The Passion Economy
Exploring the belief that by taking risks, failing often, and turning our passions into our careers, we create more positive outcomes for ourselves and the communities in which we live.
Search
Blogroll
Twitter feed
Loading Tweet...
Contact Me
Posts I like
-
“Success is how high you bounce when you hit bottom.”— General George Patton
-
Can You See Your Failures as Blessings?
Mahatma Gandhi did. This is what he had to say about the subject…
“My imperfections and failures...
-
“In order to succeed, your desire for success should be greater than your fear of failure.”— Bill Cosby
-
“No mistake or failure is as bad as to stop and not try again”— John Wanamaker
-
Risk-Taking Through World-Making
One of my favorite movies is The Game. In this psychological thriller Michael Douglas plays a tightly-wound investment banker whose success in business is matched only by his emotionless personal life. On his 48th birthday Michael’s brother (played by Sean Penn) gives him a voucher to a mysterious company called Consumer Recreation Services (CRS). Michael begrudgingly redeems the voucher and, in the weeks that follow, CRS proceeds to destroy his life. One day, after being blackmailed, chased by gunmen, and accidentally shooting (and killing) his own brother, Michael decides that life’s not worth living and jumps off a high rise. Michael freefalls towards the ground, crashes through a glass skylight but, rather than meeting his demise, lands safely onto a giant cushion to the applause of his close friends and brother. As he comes to himself, Michael begins to understand that the events that transpired since his birthday were an elaborately staged game. And, as he feels his body well up with a profound mix of emotion, he is reborn.
A few weeks ago I asked productivity guru and entrepreneur Stever Robbins: what are some methods for helping people to take bigger risks in their lives? Stever replied with an interesting thought: people have a very well defined threshold for risk. The strategy should not be to force or lure them across that threshold, but rather to reframe risk so that they become more risk-tolerant without even realizing it. While it would be super expensive (and probably illegal) to run a business like CRS, it does illustrate Stever’s point on the power of reframing risk, in this case by creating an alternate reality.
So, with The Game as an inspiration, I’m curious to explore what aspects of “risk-taking through world-making” are on offer today. Here are a few I’ve stumbled upon:
- Visualization consultancies: e.g. Otto Scharmer’s Theory U, in which individuals and organizations envision a future state and then move to embody it.
- Community-building off-sites: e.g. the Mankind Project, where participants are cut off from the world for several days and let down their guard as they adjust to an alternate reality (in this vein, Army Basic Training Boot Camps; Otherworld adventures; company off-sites).
- Location-based games: e.g. scvngr, where participants use GPS-enabled devices to solve puzzles by finding items strewn about a city, sometimes in inaccessible or risky locations.
- Location-based plays: e.g. an experimental play at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival, which the audience views inside different venues throughout the city. For example, in one scene actors have a scripted fight at a restaurant that is otherwise operating as usual.
Each one of these covers one aspect (or more) of risk-taking through world-making, and I’m looking forward to discovering what else is out there.
I’ve found that many who take a risk to follow their passion express a deep faith in the tendency for the universe to recognize their intentions, and reward their risk-taking by showing them a way to make it work (financially, socially, etc).
One great expression of this idea is the great American Road trip. From Kerouac to Peter Fonda in Easy Rider, road trips are a form of expressing clear intent (to cross the country) while embracing a faith in the ability of the universe to guide the way (to find food, shelter, and transport).
One current example of this is Chuteless, an experiment in “‘temporarily removing something in life that’s taken for granted and seeing what happens” or, put differently, “The Chuteless equation is: ‘We are going to XXX without XXX in order to XXX’.
Follow the link to follow the adventures of Simon Bray, Matt Donovan and Ben Bray as they “TRAVEL FROM NY TO LA without MONEY FOR TRAVEL/ACCOMMODATION in order to GET TO KNOW AMERICA.”
Nitin Rao sparks a conversation on how MBAs can follow their passion, in light of significant loan payments. Click through for more-
Next steps:
Take a safe job till I eventually pay off debt.Build a great company, and use entrepreneurial thought and action, starting with connections/resources at hard to find certain ways to cover monthly installments. Not to mention the much higher happiness and drive from being able to shape my experience!
