Building Passion to Fuel Purpose
in 2003, Jack Hairston was a depressed retired guy in south Florida, with no passion and no obvious reason for being alive. That all changed the day a young man’s bike broke down in front of his house. Since he was good with a wrench, Hairston went outside and helped the young man get back on his bike with a few tweaks, which ended up being the difference between the young man’s getting to work that day to earn money and not getting there at all.
Soon word spread that Hairston could fix bikes, and people starting showing up with them at his front door. Instead of feeling useless and depressed, Hairston found himself looking forward to each day because he suddenly felt like he had a purpose. With his wrench and know-how, he could make a difference in others’ lives, which he said made his own life feel like it was worth living again.
Sixteen years later, Hairston has gone from fixing up a few bikes to overseeing a warehouse for repaired bicycles, as well as one of the biggest bicycle giveaways in the country at Christmas. His charity, Jack the Bike Man, is staffed by an army of volunteers, who give their time to fix bikes for a small fee as well as provide opportunities for underprivileged children to learn how to work with bikes, help others, and always have a way to get around.
Hairston feels that being on a bicycle improves the community, connects people, gives them hope, and allows families to have access to transportation that they wouldn’t otherwise have. His Christmas giveaway, one of the most anticipated days for many families in the region, lights up the lives of hundreds of children who otherwise would have no presents. What started as a small inconvenience ended up saving Hairston’s life, giving it newfound passion and purpose.
To have grit, you have to have passion. Without passion, it’s too difficult to persist when times are hard and solutions are elusive. Without passion, it’s too difficult to remind yourself of the importance of your journey when others doubt or criticize you. Without passion, you won’t be able to screen out the noisy disturbances that undo less committed individuals. Without passion, it’s too hard to connect with others about the importance of your mission and convince them to help you and get on board. Without passion, it’s just another workmanlike goal, and not necessarily the mission that will change your life—or the world. But how do you get passion? And how does it connect with purpose?
Walter Mischel, the researcher behind the “Marshmallow Test,” which discovered the long-term benefits of delaying gratification, says that when we have a “burning goal” or a passion that lights us up, it’s easier to marshal the inner resources to work hard, say no to temptation, and see projects through to the finish line. When Mischel was eight years old, the Germans annexed Austria, and he and his family of Jewish intellectuals fled to the United States, never quite regaining their economic status. But Mischel’s grandmother would lecture him on the importance of sitzfleisch (summoning up the inner resources to continue to work hard in spite of obstacles), and Mischel did just that with his newfound passion of making “a life that would help my family recover from the trauma of suddenly becoming homeless refugees,” which later morphed into a passion for helping children learn how to cope with trauma.1
Mischel is typical of the person who discovers their passion by experiencing a setback and then decides to do something to make sure that others don’t go through the same experience, or that they have better coping tools if they do. That’s what happened to me with my eating disorder: when I successfully overcame it, I realized I had a passion for bringing enthusiasm to each day—a deep, internal recognition of the fact that we are privileged to be alive, regardless of how hopeless life might seem at times. My purpose flowed from that passion. Through coaching, speaking, writing, and educating, I try to bring hope and tools of positive change to help other people live their best lives right now, as well as to accomplish the difficult goals that will make the biggest difference in their lives.
So finding one’s passion might come by surprise and could be the result of experiencing trauma. Amy Gleicher is another example of someone who found her passion for a cause by surviving difficult circumstances. In 1988, after marrying a widower, Warren, who’d lost his wife in a car accident, and adopting his two sons, Jon and Adam, she gave birth to a son, Max, with fragile X syndrome, a genetic condition that causes intellectual disability, and behavioral and learning challenges. “I asked the doctor if he would ever go to college or get married, and he said, ‘No,’” she remembers now, looking back. By the time Max turned five, Amy’s life was a blur of exhaustion, isolation, and a crash course in motherhood that would wear down most people and sap their passion for life. But instead of falling apart, Amy channeled her energy into developing a grittier approach to life so that Max and his brothers could all live their best lives.
She adapted to the demands of helping Jon and Adam learn how to create lives of stability and normalcy after the devastating loss of their mother, and she reluctantly faced the fact that she and Warren wouldn’t be able to provide Max with the twenty-four-hour-a-day environment of trained support that his condition required. After years of researching and tirelessly advocating for Max, she got him a hard-won, coveted spot at Heartbeet, a community in Vermont that houses men and women like Max in a farm environment, where they can have their own lives of purpose surrounded by people who can give them the care they deserve. Amy says that she is grateful for the lessons Max brought her and believes that becoming a mother gave her the passion and grit that have made life rich and meaningful. “Everyone deserves a warrior,” she says. “These children turned me into a warrior, and I’m a better person because of it.”
