Dissecting Passion

Passion, a mystery

It seems magical, doesn’t it? We see these figures online, people filled with passion about their craft that they devote their whole lives to it. People like Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, Georges St Pierre. It doesn’t just have to be athletes. We hear about obsessed musicians, mad scientists, and mental actors. These people seem to have something in them which drives them to a level of excellence that is unheard of. You, a normal dude/dudette, who enjoys your hobby for a couple hours here and there, just cannot understand these passionate people.

“I enjoy playing guitar as much as the next person, but I couldn’t practice for 48 hours straight!” you validly complain.

Steve Vai stated that he would often practice from Friday night all the way till Monday morning. Kobe Bryant’s practice schedule was a known monstrosity. He’d be at the gym finishing his workouts when normal players would be walking into the courts. Uncommon amongst uncommon men. It is obvious that passionate people enjoy their crafts, otherwise why would they practice so much?

Money is clearly not the driving force. Neither is fame. Nor family. Girlfriends. Boyfriends. Proving themselves to their egos. No reason can withstand the monumental effort and sacrifices hyper passionate people go through. Simply put, they are passionately addicted to the game because they find intrinsic enjoyment in the activity.

I happen to think people can engineer passion within themselves. I am fully confident about this because I’ve done it once before. Maybe not to the degree of the people I’ve mentioned so far, but I’ve done it and it surprised me a quite a bit. Through this blog post, I hope to paint a picture of what passion is and how one can go about generating passion in ourselves.

The goal is to stop thinking about passion as if it’s something mystical, sent down from the sky. We’re not talking about fiery arrows shot by the gods, falling into the earth at random to strike a few lucky people who happen to be in the arrow’s path. Passion is like thermodynamics: it’s a natural process which can be logically explained and has certain laws. Before we get too ahead of ourselves, let’s get some things out of the way.

What is passion?

Since we’re gonna talk about passion so much, it’s gonna be important to be on the same page on what it is we’re talking about. When I use the word “passion”, it refers to a feeling that a person feels while doing an activity. The activity is so enjoyable that it compels a person to do it over and over again.. Like eating chocolate chip cookies but for a hobby.

Importantly, the most passionate people usually desire performing an activity for the sake of the activity itself, like hinted at in the introduction. But passion can arise organically even if, in the beginning, the person is doing the activity for other reasons; it just depends. Let’s look at 2 case studies.

Moral of the story: motivations matter in this topic. You must enjoy the activity for itself, if you’re looking to become passionate about the said activity.

Why should you care?

These are valid, but incorrect arguments. I think having deep passion about something makes life happier, more fulfilling, reduces your ego, and gives you purpose. 

Most people, if you ask them what their purpose in life is, fall into two camps. People who want everything materialism can offer (money, power, fame, admiration, etc) or happiness (harmony with friends, family, personal integrity, sense of place in society, etc). I argue that both are fulfilled by chasing passion. If you’re passionate about the right thing, in the right way, it’s easier to gain material objects than otherwise.

On the less obvious side, being passionate makes you a better human and thus a more valuable member to society. This inherently makes a person happier as well as making society cherish them more. Passion is the solution to the bland lives that people live day in and day out. Passion is like the strokes of a color pencil filling in the black and white images that represent everyday life. Why wouldn’t you want to pursue it?

The laws of passion

Now we’re getting to the good stuff. There are important principles at work when it comes to passion. This is the reason why passion seems to have an air of mystery; there’s seemingly no pattern and predictability. You cannot get passionate about any random thing that you’d desire. You cannot force passion just like you cannot force love in a thing that you’re indifferent about. It just doesn’t work that way. So, it seems that there’s no due process to creating passion, but there seems to be a couple of laws to passion, which makes it have perfect sense.

The laws of passion:

• 1st law of passion – You can only get passionate about an activity which holds meaning for you
  
• 2nd law of passion – More meaning, more passion; less meaning, less passion
  
• 3rd law of passion – An emotional connection to the activity makes the sense of meaning stronger

This cannot be faked. You can’t rationalize yourself into pulling meaning out of your butt.

Something about you, your personality, your deepest self must strike a chord with this activity. Maybe it’s your life’s experiences, maybe it’s necessity. Whatever it may be, it must be real. Here are some examples:

1. Basketball is my one solace. No matter what’s happening in my life, I know I can always grab a ball, head to the park, and have my mind at peace. Working at it, working at it, dribbling the ball, shooting my jump shots. Imagining a better life, imagining a better life, being like Magic Johnson one day. Haha. I’m smiling, I’m sweating, I’m playing with my friends in the park, and I have a cool personal problem to solve now: how to get better at basketball?

