What is passion? Why entrepreneurs should not wait for their passion?
Many entrepreneurs are told to "follow their passion" — but what does passion truly mean? Jonathan Chak challenges the surface-level view of passion as enjoyment, revealing its deeper roots in sacrifice and sustained effort. A fresh and honest take for anyone serious about starting.
Passion is talked about a lot. Young entrepreneurs are encouraged to follow their passion when going out there in building their ventures, right? But if you don’t understand the deeper meaning of passion, I personally think that these kind of advice such as “find your passion” can be very misleading for young entrepreneurs just starting out.
Most people’s concept about passion, is – “something that I like or I enjoy doing”. Which logically means, I do not have a passion on things that I do not like doing, right? I was on Wikipedia several years ago, trying to look up the origin of the word passion. It actually comes from the Latin word – Pati – which means “to suffer”.
That changes my perspective. So passion is to suffer, but not to do things that I like!
If you need to find passion before you start doing something, you will never get started. It’s kind of like two people being together. You cannot wait for a guarantee that someone is your Mr or Mrs Right before investing effort into that relationship. It’s quite the other way around. It is because you have put effort into a relationship that you slowly discover whether you can endure it for a long period of time.
Similarly with entrepreneurship, you have to practice something for an extended period of time, before you can even realize that it is your passion. So you can’t actually find your passion. It is only through being, that you’ll discover your willingness to suffer and sacrifice along the way. And in order to do that, you have to at least get started — you will never realise your passion by just sitting there.