Passion & Money
first a distinction…
Passion is not the same thing as fantasy.
Passion
There’s a common belief in our culture that if you find something to do that you are good at, you will be successful, and if you are also wildly passionate about it, you can be wildly successful. This simplistic idea pleases us. There are enough examples of successful people confirming it to give it legs, and it offers a cleansing illusion that supposedly removes the evil taint associated with money.
Passion, though, is not an activity but an emotion, appropriate to devotion such as in love, sex, religion, art. In pure form it has no goal and is its own reward.
In order for the belief or tenet about success to make sense applied to a life plan, we have to marry our passions to activity, adding means, and goals, as well as motivations.
The term marriage here connotes the process through which we build the vehicle of daily human activity within which to carry and nurture our passion.
Understanding passion is easy in the context of a great love or devotion, talent or gift. Any of these translates clearly in our minds into a picture of daily activity. Bringing that picture into a context of worldly success, however, is much more elusive.
Some of us are passionate and some of us are gifted. Everyone has passions and everyone has gifts. Both of those statements are true. Using what we have most effectively can also be viewed as being true to ourselves, which may or may not translate into worldly success.
Money
We all know that money is but a token of exchange. Trading your effort for those tokens in order to acquire/provide the necessities of life is the first order of survival.
A focus on worldly success and wealth, however, is capable of pushing almost every emotional button human beings have. We can believe passionately in a classless society, for example, but human nature will still dictate that we’ll be judged against our accumulation of tokens. Power and success are tokens, too, which may or may not translate into money. The ability to cause other people to do things is power. Setting a world record or baking the perfect souffle are both types of successes.
Anyone who says they don’t discriminate or judge is lying. The whole concept is totally contrary to human nature. You can feel virtuous for being humane and compassionate when you help someone less fortunate, but you can’t explain how you determined the basis of that without making judgments. Or, as my husband is fond of pointing out, if you tell kids that you’ll no longer keep score in a game they’re playing so that there won’t be any losers, they’ll ignore you and keep score for themselves.
Keeping score is natural. I want to own my accomplishments and successes. It is completely unrelated to whether and why I might decide to use my tokens for someone else’s benefit.
Our difficulties come about not from making judgments or keeping score. They arise from passing and executing sentences based on those judgments, from taking actions which affect another’s rights and freedoms. We’re all entitled to our opinions, and are going to have them even if we aren’t lucky enough to live in a society that grants us personal freedom to state them out loud.
We analyze constantly on the basis of comparison, deciding how a thing/place/idea/person is the same or different from another, in order to discriminate and make judgments.
Wanting to succeed in monetary terms really has no more morality attached to it than wanting to hit the most baseballs in a game does. Doing it has requirements and consequences, though.
If your world is partly defined by your relationships with friends and peers, most of those relationships will change if and when you have a noticeably greater amount of tokens than you did when you met. Those relationships might have to change substantially before you can reach a set goal of token ownership. Setting off in a different direction will make you different. You will be judged.
Some people who succeed financially receive adulation and others are vilified. The basis of either of those rewards is a perception of a combination of things, many of them superficial, such as charisma or lack thereof and good or bad public relations. Rarely is it a purely moral judgment.
Being more successful than others means, by definition, being different. It means a greater share of the spotlight. It attracts, proportionately, the attention, speculation, and judgment of others. It changes who your peers are.
I’ve never met a highly successful person who wasn’t passionate about something. They don’t necessarily care about more things than others …many are breathtakingly single minded… but their depth of caring and commitment to something is exceptional.
