Passion is something you turn on and off — at least, it needs to be. It is more important to bring passion into your work rather than hope to be passionate about it. The difference is huge.
To bring passion into something implies that passion is a tool that you have control over. This requires high emotional maturity and control over one’s thoughts, feelings, and actions. And when the job is done, you can turn passion off.
To be passionate is to give oneself up to passions.
Essentially, to lose oneself. This, even the teenage boy, can do. This, even the town drunk, the angry driver, the holier-than-thou persecutory, can do. It requires no intelligence or maturity.
To be passionate is dangerous.
To have passion and to use passion is powerful. Winners in the many arenas of life can turn on and off passion. They can direct the powerful energy of passion. Like a laser cutting through steel, they can focus passion to accomplish incredible feats.
Uncontrolled, passion is nothing but trouble.
Passion blinds you from seeing reality clearly. It causes you to say and do things that your mature self regrets. Worse, it leaves you empty and dry, wondering, “Why am I not passionate about the thing anymore?”
Be mindful of when you are stirred emotionally.
Is passion in your control? Does it come from within? Can you turn it off?
A warning to those whose default is to be dispassionate:
Can you turn passion on? Or are you stuck in melancholia? Being dispassionate at all times is no way to live. Babies are not made mechanically. Mechanical creation rarely conceives.
There is a place and time for the fires of passion.
Like fire, passion is powerful when controlled and fatal if untamed.
