What is your passion in life? If you don’t know what your passion is, should you have a passion?

If you know what your passion is, should you pursue it? To what extent? Should you try to monetize your passion, or not?

Let me essay some of these thoughts:

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What is ‘passion’?

Technically, the word ‘passion’ and ‘enthusiasm’ are different. When most people talk about passion, they mean to say ‘enthusiasm’.

• Passion: Pain, suffering (passion of the Christ)
• Enthusiasm: An inner-god dwelling within yourself

Generally when you are enthusiastic about something, you phenomenally love it and doing it. The inner-god within you drives you and self-motivates you.

With passion, perhaps we love it so much — it causes us deep pain. But perhaps we love it so much, that the pain doesn’t bother us so much?

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What is your passion(s) in life?

The tricky question:

What do you care about so deeply in life that you are willing to undergo severe pain in order to pursue/accomplish it?

Or in other words:

What do you care about so deeply that you are willing to sacrifice yourself for the collective/greater good?

What if you don’t know what your passion is?

I think it is fine to not know what your passion is. Furthermore, I think it is fine if you don’t have a passion in life. Above all, I think that creative activity is far more important. Which means, create more stuff (photos, drawings, videos, music, poetry, etc).

On monetizing your passion

If you want to turn your passion into your full-time occupation, I encourage you to hedge your risk by holding down a “normal” job to lay the bills, and work on your passion project on the side. This is what I did, and it was great, because building this blog (while I was full time employed) was more fun, less stressful, and I was able to “cross pollinate” learnings from my social media/community manager job into this blog.

My passion for photography

I love photography and find it endlessly fascinating. My passion is to make new photos, to push the visual genre of photography forward, while also sharing my passion with others.

I had much difficulty in my photographic journey, and have paved a lot of interesting ground. And my ambition is to share these learnings with others and you!

And honestly at this point, I am able to live so frugally that I don’t worry about money anymore. Thus you can bet this blog will always be alive, I will keep blogging until I die (at age 120), and I endeavor to delve ever-deeper into the philosophy of art, photography, entrepreneurship, and more.

Why do you care?

Why do you care about… anything? Why do you care for your passion?

For myself, there is an intrinsic joy of discovering new knowledge, coming up with new ideas, making new images, and sharing this with others. It gives me more joy and delight to know that what I am producing can aid others, because I remember how difficult it once was being on the other side.

So I guess in this sense the golden rule (do unto others as you want to do unto you) is apt. Perhaps this is a good entrepreneurial concept.

I love humanity, and I wish to contribute to help humanity evolve and advance to higher heights. I believe in unlimited human potential — and it is my ambition to help create more epic human beings.

Of course I’m experimenting first on myself. Let’s see how far we can go together!

ERIC