Passion and the Profession

While I was searching online tonight, I came across a beautiful article  poet Dana Gioia wrote about passion. In it, he speaks about the artist’s lifelong dance with passion, in a way that reminds me of nearly every entrepreneur I know, including myself: 

Passion…is not an emotion attached to a single goal but a pervasive, permanent desire independent of any person, thing, or place. Passion is the overpowering, inescapable fate of all artists, who must learn at great costs and pain not to control it — for control is impossible — but to ride it so that it will not destroy them…

There is usually something at least slightly shameful about our passions. Respectable people control their desires. But passion is an appetite that exceeds the accepted bounds of good taste, common sense, social code, financial prudence, and moral convention. It is a desire that should be curbed or repressed but has proven so powerful and permanent that it survives our resistance. 

– Full article text available at http://www.danagioia.net/essays/epassion.htm.

I love that–the notion that passion cannot be controlled, but must be ridden. When I get worn down by the exhausting process of being open to so many influences and rejections, what gets me through it is connecting to that firey dragon of my passion. That passion carries me when my willpower cannot.