What do Lucille Ball, the Beatles, Ulysses Grant, Michael Jordan, Thomas Edison, Walt Disney, and Abraham Lincoln have in common? A whole lot of failure. One of my favorite videos on the subject. Life = Risk. Are you willing to take it?
Fear of Failure: Atychiphobia, as with all phobias, is an extreme, irrational fear.
For a full definition, follow the link.
The Simple Math of Passion
I’ve been curious to explore the link between passion and happiness and I’m starting to uncover a basic formula. Drawing only from my conversations (and very little research), here’s a rough proof:
To Be Passionate = To Be All-Consumed
When I’ve asked people how to find my passion, time and again the answer I’ve received is “any activity where time flies by.” Be it reading a book, working on a piece of art, or solving a tricky logic problem, it’s the experience of being so consumed in your work that the rest of the world fades away; the experience of one hour passing in five minutes.
To Be All-Consumed = To Be Happy
Case in point: yesterday Fast Company profiled a new study where participants’ iPhones pinged them several times a day to ask them what they’re up to and how happy they’re feeling. The scientists found that users who were most engaged in what they were doing reported the highest levels of happiness. Conversely those who weren’t engaged - whose minds wandered - reported a feeling of dissatisfaction. As stated in their report: “A wandering mind is an unhappy mind.”*
To Be Passionate = To Be Happy?
By the transitive property, if to be passionate is to be all-consumed, and to be all-consumed is to be happy, then does being passionate about your work lead to happiness? A logic that I’m continuing to explore, but I’m encouraged by what I’ve found so far.
* For those questioning cause and effect:
The Harvard psychologists compared each person’s moods and thoughts as the day went on. They found that if someone’s mind wandered at, say, 10 in the morning, then at 10:15 that person was likely to be less happy than at 10 , perhaps because of those stray thoughts. But if people were in a bad mood at 10, they weren’t more likely to be worrying or daydreaming at 10:15. “We see evidence for mind-wandering causing unhappiness, but no evidence for unhappiness causing mind-wandering,” Mr. Killingsworth says.
On a related note, last weekend I attended a talk by a Buddhist nun who touched on this very point. One of Buddha’s well-known statements is that “life is suffering.” As the nun explained, suffering as Buddha meant it is less about actual pain, and more about not being present in the moment. It’s that state of unease — some would call it stress — that comes from not being focused on the here and now.
Honda just launched a new site called “The Power of Dreams,” which contains a series of beautifully crafted short documentaries that capture the essence of what The Passion Economy is all about: inspiring people to take big risks to follow their passions, and celebrating their failures as the learning experiences that they are.
Writes Honda:
Honda is a company founded by a dreamer. And we are a company that believes in the Power of Dreams. In this spirit, we have created a series of short documentary films celebrating those who have the courage to turn failure into success, and to forge dreams into a better future. Empowered by their deeply held beliefs and guiding philosophies, these individuals make the impossible real.
For more videos, visit Honda - The Power of Dreams.
My friend Kiran sent me this cartoon. As you might notice, the goat on the unicycle “Isn’t Afraid to Fail.” I was happy to see that, at least in the mind of a cartoonist, this characteristic is considered a positive trait ;)
Click through for a higher resolution version. As found on Virus Comix.
The Value of Passion in an Uncertain Economy - Stever Robbins Interviews Martha Beck
One of my intentions for this site is to explore how following one’s passion can enable viable career opportunities for those living in cities that are struggling economically. I’m particularly excited about the impact that this could have in the Rust Belt communities of Buffalo and Detroit.
Today I listened to a brilliant interview with Martha Beck (best-selling author of Finding Your North Star) conducted by Stever Robbins, of Get-It-Done-Guy fame.
I thought this interview was valuable for two reasons: first, Martha described how to go about finding your passion (hint: it has a lot less to do with your intellect and a lot more to do with your body). Second, Martha ended with a thought that epitomizes the idea I hope to promote via the Passion Economy, and articulates it much better than I have so far. Namely,
The world is changing so rapidly that we are going to see things in the next five to ten years that you truly can not imagine. But your heart, the part that is not intellect, is aware of those things already. That’s where they’re going to come from. So do not try to stay with what is normative. It’s all going bye-bye. “Walking out with the word of God,” as one of my clients said, just going out with your own creativity, is the most secure thing you can do in today’s economic climate.
