Skip to main content

To passion or not to passion

Scott Galloways point that "Follow your passion" is bad advice somewhat resonated with me and I set thinking about it. I agree with him broadly. It took me a long time to realise what is my passion. And I realised that my passion is a stack - and has a couple of things at the core. 

For one, I had to do something that was difficult for me - speaking in public in front of people and training them. It was through a fairly complex route that I reached here. This was neither natural not did I have a flair for it - it was pure effort and practice of getting better at it. It was also a derivative of something else - since I am not a natural speaker nor an extrovert.  The starting point was the design element of the training which I enjoy the most. 

I remember from school times - I would read Brand Equity - the Economic Times supplement on advertising. And the creative side of advertising attracted me. But marketing was not something I was sure I enjoyed, so that fell by the wayside. 

Much later as I moved full time into training - I realised that what I liked was the creativity and not advertising per se. And Learning and Development enabled me to be creative in the design stage and the delivery stage. It was this creativity in design that enabled me to be a better speaker. 

On the face of it, it appears that training people is my passion, but that would be a surface level understanding. I definitely like the like the design and creativity aspect far more than the delivery - but leaving it there would again be just a level lower and I thus like to deliver what I design.

Along the way, the aspect of creativity - innovation - again about how to enable creativity became an area of interest. And I am a board games and other games aficionado - me and the kids often try new games on the app store apart from trying out new board games. A chance opportunity of creating a Learning game (not a training activity which involves people throwing balls into baskets) enabled me to explore another side here - that of games.

One thing led to another and post creation of Playback and 108% Indian - after all these years, I have come to the conclusion my passion is "creation"  (corollary: "originality") and problem solving.

If this question was asked to me say 20 years ago, I would have had a faint idea (but zero confidence). 10 years ago, I might have had a slightly closer insight. But in this intervening period - I have continuously worked on it and hence today I can say, somewhat confidently, that yes, this is what I am good at. I still have miles to go before I can say that yes, this is my passion, but for now, this is it. 

So, as Scott says - passion is something one discovers along the way - it is not so apparent right away (atleast was not for me). And it is something you build on - your habits, experience, exposure all sharpen it - you begin to enjoy it and it becomes a passion. 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Be Civil. Make nice!

Popular posts from this blog

The man who saved Pumpelsdrop

This was a story we had in college if I am not mistaken. Perhaps it was in school, but a delightful story it was. The story goes somewhat like this ( reproduced from here ), but the college version we had was slightly different from this.  I t was a dull, gloomy and a depressing morning in a town named Pumpelsdrop in northern England. The Great Depression had brought all the businesses to a standstill. The bored automobile dealer was spending time alone, as usual. But, this seems to be an unusual morning as an odd entity (customer) appeared on the horizon. A man in a bright suit walks up to the dealer and says, "I need to buy a Rolls Royce Phantom II. We have a business conference coming up and I need to impress my customers". Then proceeds to pay 10% of the deal with a single check for 2000 pounds. The rest he says will pay when he takes the delivery.   The auto dealer was stunned. He was delighted to hear that someone is holding a business conference of some kind and ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Zero to One

Zero to One by Peter Thiel is a nice read. (Yes - if I sit down to write a book review - the book has to be worth it - and usually good - so most of my book reviews are about good books.You can stop here if that's the information you seek.) Where this book scores is in contrarian thoughts and contrarian questions that make you think. It starts with a four big lessons learned from the 90s dot-com crash that is, Make incremental advances, Stay lean and flexible, Improve on the competition and Focus on product, not sales. Just as you warm up to it, he says, the opposite rules are more correct - which are: It is better to risk boldness than triviality. A bad plan is better than no plan. Competitive markets destroy profits. Sales matters just as much as products. And finally leaves with a simple definition of contrarianism - it is not to oppose the crowd (or follow a smaller or newer or older crowd) but to think for yourself. "All happy companies are different"...
Post a Comment
Read more

Playing to win

This bright green book with a yellow title has always caught my attention, but I had never read it.  Imagine my surprise that when I finally picked it up as part of a preparation for a workshop that it was such a fantastic book. Playing to win by Alan Lafley and Roger Martin is one of those books that is up there when it comes to learning about how strategy can be crafted and implemented in real business. There is much in the book - and unlike other books - this book is really a leaf out of P&G, but with frameworks and models that can be applied anywhere. Image from here . It is these 5 questions played in a loop (well, iteratively) that are the juiciest part of the book and as simple and obvious as they are, it is this place where the strategy play happens. So, yes, simply put a great book to be read by anyone who is anywhere close to strategy...
Post a Comment
Read more