2. I am proud that I’ve been logical my whole life. I used to help my mom (who doesn’t read english) with her diabetes medicine every night. Step by step processes come naturally to me, and I can control my emotions to actually see what reality is. I’m proud about that. I love computer science because of how logical it is. One step leads perfectly into another, and there’s no chaos, unlike life, which can be chaotic. I really appreciate computers for being this way. Programming is a way I can preserve my sanity in this crazy world.

These two examples showcase 2 very strong cases of meaning, and we don’t need to have something that strong. However, if we want to create the deepest sense of passion within ourselves, we have to try to find the deepest sense of meaning that the activity can possibly hold for us. Remember law 2 and 3.

Creating a sense of meaning with passion

I’d like to really emphasize that you don’t necessarily have to bring a sense of meaning out of your nature or circumstances. You can create it yourself, but you just cannot fake it.

For example, say you wanted to create passion for painting in yourself by following the steps outlined in this blog. What you cannot do is create a sense of meaning by just repeating the words, “Painting is important to me” over and over again. You cannot trick yourself. Your mind is smarter than that. The sense of meaning has to be real, even if it’s not strong, even if it’s not for the sake of the activity itself.

Recall that nobody starts working out for the sake of working out in the beginning. BUT, the sense of meaning for it is very strong. People have different motivations for working out, but some of those can be

These are all highly meaningful reasons even though the reasons for working out may be impure¹. Even though we don’t strictly need a pure reason since we have a super meaningful reason for doing the activity, we still count on our original impure motivations converting into purer ones over time. Nevertheless, whatever reason you come up with, you must make sure it is truly meaningful to you and not far-fetched.

Engineering passion

We’re now at a position to discuss how to create passion within ourselves for an activity. To be able to engineer passion, at the very least we need to fulfill the first law of passion i.e. the activity we’re trying to build passion for needs to hold real meaning for us. If the meaning rests within the activity straight off the bat, all the better. If the meaning resides in something that the activity leads you to (a better body through working out), that’s fine for now too. Once we’re at this point, building a sense of passion is a two-step process:

1. Create a reasonable schedule for practice and stick to it. Eliminate all possible options for skipping practice

2. Progressively overload the duration or difficulty of training with an intelligent game plan

Does our schooling engender passion?

I’m not saying that school builds passion. In fact, most of the time it does the opposite. People go through the motions of going to class, do the bare minimum to pass, and try to hang out with friends as much as possible. If anything, school sucks the passion out of these subjects that we are forced to study. BUT, it is undeniable that school is effective at building competency, which is very closely related to building passion.

The only reason school doesn’t create passion out of these subjects is because most of us don’t encounter activities meaningful to us in schooling. I don’t care about chemistry; it holds no meaning to me. So, being forced to learn it drives me crazy and makes me despise it. Yet, you see some of your peers who seem to be really into chemistry.. Something about these mystical unicorns, their lives, history, and circumstances induce them to find meaning in chemistry either in itself or meaning through second order i.e. I need to be good at chemistry to get good grades, which is meaningful to me. This is the reason they become good at it, which is also important to building passion.

The second item which mirrors the two-step process are games. Games by design work in a progressively overloaded way. You don’t fight the level 100 boss to begin with. That’d be too much for you to bite off, like making a first grader do calculus. Games are also fun to play and release a lot of dopamine in us, making skipping practice a near impossibility. Unlike school, where you’re motivated by risk to attend, we get motivated to play games by our desire to seek pleasure and progress; you’re naturally gravitated to play. The risk of not playing is that you’ll not progress in the game, simple as that.

So, we seen that school and games are two things that have different aspects of the two-step process to building passion embedded in them, even though they may or may not be successful in building the passion itself. Now let’s discuss how we can apply this process in a real way because there’s a lot to unpack in the steps to make it as effective as possible.

Important details about engineering passion

Just knowing the two-step process isn’t enough. We all need to know exactly how we can go about implementing it in our lives properly. We must know the correct mindset we need to have about all this, otherwise it’s just words on a screen. Let’s all let go of our earlier patterns of thinking about passion: to build passion, you need to be brutally honest with yourself (and others), work hard, and think in detail. Vagueness is your enemy. 

The paradox that fools people is that they think that you either have passion or you don’t, when it’s just not that simple. Passion is the result of detailed, analytical thinking mixed with the right work ethic over a long course of a long time. It doesn’t just appear magically. Behind the scenes, the passionate person has painstakingly laid thousands of bricks, even if they’re not aware of it. Thus, we, who want to build passion, need to change how we think; we need to think about passion consciously from the first principles.

Step 1

“Create a reasonable schedule for practice and stick to it. Eliminate all possible options for skipping practice”

What makes a reasonable schedule?

