Thoughts on passion
The planet is awash with the passionate. Job applicants, teachers, sportswear companies and estate agents – wherever you look, people, firms, and teams bandy the word around with reckless abandon. It’s claimed as a positive attribute, as a sign of commitment, and something to be embraced. But is this necessarily true?
When the P-word first entered the English language, in the Middle Ages, it had very different associations. Derived from the Latin verb pati, meaning to suffer, it referred to the crucifixion of Christ.
It quickly came to mean any emotion, positive or negative. In the 16th century, Shakespeare gave us its first recorded use in an erotic sense, in Titus Andronicus. And by the 1800s, we were introduced to ‘crimes of passion’, as violent, jealous forms of emotional obsession.
But today, having ‘a passion’ is considered vital. It’s claimed almost as the sole thing needed for success, an attitude exemplified by Gary Vaynerchuk, the brash, hugely successful entrepreneur who started the website Wine Library TV. His book, Crush It! Why Now is the Time to Cash in on your Passion, insists that belief and desire are enough. If you’re passionate about something, he tells us, you’ll make it work.
Yet far from being vital to success, passion can be dangerous and distracting. For thousands of years, philosophers from the Stoics onwards stressed the importance of using reason over raw emotion.
Level-headedness in times of crisis is something we admire in athletes, statesmen,
generals and business leaders. During Barack Obama’s candidacy for US president,
a Time magazine article accused him of a ‘passion gap’. “One of the great strengths
of the Obama candidacy has been the sense that this is a guy whose blood doesn’t
boil,” runs the story.
Modern psychology has established both the pitfalls and positives of passion. According to Robert Vallerand, of the University of Quebec in Montreal, passion is “a strong inclination toward a self-defining activity that one likes or even loves”.
In Vallerand’s view, while many of us play the guitar or basketball, these activities can only be regarded as our passions if we think of ourselves as guitarists or basketball players. In his research, Vallerand found that 85% of us have at least one activity that we see as defining who we are – usually not work, but a hobby of some sort – and that typically we spend 8.5 hours per week on it.
Local heroes
Apple is the brand that Europeans are most passionate about, according to a survey by online research agency Panelteam. Sony came in second, followed by Coca-Cola, Samsung, and adidas. However, local brands made a strong showing. Douwe Egberts (coffee) gets Dutch consumers most excited, as does Bauli (cakes) in Italy. British brands such as Cadbury, Marmite and Sainsbury’s rate highly in the UK, while in German-speaking lands, Milka is the favourite. Source: Panelteam, European Passion Study 2010.
While our passions define us, their effects on our lives can be good and bad. So an obsessive dancer with an injury avoids resting and recovering; while one with a healthy passion will do what is needed to preserve his or her fi tness.
Cal Newport holds a Ph.D. in computer science from MIT, and has written several books on how to achieve academic success. “Passion seems to be a common source of problems,” he says. “For some, they have too many passions and don’t know where to focus their energies. For others, it’s the lack of a passion, or maybe a belief that their particular passion won’t bring them somewhere worth going.”
For him, the idea that we can all discover our passion and make use of it
is “a dangerous fiction”. All too often, the P-word is a cop-out for those
lacking inspiration or motivation. “Passion is the feeling generated by mastery.
It doesn’t exist outside of serious hard work,” he says, “almost any superfi
cial interest can be transformed into a passion with hard work.”
Fellow author and academic Natalia Ilyin works in a more creative field (design) but is equally suspicious. “To say that a bunch of software engineers or graphic designers are passionate about their work is to try to inject sex and confusion and addiction and desire into a kind of work that is essentially asexual, organised, left brain, and sober,” she says. For her, passion simply means ‘focus’.
Perhaps finding your ‘passion’ is overrated. Maybe, we’d all be better off just working hard at something we quite like. As Dr Dinesh Sing, of Delhi University, said recently, pop psychology’s idea of passion is “looking for quick fixes. Passion really requires deeper inner reflection – it’s a lifelong process”.
Vita appassionata
The Italians are the most passionate people in Europe, according to a recent survey of 10,000 Europeans. Some 37% of Italians see themselves as passionate, followed by 25% of Spaniards and 12% of French people.
But this does not transfer to their professional lives. Italians were the least passionate about their jobs, with only 57% happy to go to work, compared to 89% of Danes, 86% of Dutch people, and 73% of Germans.
Source: Panelteam, European Passion Study 2010.