Obsessive passion vs. harmonious passion
Bob Vallerand is the perfect person to be the world’s expert on the topic of passion. When you meet him, he exudes high energy, makes direct eye contact, and leans forward while speaking effusively about his findings on what he calls “harmonious” and “obsessive” passions. A former basketball player with aspirations to play at an elite level, Vallerand loves to talk about the sport to illustrate the differences between having a positive type of passion that makes you happier, wiser, and more willing to contribute to society (harmonious) and having the kind that causes you to ruminate, be sapped of vitality, and neglect other important areas of life (obsessive). A harmonious passion is one that you look forward to and that fills your daydreams in a positive way, while an obsessive passion is marked by intrusive thoughts and difficulty controlling the urge to do the activity. Think about the difference between a mate who is respectful, treats you well, and gives without strings attached versus a mate who is jealous, controlling, and takes more from you than they give.
“Look at Bill Bradley,” Vallerand explains. “He is someone who was passionate about basketball and played at a high level in the NBA with the New York Knicks, but he never stopped growing in other areas. He was a Rhodes Scholar and went on to serve as a U.S. senator. He never identified just as a basketball player, and was able to explore other passions like getting a master’s in political science at Oxford while also winning the European basketball championship playing for an Italian team. This helped open the door to a second career in politics.” Vallerand says that other examples of harmonious passion are people who donate time to causes like Doctors Without Borders, as well as those who are able to come back from difficult experiences with a better perspective on life.
People with obsessive passion, on the other hand, ruminate about what they can’t do and are unable to disconnect from their passion. Vallerand points to the number of top sports performers who have obsessive passion, which is why they cannot successfully move on when their careers end. It’s also why so many college athletes report pervasive feelings of distress and anxiety during their competitive years. The constant measurement and assessment of talent and competence are more than many of these athletes can handle, particularly when their core self-concept is so closely tied to their performance. They don’t have a growth mind-set to give them resilience and help them get through sluggish or injury-filled periods. After their athletic careers end, some may struggle for years to find something that feels as positive and affirming as what they experienced as athletes, which is why they struggle with self-worth and confidence. Professional organizations like the National Football League are aware of this problem and now encourage players to plan for their post-professional lives—to spend time learning new skills and hobbies—reducing the difficulty of moving on from a life of obsessive passion into one that might be devoid of passion.
Two passions?
Consistent with the findings that harmonious passion adds happiness to life, while obsessive passion detracts from it, new research from the Journal of Positive Psychology finds that having two harmonious passions is actually better than having just one. Benjamin Schellenberg and Daniel Bailis asked more than a thousand college undergraduates about their favorite activities, and those who reported having two harmonious passions scored higher in well-being and happiness than those who reported having either one harmonious passion or none at all, indicating that there is an additive benefit to finding joy in two positive activities. Any parent with more than one child will understand why this is so because the arrival of a second or third child never seems to detract from the joy you experience with your first- or second-born; you simply have more love to give to everyone.
Moving from obsessive passion into harmonious passion
Legendary swimmer Michael Phelps is a great example of someone who lived with a miserable, obsessive passion—for swimming and winning—from a young age until well into his twenties. His public tribulations after the 2012 Olympics with depression and recreational drug and alcohol use led to a DUI that sent him into an emotional free fall and landed him in a rehab center. As with so many similar stories, hitting bottom is what caused Phelps to honestly examine his demons as well as his inner motivations for swimming and then to do a reboot that saved his life and refueled his sense of purpose. The obsessive passion that once drove him to suicidal thoughts was transformed into a harmonious passion that allowed him to train with joyful abandon and a primal love for the sport. As a result, he became, at age thirty-one, the first man to qualify for five different Olympic games. He then cemented his athletic legacy and became the most decorated Olympian of all time by adding five golds and one silver to his overall haul in Rio—for a grand total of twenty-eight lifetime Olympic medals, twenty-three of those gold. Phelps’s passion for winning evolved into a passion for finding out what new frontiers he could create in a sport he loved, and instead of resenting the daily grind that allowed him to finish his swimming career on a high note, he focused on the joy it brought him and how it inspired so many others to swim—the “Phelps effect,” it’s now called.
