Did anyone ever accuse you of being passionate about your job? I began working at the age of twelve and I must have been over forty before anybody ever made such an accusation about me. Mind you, I always worked hard and tried to do my best but it is a big jump to the class of being passionate about your job. It wasn’t until I started using my unique talents on my new job that work became a passion. I believe that we are all given unique talents but unfortunately most of us never get to use those talents for their full time work. Like me, I think that most people somehow get in the wrong line when it comes to job placement. This came to mind just the other evening at the Texas Steak House. Our waitress explained to my wife and I that there was a difference between her job and her vocation. She was studying to become a registered nurse and was just about to take her final year of study. She was working at her job and doing the best she could at that job but it was still just a job. She did not seek promotion. Driving home from dinner it sort of hit me, “Gee, why didn’t I figure that out when I was twenty years old instead of when I was forty three. What a lot of suffering I went through. What is your special talent? Have you figured that out yet? What are you doing about turning it into a means of employment? Or what are you doing about using that talent part time for the good of others?
Art,
Forty? It was about that age when I had the same epiphany, the same self discovery. I hadn’t changed, I was the self-same person, just enlightened. I don’t think I’ve ever had a job I wasn’t passionate about.
Your friend, my acquaintance the late great Cavit Robert said: he didn’t want “a man who had a job, but rather a man who’s job had him!” Like you I am that man. My passion is people in all their follies.
I think there are two reasons so many fail to succeed in their passion. Perhaps the most dominate is mistaking lust for passion! Second is self-imposed limitations, brought on by lust. People build walls with to much debt, to many obligations to soon.
Homer had himself tided to the mast and his crew’s ears filled with wax to sail past the lusty Siren’s , a passionate man would have gone back!
Lust fades, passion grows! I’ve been passionate about my wife from the day we meet, about 43 years ago.
I was blessed, a lot of very good people guided me to the right line very early in life.
Bill