In Chapter 1 of 11, Rachel Lehmann-Haupt's mother encourages her to "Find your passion, find yourself." "In Her Own Sweet Time" author Rachel elaborates on how her mother's guidance and influence has guided and shaped her writing passion across high school, through Kenyon College and into a professional career.
In Chapter 16 of 16 of his 2009 interview with Capture Your Flag host Erik Michielsen, "Start With Why" author Simon Sinek shares why passion is a result and not an action. Finding one's passion requires creating a process to make it actionable. Sinek shares why the first step is to identify what you love and then to continue to enable this root element through action.
Simon Sinek is a trained ethnographer who applies his curiosity around why people do what they do to teach leaders and companies how to inspire people. He is the author of "Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action". Sinek holds a BA degree in cultural anthropology from Brandeis University.
Transcript
Erik Michielsen: What are your thoughts and what is your approach in finding and building upon passions?
Simon Sinek: Passion is not an actionable word. It is correct that those who do what they are passionate about do better, but it is not helpful advice. The question is where does passion come from? Passion is a result. Passion is an energy. Passion is the feeling you have when you are engaged in something you love. Passion is the feeling you have when you would probably do this for free and you can't believe someone pays you for it. We mistake that passion is something we do in our private lives but it shouldn't be done in our careers. I'm a firm believer in you are who you are and anyone who says they are different at home than they are at work then in one of those two places you are lying. The goal is to make everything you do at home at work something you are excited to do. So how do you find the thing that you are excited to do? It is easier than you think. What are the things you would do for free? What do you do when nobody tells you to do them? How can you recreate that feeling and be paid for it? I'm very involved in the art world. I love to go to museums and galleries and I love to go see dances and performances because I want to see how others are interpreting the world. That inspires me. New ideas, new thoughts, new ways of looking at the world are things that interest me, privately, and I seek it out and pay money for it. So, does that mean I have to have a career in the arts? No. That means I have to have a career where new ideas are explored, where people are experimenting and trying things out and I have to explore new ideas and try things out and I'm just as excited to go to work each day as I am to go do something on a Saturday night. The idea of finding your passion is ironically simple. You should be doing something you love sometime. What is the stuff that you enjoy and what is the stuff that you love? Who are the people you love and what do they all have in common?
In Chapter 2 of 9, Julia Green reflects on her Georgetown Law School experience. While there, Gatto remembers sharing an uncertainty toward career and purpose with her classmates and peers. Hiring companies present lucrative opportunities and students, unfamiliar about goals with career planning, accepting them not seeing alternative opportunities, especially given student loan obligations. Green highlights the benefit attending law school immediately upon college graduation, namely having a law degree by age 25. She also highlights the recruiting dichotomy between corporate law and public interest law and the necessary initiative required to push beyond the corporate recruiting marketing and promotion and into exploring public interest opportunities.
In Chapter 1 of 9, attorney Julia Green defines her role as a federal public defender in New York City. Green is a criminal defense lawyer who represents indigent defendants who cannot afford counsel.
In Chapter 9 of 15, music executive traces his relationshp with music from pre-high school Pink Floyd and Grateful Dead concert experiences. Not only does this early experience blossom into deeper appreciation for live music, especially the Grateful Dead and, later, Phish, but also it shapes way Epstein later will participate in this relationship as an Island Def Jam record label operations executive.
