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 continues with that theme and the idea of obsessive passion.
Here are a few gems from today’s reading:
- While nearly all passions can lead to feelings of obsession, obsessive passion refers to those that become motivated by achievement, results, and external rewards more so than by internal satisfaction. It’s when someone becomes more passionate about the rewards an activity might bring than about doing the activity itself.
- Obsessive passion can quickly hijack a joyful and righteous pursuit and turn it into a dark one. One of the foremost reasons for this is that someone who is obsessively passionate ties their self-worth to things outside their control. This often ends up creating high levels of distress.
- Being passionate about—or, perhaps better put, a slave to—the achievement of an external result that you cannot control creates a volatile and fragile sense of self-worth.
- Those who are most focused on reaching some external barometer of success are often the same people who struggle most to enjoy it. That’s because they’ll always crave more. More money. More fame. More medals. More followers.
- Once we become passionate about something, our biology makes it nearly impossible for us to feel content, and our psychology only further attaches us to the pursuit. It becomes easy to get sucked into a vicious cycle.
- Researchers have found that regardless of the field, individuals who display obsessive passion are more likely to engage in unethical behavior and are at a higher risk for anxiety, depression, and burnout. Their relationship with their passion is likely to erode, and their overall life satisfaction is poor.
- When people who embody obsessive passion fail, experience setbacks, or even just plateau, they often feel completely devastated. As a result, obsessive passion is linked to anxiety, depression, burnout, and unethical behavior.
Those gems lead us to today’s Dadly Daily Declaration:
When our sense of self is tied to external results, desperation inevitably follows. Nearly all success includes at least some degree of failure. If you can’t accept those failures honestly, openly, and with humility, then fraud, angst, and depression are a likely path. That’s because the experience of failure, or even just a lack of progress, becomes a personal attack.
