Today, we continue our Dadly Daily Declaration series with readings from The Passion Paradox by authors Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness. So far, Stulberg and Madness have discussed the pitfalls of passion and the sole focus of pursing your passion. Today’s reading focuses on the imbalance of harmonious passion.
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Here are a few gems from today’s reading:
- Whether it’s falling in love, trekking in the Himalayas, writing a book, or training to go as fast as we can in a sport, during these bouts of full-on living, you were completely consumed by yourr activities. Trying to be balanced—devoting equal portions of time and energy to other areas of your lives—would have detracted from your formative experiences.
- Nearly all the great performers—from athletes to artists to computer programmers to entrepreneurs—can draw a direct line between being happy, fulfilled, and at their best and going all in on something.
- Balance implies equilibrium. That you can juggle all the components of life in equal accord. That you can simultaneously be present in all your pursuits. That you can be the best husband, the best father, the best employee, the best student, the best athlete, and so on—and do all these things at once. But this is an illusion, and one that is easily debunked by even just a brief examination of the passionate individual. When someone is wrapped in passion, she is anything but balanced. She is consumed, fully present with and singularly focused on the object of her desire. Ask anyone who has ever really gone for something—who has truly tried to become the best they could be, if not the best, period—and she will tell you that it becomes easy to forget that anything outside her passion exists. Passion is disruptive. Even if it’s of the harmonious variety, and even if you develop it incrementally, passion throws your life out of balance. Living with passion can be, as one of its original meanings implied, a struggle.
- Our time, attention, and energy are limited. The more passionate we become about any one pursuit, the less of ourselves we have to offer to everything else. This is not necessarily “good” or “bad.” It just is.
- You simply cannot be deeply passionate and balanced in combination. The roots of passion—both biological and psychological—prevent it.
- Living with passion is, by definition, living without balance.
- The problem isn’t that you sacrifice a lot for passion, but that it’s all too easy to let the inertia of a passionate experience carry you forward without ever really evaluating what you’re sacrificing—for example, time with friends and family, other hobbies, even simple pleasures like catching up on the latest episode of your favorite television show.
Those gems lead us to today’s Dadly Daily Declaration:
You must be a minimalist to be a maximalist. If you want to be really good, to master and thoroughly enjoy one thing, you must say no to many other things.