This schedule needs to be tailored to you and your level of experience. If you’re a beginner in programming, create a schedule which isn’t too difficult to follow. Don’t be too intense in the beginning. Dip your toes in the water first. Practicing everyday for 5 minutes would be preferable to practicing 35 minutes on Saturday. Try your best to make it reasonable from this standpoint.

What is “eliminating all possible options for skipping practice”?

Our biggest problem as humans is ego. We think we know best, even if we’ve failed 10000 times. In some cases, this is our strength; in others, not so much. In the case of building habits (which is what we’re trying to do through step 1), we’re not very good at keeping our own promises. It is so easy to cheat yourself that it is laughable. Trusting ourselves is the number one reason most good habits we’re trying to build end up dying an early death. It’s the beginner’s curse. To avoid it, we’re gonna remove options for not sticking to our game plan.

This is where the brutal honesty comes in. In the beginning, it is preferable to involve other people or entities into your game plan. Take the help of a third party who will keep you accountable. If you are already disciplined with sticking to your schedule, that’s great! But if not, rely on someone who will keep you in check. Also, associate some level of negative cost with missing practice and make sure that when you do, the entity keeping you accountable charges the risk. Check out the examples below if this isn’t clear right now.

Examples –

• Every time I don’t go to the gym according to my schedule, I have to pay my workout partner $20.
• If I don’t post a blog every week, I have to do 500 pushups. My mom routinely checks my blog page and catches me if she doesn’t notice a new entry.
• I record live streams of me studying for the GRE everyday. If I don’t post a new video for my study session, I have to donate a certain amount to my favorite charity. I’ve instructed my followers (if have any) to remind me of this. If not, I have instructed friends/family. 
• I will practice guitar everyday at 8PM or I will not buy the guitar strap that I really wanted

These are some examples I pulled out of my hat right now, but you see the idea. The point is to rely on someone or something else, which is very important. We’re trying to create a system that insulates us on the day when we’re tired and weary, and it’s gonna be so easy to say, “Screw it. Just one day, I’m gonna skip”. Sometimes, of course, it is difficult to have that interested party who will keep us in line, but try your best to find them or do the next best thing: trust yourself. Caveat: if this keeps happening a lot, maybe you’re too tired and burnt out. This is a sign that your practice schedule is too intense for your level right now. Lighten up the load and make it doable. With time, you’ll get stronger and be able to increase your volume.

Step 2

“Progressively overload the duration or difficulty of training with an intelligent game plan”

What kind of progressive overload are you speaking about?

The kind which varies in duration and difficulty. Any activity has levels to it. Painting, guitar playing, programming, running, any and all of it. You can make things more difficult for yourself by using advanced techniques, trying to experiment with it, failing, analyzing why you failed, refining techniques you’ve already learnt, and creating longer practice schedules (once you can easily practice for the amount of time you started out with).  

What makes an intelligent game plan?

This is crucial. Every MMA fighter goes through a “camp” when they’re preparing for a fight. The camp is neatly tailor to drill concepts which the fighter is lacking in, is strong in, what their opponent lacks, is strong in, and everything in between. Conditioning, strength, flexibility, mobility, all the ities. A detailed, structured game plan of such caliber covers all aspects of the fight.

Similarly, create a game plan for yourself. It doesn’t have to be that detailed, but at least you’ll have a clear jump from one level of practice to the other. Keep school or college in mind, how planned your education was. Some people created the schedule you followed. Make an imaginary college degree for yourself which represents the game plan of practice. This’ll be easier for some activities than others, but do your best.

Example –

I want to be passionate about writing

This can be as detailed as you want it to be. In fact, it’s probably better if it’s detailed. Identify the important skills associated with your activity and write a game plan which’ll make you work on each of them. Doesn’t have to be perfect for it to work. Having a game plan is better for learning than just throwing darts in the dark and hoping you’re hitting the correct spots. If it starts getting too easy, make the plan more difficult. Raise the intensity of practice. If it’s too difficult, lighten up. 

Conclusion

We’ve now realized why passion is important in life, defined a checklist of items which must be complete before even embarking on this journey, and how to actually steer the ship when you’re smack in the middle of the ocean that mastery of any activity is. No matter what activity, craft, skill, subject you choose to build passion on, there will be levels to it, and you’ll have to be careful not to drown in the vastness of the knowledge and follow the blueprint with hopeful faith.

Like professor Moody said in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire – “Constant Vigilance!”. You need to be constantly vigilant of what you’re doing, how the game plan is working out for you, etc. Fears, anxieties, and doubts are part of the process. but remember that the mountain is climbable. It is climbable but can never be summited, which is the beauty of it. The journey never ends, but you will make progress and will be mesmerized with the view that’ll be before you 2, 3, 4 years after beginning. Best of luck. 

1. A pure motivation would be for doing an activity only for the sake of the activity ↩︎