What isn’t passion
Passion is what you wake up for and look forward to expressing. Having “interests” is a completely different animal. I frequently find that clients of mine who record low grit scores, and who carry regrets about unfulfilled goals, have lots of interests, but nothing that’s ever turned into a bona fide passion. They love to explore new ideas and are early adopters, but they don’t always have the needed stick-to-it-iveness when it comes to seeing things through to the end. Some of this is because of their attention span, some of it is because they truly thrive on novelty and need to keep moving, and some of it is because it’s human nature to be enthusiastic when starting something, but then fail to have the passion to see it through. In fact, a comparison of five thirty-day video-teaching series found that viewership drops by half after the first day of instruction, and that fewer than 10 percent ever get to the last video.2
If you think you have interests, but not passions, consider taking one of the stronger interests and doing something deeper with it. Sometimes you need to fully immerse yourself in something to see if it takes root and quickens your pulse. If you are dabbling in an instrument but haven’t taken a lesson, take that first lesson and don’t quit until you’ve put in several months of effort. If you are fascinated by a certain type of learning, sign up online for a course and finish it. Just like young children who can’t develop a passion for anything until they’ve mastered the tedious fundamentals—for example, chess, piano, or the multiplication tables—as adults, we have to get past the early-exploration phase to find out if something really lights us up, and making ourselves accountable to others helps us do just that.
There’s another reason to try to turn an interest into a hobby, and that’s because having too many interests but no consuming passion is like dating a lot of people but never getting married and discovering the passion that comes from a long-term, committed relationship with just one person. When you always keep doors open in your mind and dabble in many things, it actually consumes so much energy that you have nothing left to give fully to any one thing. Psychology researcher Dan Ariely, author of Predictably Irrational, says that studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that people hate to “close doors” on future options, even when it’s unlikely those options will ever pan out. But the end result is less time and focus for the things that really matter, so Ariely suggests that people narrow their lives down to the options that matter most and that create the greatest emotional payoff. Marie Kondo, the Japanese decluttering expert, says the same thing and encourages people whose lives are full of “stuff” to let go of anything that doesn’t “spark joy.”3 If something doesn’t spark joy, then it should be thrown out, donated, and expunged because it brings us down in ways we probably can’t even see.
Passion drives purpose
The more you examine lives of authentic grit, the more you see that passion is part and parcel of understanding a person’s purpose. Take Wayne Pacelle, a lobbyist in Washington, DC, whose passion has always been for animals. This passion led him to his purpose: to prevent humans from abusing animals. A Yale University graduate, he adopted a vegan lifestyle thirty years ago as a young man and has worked tirelessly to help the plight of animals wherever they are exploited. He played an important role in negotiating with SeaWorld to phase out the breeding of killer whales for shows, in getting stores like PetSmart and Petco to stop selling puppies from puppy mills, in stopping Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus from continuing their elephant acts, and in halting the use of chimpanzees in medical tests at the National Institutes of Health.
Without authentic grit, though, and an unwillingness to give up on some of his biggest goals, Pacelle wouldn’t have achieved one of his biggest coups. After years of not making headway in reaching anyone at McDonald’s, which buys one in every seven pigs in the United States, Pacelle got a call one day from the billionaire Carl Icahn, asking what he could do to be helpful. Pacelle described the inhumane treatment of pigs at commercial breeding farms, where they are confined for years in crates so small they can’t walk or turn around, becoming so agitated that they chew the bars until their teeth crack and bang their snouts and foreheads to a bloody pulp. Icahn swung into action and “effortlessly” reached the CEO of McDonald’s and other companies, opening the door for Pacelle to come in and make his case. McDonald’s ultimately agreed to give up buying pigs from farms that used crates, which caused sixty other food suppliers like Burger King, Wendy’s, and Carl’s Jr. to do the same. That laid the groundwork for Walmart, the world’s largest food seller, to adopt new guidelines for its suppliers, directing them to adopt humane policies, too.4
What if you feel passionless?
Occasionally, people come to me for help because they’ve simply burned out on life and don’t feel like they have any passion for anything. In the process of working, raising children, and dealing with the disappointments of life, they’ve lost track of what lights them up. In some cases, they got onto a specific track early in life because they felt they had to make a choice about a career, and they chose steadiness over passion.
