Passion is a Dangerous Concept
One word that gets bandied about with tiresome frequency in the world of self-development is “passion” and tagged onto it the concept that you can never succeed without passion and that if you are not succeeding then it’s probably due to a lack of passion. I call that nonsense but I do see what the supposition is trying to get to.

Words can prove wonderful at encapsulating a concept succinctly but they can also create continuous woe if the concept understood does not describe the problem that it seeks to describe accurately. People can easily spend decades pursuing will-o-the-wisp concepts that prove impossible to obtain just because of a poor or wrong description.

Let’s take a look at the dictionary definition of passion:
passion |ˈpa sh ən|
noun
1 strong and barely controllable emotion : a man of impetuous passion.
• a state or outburst of such emotion : oratory in which he gradually works himself up into a passion.
• intense sexual love : their all-consuming passion for each other | she nurses a passion for Thomas.
• an intense desire or enthusiasm for something : the English have a passion for gardens.
• a thing arousing enthusiasm : modern furniture is a particular passion of Bill’s.

And from the thesaurus:
passion
noun
1 the passion of activists fervor, ardor, enthusiasm, eagerness, zeal, zealousness, vigor, fire, fieriness, energy, fervency, animation, spirit, spiritedness, fanaticism.
2 he worked himself up into a passion (blind) rage, fit of anger/temper, temper, towering rage, tantrum, fury, frenzy.
3 hot with passion love, (sexual) desire, lust, ardor, infatuation, lasciviousness, lustfulness.
4 his passion for football enthusiasm, love, mania, fascination, obsession, fanaticism, fixation, compulsion, appetite, addiction; informal thing.
5 French literature is my passion obsession, preoccupation, craze, mania, hobbyhorse.

Passion is a deeply intense concept of fervent emotion, close to the point of obsession and close to desperation. Passion is temporary and tends to come in waves. Passion is an all or nothing concept, difficult to discern, risky to commit to (what happens if the passion dies?), unsustainable and almost certainly mentally unhealthy in the long term. Thus the promotion that it receives today as a cure-all and also a cause of not doing well in life is deeply unjustified.

Passion is Just a Ruse
The idea behind promoting passion so heavily is to create a purpose that carries us through all of the difficulties and obstacles that we find along the way towards reaching our fervently held wishes. We will encounter many problems along the way and the easiest thing is to turn away from difficulty and impossibility. Many people mistakenly believe that the inability to make progress is simply due to a lack of emotional drive. The mistaken assumption is that strong emotions will magically take you past the obstacles that thwart you. That is not what removes the obstacles. Identifying the thing which proves impossible to do in the moment that you want to do it and making it possible is what allows you to make progress on any task. Emotional drivers, whether positive, such as imagining the rewards of fulfilment, or negative, such as imagining the awful consequences of not making things work can only work when allied to an ability to get past the points of what proves personally impossible for any particular individual. If you have that ability then you will rarely need emotional drivers. So, if you have never found your passion and rarely feel passion then don’t worry about it. It really is no big deal and there is nothing wrong with you and nothing is missing.

Instead we can create attitudes that lead us to solve difficult problems more readily. Casual and carefree curiosity, playfulness and experimentation carried out for the fun of discovery alone and not for any particular purpose other than to have fun in the moment will do more to carry you forward in pursuing your interests and your ability to progress beyond barriers than any amount of positive or negative emotional drivers. Apply some vigour to this process and you learn quickly, with concentration and with an attitude that accepts difficulty and that simultaneously strives to overcome it in a relaxed and confident manner.

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