Passion and Hustle = Happiness and Success

I was driving my daughter home from freshman college orientation and decided to make good use of our time together to do my fatherly thing – offer lessons in life. After all, I am her father and she is heading into her next big phase in life.

A phase that means she will be living about 1,000 miles from home for the better part of each of the next four years; which means I will have limited opportunities to offer, well, fatherly advice.

So, as I started offering advice (or going into the boring lecture mode depending on your viewpoint) – I began with my usual sermon about people needing passion in life — and to be passionate about whatever they are doing. Whether it’s schoolwork, a professional job or even a hobby – you have to have a passion for something I explained to her — otherwise what you do in life becomes drudgery or just a job or something “I have do to pay the bills”….etc.

I waxed eloquent about those in life that don’t have a passion for what they do and explained that people in this state spend the majority of their waking hours either depressed or unhappy or both. They “live for the weekend” as some people say shamelessly with a dose of pride.

Don’t get me wrong, I continued, we need to look forward to diversions from whatever we are passionate about — otherwise our passion can turn into drudgery or worse an obsession and keep us away from important passions like our family. This ultimately means we need several passions in our life; which will include your spouse, your family, your profession, your hobby, your spiritual undertakings and so forth. Frankly, we need many passions to have a well-rounded life.

But the one thing we do during the majority of our waking hours has to be something we are unabashedly passionate about.

And so the ramblings continued – this doesn’t mean your passion won’t include hard work and that sometimes we need to do something we don’t like. Let me explain this through an analogy I stated, in spite of the abrupt, momentary sigh accompanied by a murmuring “I hate analogies…” from my innocent eighteen-year old. I stated that even if you’re passionate about fly fishing you most likely are not passionate about unhooking the fishing line from the tree behind you. The same thing holds true for any passion.

As I concluded part one of my Fatherly Passion Speech I asked her what might be the second most important thing to consider. She quickly responded “Hustle!” —  I almost swerved off the road as I smiled and laughed uncontrollably. I said how did you know I was going to say that? She responded “It’s what you have always told me.” I was flabbergasted.

All these years never really knowing if what I was saying was sinking in or not. It was a total WOW moment. These are truly the moments that make parenting worthwhile.