Thanks to Martha for sharing her wisdom and Stever for giving her the platform to do so. Click play (above) or download (below) to hear it for yourself. The interview is 24 minutes long.
15 Plays | Download
The Rise of the Anti-Schools
Over the last few weeks I’ve heard a number of social entrepreneurs advocate for less linear approaches to education. Many of these arguments are based on the premise that academic institutions as we know them are not dynamic enough to serve our changing needs as students as we discover the world, our abilities, and our interests. As Sir Ken Robinson (author, speaker and advisor on education) put it in one of TED’s most widely emailed videos:
[There are a number of things that we’re enthralled to in education as it currently stands]. One of them is the idea of linearity, that it starts here, and you go through a track, and if you do everything right, you will end up set for the rest of your life. Everybody who’s spoken at TED has told us implicitly, or sometimes explicitly, a different story, that life is not linear, it’s organic. We create our lives symbiotically as we explore our talents in relation to the circumstances they help to create for us. But you know, we have become obsessed with this linear narrative. And probably the pinnacle for education is getting into college. I think we are obsessed with getting people to college, certain sorts of college. I don’t mean you shouldn’t go to college, but not everybody needs to go, and not everybody needs to go now. Maybe they go later, not right away.
Where I’ve heard less discussion is on what a non-linear approach to education looks like. What are the values that it’s based on? What are the grounding principles? And how do you track your progress? Also, is it possible for an academic institution to be the purveyor of non-linear education?
A couple of recently founded alternative MBA programs would argue yes to that last question. Take the KaosPilot School, a Denmark-based alternative MBA program whose mission is “to create positive societal change through personal growth and enterprise.” Unlike traditional MBA programs, the KaosPilot School has no classes or subjects. Instead, the school year is divided into several phases where students focus on one subject for a period of time.
Another example is Johns Hopkins’s recently-founded Carey Business School. It takes the opposite approach of Kaos in that 80% of the curriculum is core, however its classes are pretty radical, such as a human expression module taught by a drama professor. Says, Dean Yash Gupta in an interview in Fortune: “I believe learning is not about looking alike,” Gupta says. “If you really want to believe in a new kind of program then all experiences must come to play.”
The long term success of alumni from alternative programs remains to be seen, however the conversation around the need for such programs seems to be getting louder and louder.
Started in the heat of the recession in 2009, brothers Mike and Dave left their full-time jobs to pursue their passion for a sustainable lifestyle through innovative design. Most famous for their Holstee Tee, made of 100% recycled material, their startup has also achieved notoriety for their clear, fun, hold-no-punches manifesto.
In one of my favorite speeches, Harry Potter author JK Rowling delivers an amazing address to the Harvard Alumni Association titled “The Fringe Benefits of Failure.” In this speech JK Rowling describes how her career hitting the skids made possible her turnaround as an author and eventual creation of the Harry Potter franchise.
She writes, “I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realized, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.”
In both her story and that of Erik Proulx (below) there’s a common theme about how failure enables people to take the risks that ultimately serve them best. It’s only after they’re forced to fail do they start truly risking failure. In a sense I find that counter-intuitive and I’m curious to explore the subject in more detail.
The text / transcript of the speech is found here.
Career Cadence: A Workshop on Passion
This week I had an inspiring chat with Alan and Paul, two Yale School of Management grads and founders of Career Cadence, an unusual startup focused on helping college students and young professionals to figure out their passions. Once the passion piece is figured out, they help their clients to find a job that fits this passion, and then help them market themselves effectively to potential employers. Oh, and they do this all, with great success, in five hours.
In my conversations with Paul and Alan I’ve been struck by how practically they frame the value of turning your passion into your career. They speak about the personal benefits of being a better performer at work (“Passion is a competitive advantage”). They also speak about the macroeconomic advantage of a society where people are more productive, where they come home with less stress and are thus more likely to take care of their families and their health.
Wonderful stuff and refreshing to see an education-focused startup in an era dominated by scalable technology. I’m curious to follow their journey. Here’s to their success.
“You know how the Eskimos have like 30 something words for snow? I keep thinking that we need a larger set of words for failure. Like there’s the good failure you learn from and then there’s the failure due to neglect or lack of drive. A new word…or maybe just a symbol like prince. A huge thumbs up next to a glass of spilled milk.”
Lora Menter
