The magic of the two p words! Passion and pursuit.
Let’s take a moment to stop and think about how the words passion and pursuit impact and turn our lives upside down. If you are not convinced about this, I have proof!
Recently I met an auto driver and had a ride home with him, on the way home we started to have small conversations. In which he mentioned how badly he wants to become a psychologist. Here’s the reason why? He loves the game of cricket, so badly you won’t believe it, he named his son Sachin Tendulkar! Crazy right? But yeah let’s come back to the story. He used to watch the Indian team play for many years. There was one phase where the Indian team has been losing games for a very long time and so to bring a change the team managers decided to bring a psychologist to meet the team. And a psychologist made a visit to the team, had a chat, and left, right after the meet the team won games in a tremendous way.
You might think why am I even telling the history of the Indian cricket team… What does this story have to do with passion or pursuit? It is what happened after this that makes this story a note-worthy one. The auto driver was just in awe and decided he needed to be that one person who just brings success to people's lives by taking the mind game in hand (psychology). From that moment he was not the same person, he altered his whole life from then in a way to fulfill the passion that the incident seeded in him. He started learning psychology, he started putting efforts into somehow developing skills around it. To an extent that he sent his own son to play cricket so that it will help him to know more about the world of a cricket player.
Now, that’s when I realized how a strong passion and a pursuit for it can impact our whole life. Take a look at a sportsperson who is with a passion to reach heights they sacrifice, set their day schedule different from ours, change their diet, miss out on outings, and do anything and everything to achieve their passions. This pursuit of passion is not just for sportspeople, the word passion just means an unbearable emotion towards something. This can be anything… Mother Theresa had a passion to touch lives by being the voice of compassion in the world and with a strong pursuit, she did accomplish it.
Likewise, a community always comes with a passion as a base. All communities inevitably have these 2 phases, one where the first cohort or the first set of people in the community absorbs and tries to drive the community in understanding the community’s purpose and the second phase is where the members take the community’s passion as their own and start working for it.
Possession of a passion is something very strong! But inculcating that passion in the community has always been a challenge.
How can you do it?
Create incidents that’ll help people experience the reason you have the passion, this will ignite the same passion in them.
We all invest and create emotions based on situations in our lives, only a person who has lost his dad will know the importance of it, only when a person goes to the death bed and returns will he value life more than anyone else, only a person who has jumped off a cliff will find it’s joy and freedom. All emotions, literally everything we feel in our lives is born out of a situation we didn’t even notice.
Create situations or take them down your life to kindle the same emotion in them too. Without which you expect them to reflect your passion is a fault on your side! Unless and until you tell them they won’t know.
A community succeeds only when people in the community think together and work together. And when a strong collective passion is a fuel that keeps the community running, then there is nothing that can stop the community from making an impact. Is your community running out of fuel? Fret not, cause you have it right in your hand.
Have a great time building a community pulled by Passion and Pursuit.