Today we start a new book for our Dadly Daily Declaration. Our declarations will come from The Passion Paradox by authors Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness. This new tome from Stulberg and Madness aims to demystify passion and show readers how they can find and cultivate their passion, sustainably harness its power, and avoid its dangers.
Stulberg’s work has explored the principles of mastery that transcend capabilities and domains. In his research and writing, he has learned that many of the practices underlying sustainable success are the same, supported by scientific evidence, and available to everyone. Stulberg has a regular column in Outside Magazine, and is co-author of the bestselling Peak Performance: Elevate Your Game, Avoid Burnout, And Thrive with the New Science of Success, which explores the science and practice of world-class performance. He also has a coaching practice that partners clients wanting to apply the principles he has researched and written about.
Steve Magness is a performance coach, author, and lecturer. He currently serves as a coach to almost 20 professional runners, is the Head Cross Country coach at the University of Houston and a Lecturer of Strength and Conditioning at St. Mary’s University, UK. In addition, he has served as a consultant or executive coach to high performers in a variety of business fields.
As a writer, he is the co-author of Peak Performance and the author of The Science of Running, an Amazon Top 100 bestseller. Additionally, his work has appeared in Wired, New York Magazine, Sports Illustrated, Runner’s World, Outside Magazine, Meter Magazine, New Studies in Athletics, and the International Journal of Athletic Training & Therapy.
Here are a few gems from today’s reading:
- While there are plenty of voices telling you to find your passion, there are hardly any telling you how to be passionate.
- Passion can lead you down a few negative paths, including:
- You become a slave to external results and validation. Following early success, the desire for more—more money, more fame, more followers—can easily take over. Your initial passion for doing an activity turns into a passion for achievement and results. You tie your self-worth to external validation, and the experience of a failure, or even just a plateau of moderate success, becomes devastating, rattling you to the core. Your enjoyment decreases (at best) and you become anxious, depressed, and unethical (at worst).
- You become blind to everything but your passion. You throw yourself so fully into a pursuit that you neglect everything outside it.
- You burn out. Surrendering completely to passion may work for a day, a month, or even a year. But if left unchecked, most passions burn bright and burn short. Before you know it, you run out of energy. What could have been a lifetime of passion and meaningful work instead looks more like a short bout of reckless excitement.
- You lose joy. There is also a risk that your passion’s spark will dim slowly over time.
- Passion’s positive and negative paths—the good and bad kind of passion—arise from the same place.
- Passion is fragile, and it must be handled with care. This is why research shows that passion isn’t just linked to happiness, health, performance, and life satisfaction, but also to anxiety, depression, burnout, and unethical behavior.
- What direction your passion takes is a choice, not a predetermined destiny.
- If you do proactively manage your passion, living with passion leads to improved health, happiness, and overall life-satisfaction. There is both good passion and bad passion. And what direction your passion takes is largely up to you.
Today’s Dadly Daily Declaration is this:
There is a positive, better kind of passion. It emerges when you become wrapped up in an activity primarily for the joy of doing the activity itself. When you experience success with humility and failure with temperate resolve. When your goal becomes your path and your path becomes your goal. When your passion is fueled by deep purpose and is in harmony with the rest of your life. When you practice mindful self-awareness to pierce through the tidal inertia that passion can create, giving you control over your passion so your passion doesn’t control you. When you feel alive not just for a few months or years but for an entire career or lifetime. This is the passion we all crave. This is the best kind of passion.
