessary to overcome resistance.
It follows that free will, and not passion, is the key to overcoming the inevitable resistance we will face in most of our important endeavors. Passion is merely an indicator of the things you can be good at. I’m still passionate about chess and I teach it to my kids, but resistance took the upper hand because I’ve not been determined enough to do the actual work to become a champion.
It’s curious though, that meaning is to be found on the other side of resistance. Nietzsche summarized this concept well when he wrote:
“To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities — I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not — that one endures.”
