Why Following Your Passion is the Hardest Thing You’ll Ever Do

October 1, 2012 by Blog

A few days ago, I was having a conversation with someone in my family that absolutely blew my mind — not in a good way.

The person I was speaking to told me that from the time I was very young, I had been independent and driven. She told me that I had always been the way I am and that everyone else just wasn’t born with my independent and confident genetic makeup.

Hold on a second there, partner. 

I’ll admit that I have pretty awesome parents, but I will not for one second accept that I am the way I am just because I was born this way.

On the contrary — I built myself this way.

Image: Doing the work

  • Not easy to wake up at 6am every morning when you don’t have to.
  • Not easy to write a book in four weeks when you don’t have to.
  • Not easy to work out four to five times a week when you don’t have to.
  • Not easy to reach out to intimidating peers when you don’t have to.

Do you see what I’m getting at? I’m not luckier than anyone else. I’m just willing to do the work nobody else wants to do.

Hiding Behind Excuses

In reality, what angered me about this comment was not so much what was being said about me in particular. What affected me the most was the realization that most people feel this same way and are completely wasting their potential!

Here’s what people may think:

  • If other people are just naturally gifted, it’s not possible for me to reach their heights.
  • If other people are just naturally gifted, I can relax and not try very hard.
  • If other people are just naturally gifted, I don’t stand a chance at being that happy.
  • If other people are just naturally gifted, learning isn’t worth my energy.

It takes time to find what you enjoy doing. It takes time to cultivate the necessary skills and improve in strides. It takes self-reflection

It takes hard work. My advice is you better start doing it.

Don’t Believe Me? Let’s Take Out The Calculator

It’s time to prove to you just how long it takes to master skills — even when it doesn’t feel like work.

Hitting the gym & gaining overall fitness: Over the past four years and four months, I have exercised an average of 4 hours per week. (And I’m being quite modest. I had various years of 6+ hours in the gym each week.)

If you do the math, the hours I’ve put in the gym are nearing 1,000 hours.

Sound easy? It wasn’t.

Image: writingThe Perpetual Vacation & working on this blog: Every single day of the week, I spend about two hours on my blog. I started the first version of this blog in March of 2010, so if you do the math, the total is kind of embarrassing.

I’m almost at 2,000 hours of working on my blog.

Sound easy? It wasn’t.

To Be or Like to Be & writing books: This first serious writing and publishing project of mine took about 4 weeks to develop.

Realistically speaking, I spent approx. 150 hours on the book.

Sound easy? It wasn’t.

Marca Labs & founding a startup: Working on my latest entrepreneurial venture takes up between four and five hours each workday. The first three months of the project were very laid back, and I didn’t do much while the website was being developed. Starting in March, I started investing much more time in the various projects that full under the Marca Labs umbrella.

The calculator says I’ve spent between 600 and 800 hours working on my startup.

Sound easy? It isn’t.

Not-So-Obvious Solutions

Here are my summarized two cents:

  • The beauty in getting to the point where you have some kind of passion and instinctual direction means that developing the necessary skills won’t feel too horrible.
  • The awesomeness in sitting down to write a journal (or blog) is that my emotions have spilled out whether I wanted them to or not. This could work for you, too.
  • The amazing part in realizing what you enjoy doing means that the next step is mustering the absolute courage to do something about it.

Talk about being your own superhero.

Did you think following your passion would be easy? It isn’t. But there’s a silver lining here that I hope you pay close attention to:

Nobody is born to be successful. Everyone has worked for it. That means that you can work for it and be successful, too. You can start NOW.

If you want to join my quest to live a perpetual vacation, drop your email below:

  

More badassery:

  1. Become a Passion Magnet, One Passion Project At a Time.
  2. Is “Following Your Passion” the New Ivy League?
  3. Programming the New Business Person: Passion + Usefulness.

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  • http://communityethics.co.uk Josh Chandler

    Marcella,

    This post is full of the ever present passion and honesty that I have come to love about your blog.

    All too often people who want to launch a business or work on something special get discouraged when they meet highly passionate and extroverted people who constantly enthuse about things.

    As you have shown in this article, passion is all about committing, no matter what, to achieving goals and making sure you stay focused on achieving the important objectives.

    I hope this article gets a lot of attention because it has such valuable lessons in it. Thanks for a great article Marcella.

    • http://www.marcellachamorro.com/ Marcella Chamorro

      Thanks, Josh! I agree with you that staying focused is such a major aspect of doing the hard work. Saying yes only to what is in-line with my goals is SO TOUGH, yet so important.

      • http://communityethics.co.uk Josh Chandler

        I agree. It isn’t the easiest thing to handle.

  • http://about.me/allruiz allruiz

    Genial!!!

    There’s a lot of great stuff in your blog, but this is outstanding… just plain and simple truth.

    People always look for a wonderful life with no effort at all… there’s no magic, just pure hard work.

    • http://www.marcellachamorro.com/ Marcella Chamorro

      Thanks, dude! This applies to fitness, too, doesn’t it? I always ask myself why people who want to *be fit* don’t hang out more where the fit people hang out = in the gym!

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