This was the case with a young woman, Angelique, who called me for coaching help because she recognized earlier than many that she’d gone down the wrong road right out of college, and she wanted to change direction before it was too late. Angelique had become an accountant because her mother had told her repeatedly while Angelique was growing up that taking professional risks or following her passion wouldn’t pay the bills or help her prepare for her future. Consequently, Angelique felt like she was living her mom’s best life and not her own, and she wanted to figure out what her own best life could be.
When I asked her what she’d done in her youth in her free time, Angelique talked about taking care of her stuffed animals and her own pets, running a pretend veterinary clinic in her bedroom. She’d also volunteered as an emergency worker with the local fire squad in high school, before deciding to put all of her attention in college on creating a “safe” future. She’d reluctantly chosen an accounting major, and because she was conscientious and got stellar grades, she wound up at one of the top accounting firms in the country, even earning her CPA on the first try. But every day that she got up and went to work, she knew she was doing the equivalent of putting on a costume and acting in a play. Instead of feeling alive, she didn’t have a harmonious passion or even an obsessive passion. She had no passion, and it scared her. But when we started to talk about her enjoyment of taking care of others, I started to probe and throw out ideas to see what would happen.
“You are high in self-regulation and perseverance, which is probably why you’ve finished whatever you’ve started, regardless of whether or not it was a fit,” I said. “But what if you used those same strengths to finish something really hard that’s related to taking care of people instead?”
The phone went silent. I’m used to this. When you hit a nerve associated with a passion that’s been squelched, people often feel like they’ve been punched in the gut. They’re so accustomed to pushing their feelings away out of fear that zeroing in on something important has the effect of silencing them.
“You mean, like going to nursing school?” she finally breathed.
“Or medical school,” I countered. “You’re young. Why not?”
Everything was unlocked from that moment forward. Angelique went from having no passion to being consumed with the dream of going to nursing school. She told her live-in boyfriend that she was going to apply to a variety of schools that fit her needs and that she was going to pursue her dream instead of following him around the country as he built his own career. The relationship went through a rocky phase, but her boyfriend followed her to nursing school in Boston—and the last I heard, they were married and Angelique was blissfully happy in her work and volunteering her time as a “nurse without borders” in places around the world that needed her skills.
Angelique’s story is instructive, because although she felt life was joyless, she still had passion buried inside of her that needed encouragement to come out. Rediscovering that passion led to visualization of her best possible self, an analysis of which friends and family were most supportive of her decision to upend her life, and careful goal-setting, which involved risk-taking and grit. Angelique set goals that weren’t easy, but she also knew instinctively that she’d regret not pursuing those difficult goals if she didn’t give them her best shot before she settled down to raise a family. As a result, the changes in her relationship status, her newfound joy and confidence, and the fact that she felt she was adding something of value to the world all added up to change her life for the better, infusing it with purpose and showing her the power of going after your dreams, even when they aren’t immediately visible.
EXERCISE Questions to ask yourself
Just like Angelique’s life reboot started with a question about what she loved doing as a child, there are questions you can ask yourself if you aren’t sure how to find passion in and a purpose for your own life. Try a few of these. Spend some time thinking them through and writing out your answers, and even talking to supportive family and friends who could help you brainstorm.
• Which activities, people, or places give you energy?
• Remember the Values in Action Character Strengths Survey I introduced you to earlier in the book? When you’re using your top strengths in ways that bring you happiness, or that add to the happiness of others, what are you doing?
• How do you like to spend your free time?
• If you could design the perfect day for yourself, what would you do and with whom would you spend it?
• What causes do you volunteer for that matter the most to you? What about that cause is important to you?
• If you could be a superhero, what superpower would you want to have, and what would you do with it to make your life and the world better?
• If you couldn’t fail, what would you be doing—or doing more of? Why?
• If you could be profiled as a CNN Hero or a person featured in NBC’s Making a Difference, what type of difference would you be making, and why?
• What do you like to research on the computer?
• What do people compliment you on?
• When do you have fun?
EXERCISE Who am I when I am at my best?
Chris Peterson, who co-created the VIA Character Strengths Survey, suggested that an equally valuable way to identify our strengths is to think of our favorite characters from history, stage, screen, literature, comic books, commercials, and anywhere else where some person, fictional or nonfictional alike, has captured our fancy. Try this approach, and write down the characters that come to mind and the strengths that you associate with them. For example, if you think of Mary Poppins, you might note her “creativity” or “zest,” and if it’s a historical figure such as Gandhi, you might note his “patience” or “humility.” After coming up with some varied characters and their traits, write about how you have embodied those same strengths and any times when they showed you “at your best.”