Here is what I know, for sure:
Oprah frustrated many adults and their children when she challenged us all, in so many words, to make our personal passions our life work. I still cannot go one week without someone asking me, “What is your passion?” or asking me the same question relative to my college-aged children.
Oprah was a motivational genius when she initiated this dilemma in the 1990’s, telling everyone, “What I know is, is that if you do work that you love, and work that fulfills you, the rest will come.” She challenged each and every one of us to identify our passion, as if it is the singular profound link to finding success. The question sent us all into a tailspin, all of us taking interest surveys and searching introspectively to identify what we love. We have since passed that pressure-filled question onto our children and even linked its ever-important response to college admissions and eventual long-term job prospects. If you can expend Malcolm Gladwell’s requisite 10,000 hours on your passion, you will become an expert in the field and, no doubt, find success.
Please know that I admire both Oprah Winfrey and Malcolm Gladwell; however, I have looked into the eyes of many a teenager and asked them what really makes them tick – “What do they enjoy doing in their free time?” – only to hear back the mundane response, “Hanging out with friends” or worse, “I don’t know.” I have coached the ideal students – truly students who embrace every challenge – and yet, they have little motivation to pursue a singular topic of interest, other than those that are assigned to them in a classroom.
Well, I hate to admit it, and I really have grown to detest the “P” word, but finding a passion is really, really important. I think where we all go astray is believing that our passion can only be that one monumental thing that motivates us, when, in reality, we can have multiple passions.
The summer is the ideal time to identify a passion – an interest or curiosity, if you will – a topic worthy of your thorough investigation. I challenge you to challenge yourself and your children to pursue a topic of interest to exhaustion. Put a topic about which you are intensely curious – kites, croquet, the Tudor family, fishing – under a microscope, and read, study, and explore all that you can about that topic. This is not necessarily a life-long commitment, but try to make it at least a year-long commitment, to evaluate the depth of your interest.
I promise that such a pursuit will bring you joy, if not ultimate success. Your newfound knowledge will serve to make you, to make your children, multidimensional, interesting, and interested.
That is what I know, for sure.