Fires start with Flickers
May 25, 2007 | by brett | Permalink
People who have not found their passion are sometimes inappropriately labeled as lazy. To me, that’s like calling the kid who can’t read dumb, when it’s really just a case of the
kid needing some glasses.
Discovering a passion does not have anything to do with motivation. We are all genuinely driven to find our passion, but the problem is that most of us are just waiting for our passion to overwhelm us like a 20 foot wave.
My friend Suzanne, who will be doing a guest post for us next week, puts it this way. “A passion can be a small flicker- you can tell it’s a passion when its flames are ones you want to fan.”
With that said, let me tell you how I fanned my fire.
The Fall of 2005 was the time where my college was crawling with campus recruiters. For the month of October, the campus career center had more interview action than the Joe Franklin Show. As a senior in a suit searching for a job, I was in the thick of it all.
I had close to 20 interviews during the fall recruiting process. At the end of these interviews I would ask the person on the other side of the table one question:
“What do you love about your job?”
The responses that I received to this question were usually the only time the interviewer completely opened up during their interview, because their passion for their work transcended into an infectious answer.
In my last interview, I asked this question again to my interviewer. But this time, there was a different feeling in me. I completely spaced out during her response as I came to grasps that this could be that last time I would be hearing about a person’s passion. I began to realize just how much I enjoyed it. I loved to hear about what made them happy in their career. I loved to hear about the path they paved to find work that gave them gratification and fulfillment. I decided right then that this was my “small flicker” that I needed to pay attention to, and that night the idea of conducting exploratory interviews with people who loved their job was conceived.
There are many other people I’ve interviewed that started with a small flicker of passion and fanned that fire into something greater. Amy Hilliard took a love for baking poundcakes and combined it with her marketing experience to create Comfort Cakes. Trey Smith took an interest in playing video games to being paid to make them at EA Sports. Matt Klentak wrote down everything that his interests consisted of and decided to pursue a career in sports.
Everyone wants to find their passion. The motivation that starts the pursuit is when people decide to stop waiting for the wave that may or may not come, and start to take action on the small sparks that holds the potential to be transformed into fiery flames.
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THERE IS ONE RESPONSE TO THIS INTERVIEW
Jenn Says:
June 9th, 2007
All I can say is, I am thankful for those times of darkness when the small flicker is the only light I need.
RESPOND TO THIS INTERVIEW