The Passion Economy
Exploring the belief that by taking risks, failing often, and turning a passion into a career, we create more positive outcomes for ourselves and the communities in which we live.
Search
Blogroll
Twitter feed
Loading Tweet...
Contact Me
Posts I like
-
passion is in the risk.
-
take the risk
one of my favorite things to tell my friends when they begin to doubt things/life/choices…
“if you never try, you’ll never know”
-
“”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...”
-
-
Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams
-
“I’d rather be a failure at something I enjoy than a success at something I hate.”— George Burns
-
Day 5: Passion
This, my friends, is called Not-your-typical-German-chocolate-cake.
Baking is my passion. I feel this sense of accomplishment... -
I don't care if chasing my dream makes me ridiculously poor...
I refuse to do things in life just to get by. I refuse to do things in life with no...
-
“Success is how high you bounce when you hit bottom.”— General George Patton
Tag Results
1 post tagged buddha
The Simple Math of Passion
I’ve been curious to explore the link between passion and happiness and I’m starting to uncover a basic formula. Drawing only from my conversations (and very little research), here’s a rough proof:
To Be Passionate = To Be All-Consumed
When I’ve asked people how to find my passion, time and again the answer I’ve received is “any activity where time flies by.” Be it reading a book, working on a piece of art, or solving a tricky logic problem, it’s the experience of being so consumed in your work that the rest of the world fades away; the experience of one hour passing in five minutes.
To Be All-Consumed = To Be Happy
Case in point: yesterday Fast Company profiled a new study where participants’ iPhones pinged them several times a day to ask them what they’re up to and how happy they’re feeling. The scientists found that users who were most engaged in what they were doing reported the highest levels of happiness. Conversely those who weren’t engaged - whose minds wandered - reported a feeling of dissatisfaction. As stated in their report: “A wandering mind is an unhappy mind.”*
To Be Passionate = To Be Happy?
By the transitive property, if to be passionate is to be all-consumed, and to be all-consumed is to be happy, then does being passionate about your work lead to happiness? A logic that I’m continuing to explore, but I’m encouraged by what I’ve found so far.
* For those questioning cause and effect:
The Harvard psychologists compared each person’s moods and thoughts as the day went on. They found that if someone’s mind wandered at, say, 10 in the morning, then at 10:15 that person was likely to be less happy than at 10 , perhaps because of those stray thoughts. But if people were in a bad mood at 10, they weren’t more likely to be worrying or daydreaming at 10:15. “We see evidence for mind-wandering causing unhappiness, but no evidence for unhappiness causing mind-wandering,” Mr. Killingsworth says.
On a related note, last weekend I attended a talk by a Buddhist nun who touched on this very point. One of Buddha’s well-known statements is that “life is suffering.” As the nun explained, suffering as Buddha meant it is less about actual pain, and more about not being present in the moment. It’s that state of unease — some would call it stress — that comes from not being focused on the here and now.
