A life full of passion is a life worth living
Have you ever wondered, is there more to life than just this? A path full of excitement, full of passion? Picture for a moment, if you will: we go to school, we graduate, we find ourselves a good job (if lucky enough), we hope to get promoted in the company after years of hard work, we have a family and not very often we go for vacation.
Then the family grows, we get a pet, kids grow, they go to college, they find a good job, they get married and have children of their own. You retire and by that time, you feel too exhausted to do all the things you always said you would do when you retired, plus you need to take care of your nephews. This is how life looks like for most of us, more or less, isn’t it?
But is that all there is? How about the passion, the adventure, the eagerness? Wouldn’t you love the feeling of jumping out of bed each morning with a sense of excitement for what the day has prepared for you? The rush of actually enjoying what you’re doing and not just working because you have to.
Californian entrepreneur and Ted speaker Scott Dinsmore was asking himself the same questions after he decided to build up a strong resume that would help him climb the corporate ladder. Things were going great for him from the outside looking in, but it didn’t take him long to realize that doing a job you don’t love and that ultimately gives you no pleasure was not the answer he was looking for. He left his job at a Fortune 500 company, and not only did he decide to never go back on living anything but his passions, but he made it his life mission to change the world by helping others do the work they love as well.
Scott then founded the Live your Legend organization, where he connected tens of thousands of people that were looking for meaning in their lives.
Live your Legend
Think about your life right now, should you re-design it? You might want to take a look at Scott Dinsmore’s Ted talk “How to find and do work you love”. It has been viewed over 2 million times, and it has put many people on the journey to improve their lives. You can check it out here:
Scott is not among us anymore, he was tragically killed by a tumbling boulder while climbing mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, a long life dream of his. He was only 33 years old, but he lived more in his life than most do in a lifetime, and most of all, he lived his passion even in the last moments of life. Life’s not about how many years in your life, but the life in your years.
The pursuit of happiness is a pursuit of passion
Do you think your life would be different if you too would be living your true passions instead of the life that society thinks is normal? Do you even remember what your passions are? If the answer is no for that last question, maybe it’s time to rediscover them. This might be the first step in you living the life of your dreams. Think about when you were a child. Children know best how to enjoy their lives. And they know exactly what they want to be doing in any moment and do it. They know what they want to be when they grow up and they’re passionate about their aspirations: an astronaut, a scientist, a ballerina, a super hero, an actor, and the list goes on. That is until parents come and tell them to wake up, that reality is different.
It ain’t easy being real
April 12, 1961 – Russian astronaut Yuri Gagarin is the first man to enter space. Was he a super hero? Yes, he was, at least in most people’s terms. How did he become an astronaut? It all started with a dream. It all does. Jim Carrey had an unfortunate background before he became famous. But he never gave up, and here he is now. Anthony Robbins, a personal development guru, motivational speaker, entrepreneur and international best selling author, changed the lives of literally millions of people. He came from a poor family, his parents got divorced and his mother got re-married several times, he worked as a janitor and all he had was a big passion for life, love for people, and an incredible determination to be the best version of himself. are just some examples of people that dreamt big. Reality was not different for them and they decided to take matters in their own hands.
Set your goals and don’t be deterred
First step, as Scott Dinsmore said, is finding out what you really want, what is the work that you can’t not do, as he nicely put it. Introspection needs to be done, we need to become self experts and find out what is it that makes us tick.
And after you’ve realized what your true passions are, if you think it’s impossible or hard to get them, remember people like Yuri Gagarin had to fight the same issues. Don’t give up. In order to feel a sense of contribution and self worth, we need to have big dreams that motivate and stretch us. We grow stronger with our challenges, and they give us the strength to climb an obstacle when it’s most needed. Doing something that pushes us to grow makes us become the highest version of ourselves.
Everything was impossible until somebody went out and did it! In the early 1950’s it was thought to be impossible to run one mile in less than 4 minutes, until the 6th of May 1954, when Roger Bannister came out and broke that record. And guess what, in less then a few months, more people came out and did it, and even got better times. Now it became a standard for middle distance running for males.
If you follow your passion, you can never get lost
Finding your passion is like having your own “life compass”. Leonardo da Vinci wonderfully said: ”Fix your course to a star and you can navigate any storm”. Even if you find yourself in rough seas, you will be able to navigate them, because your star is right there. Just imagine doing what you love each and every day of your life, you carry everything you need in you. Even if you don’t have concrete goals, just live by what you think is right and you’re passionate about. No matter what the outside influences are, you can’t go wrong that way.