We’ve all heard so much about “passion.” People want to be passionate about their work, so they search for a career or calling they can feel passionate about. However, I’m not a big “passion” person because passion is transitory, temporary, and often shallow. It has too many ups and downs. Passion is great, but it simply won’t get you very far. So what do I recommend?
Hunger. When it comes to your career or calling, my advice is this:
Your “passion” is what you want.
Your “hunger” is what you can’t live without.
Passion too often gets confused with what people enjoy, what they find easy to do, or what seems trendy at the moment. That’s a big reason I get so many scripts mailed to me with cover letters telling me how passionate the writer is about writing. But the problem is, you don’t need to read many pages before you realize they’re simply terrible writers. That’s why I encourage you instead to search for your deep hunger.
Passion is something you can live without, but hunger is what you need to survive.
For instance, if writing is your passion, you may enjoy it, but when that passion subsides, you’ll move to something else. But if writing is a hunger, then you can’t live without it. You’ll write everyday, you’ll write no matter how many critics, and you’ll write without getting paid.
You write, because you can’t not write.
That idea is why I wrote the book “One Big Thing: Discovering What You Were Born to Do“. The bottom line is that in today’s demanding, hyper-competitive world, hunger is fierce and unrelenting, and will eat passion for lunch.
Leave a Reply