Day #3 - Passion

Before I say any more about goals, I want to pause to say a word about passion. Someone asked me the other day how they could find their passion. I had to think about this for a while because I felt as though I have known my passion all of my life. The reason I want to describe passion is because I believe that the goals that we have the best chance of achieving are the ones that grow out of our passion.

This word “passion” is used so often that I was tempted not to use it at all. But it is such a powerful concept that properly understood it could direct you for the rest of your life.

My passion is helping people. That is also my mission. If I look back over my life, I can describe every season of my life as having been full of events and activities that all relate to an effort to help other people. There were times when I was more effective helping people than at other times. And there were times when I enjoyed helping other people than at other times. There were even times when I tried not to want to help other people! But I grew to learn that this is who I am.

And the various projects I have led – the different jobs I have held – have all been pursuant to my desire to help other people. The big question for me was how to balance my passion for helping people with my need to take care of my responsibilities and myself. This can be a tremendous challenge for most people. Too often the things that we love to do and the things that we get paid to do seem to be worlds apart. If that reality lasts long enough, we tend to ignore the things we love to do and we become enslaved to the things we do to survive. At that point, we don’t even want to be reminded about our passion.

But finding and knowing our passion is critical to our mental health and our quality of life. A person who never finds her passion is someone whose life is dedicated to the fulfillment of someone else’s dreams! Passion is the fuel for the engine of a fulfilled life!

Here is your passion – whatever you would do every day if you did not need any money; what you enjoy doing so much that you would do it enthusiastically if someone awakened you at 3am without warning; something you are willing to practice doing although there is no reward to be achieved from doing it; something that makes you feel connected to the purpose for which you were born.

What is your passion? We do best what we love the most. God has created each of us with something on the inside causes us to feel unfulfilled until we get it out. For me it was helping people through speaking and creating solutions to problems. For my brother it is playing music. What is it for you?

Action items:

1.     What would you do if you needed no money at all?

2.     Whose life best resembles the life you would like to live 

3.   If doing one thing every day of your life would make you happy, what would that be?