Today, we continue our Dadly Daily Declaration series with readings from The Passion Paradox by authors Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness. Stulberg and Magness aim to demystify passion and show readers how they can find and cultivate their passion, sustainably harness its power, and avoid its dangers.
Here are a few gems from today’s reading:
- Pressure to perform, be it financial or psychological, often leads you away from thoughtfulness and logic and toward a more irrational style of decision-making. When you go all in, you move from a place of wanting to succeed to needing to succeed.
- Instead of backing yourself into such a corner, perhaps the better move is to adopt what author and investor Nassim Taleb calls a “barbell strategy.” The image of a barbell—two weights on opposite ends—symbolizes stability. One side of the barbell characterizes low-risk, low-reward scenarios, whereas the opposite side characterizes high-risk, high-reward scenarios. It represents what Taleb calls “a dual attitude of playing it safe in some areas and taking risks in others,” all the while avoiding the middle ground that is neither completely safe nor carries a big payoff.
- Such a strategy brings two major benefits: First, you are more likely to take bigger risks with higher payoffs when you know that failure won’t ruin you. You won’t have to worry about playing it safe or constantly second-guessing yourself while pursuing your passion. Second, even if you initially come up short, you’ll still be OK (thanks to maintaining your stable gig) and thus you can continue using different strategies to try to make your passion a bigger part of your life. In other words, the barbell strategy says that you should pursue your passion incrementally.
- Pursuing your passion incrementally relieves pressure and allows more room for error. It affords you the chance to fail and to learn from your failures. Though pursuing your passion in such a manner may feel painstakingly dull in the short run, it increases your chances of being successful in the long run. Those who go big or go home often end up going home. Those who go incrementally over a long period of time often end up with something big. The best route to making your passion a bigger part of your life is to do so gradually.
- Going all in on something makes you fragile, especially if you go all in prematurely.
- For the vast majority of people—at least according to the research—the best route to directing more time and energy toward a passion is to follow the barbell strategy, incrementally shifting more and more weight away from safe and stable (i.e., your day job) and toward what makes you tick.
Those gems lead us to today’s Dadly Daily Declaration:
If you are determined to fully live out your passion, to truly devote your all to it, to make it the centerpiece of your life, at a certain point you’ve got to make a bet on yourself. You’ve got to take a leap of faith and go all in.
