Practice Your Passion

This post is part of Think Kit by SmallBox, today’s prompt: “Did you get any good advice or learn a valuable lesson this year? Was it expected or unexpected, easy or tough? Share what you learned.”

I feel like I’ve written a lot about what I’ve learned in 2013 since picking up the blog back in October.  In the spirit of Think Kit, I’m going to go back and rehash those posts–instead I’m talking about my favorite thing learned in 2013–that I’m surrounded by “really cool people, doing really cool things” and I need to trust my gut on a whole lot going on in my life by practicing my passion.

The single best advice I got this year was to “practice my passion” in life.  It might come across as wishful or whimsical, but it’s really the focus of everything I do and what I envision doing in the future.  The flip to all of that is that practicing your passion isn’t always supposed to be easy, and it certainly isn’t all rainbow and sunshine.  But at the end of the day, by focusing on practicing my passion, it makes me a better person and gives me motivation to tackle the next day.

I’m a bit of a big picture type of guy, I’m currently seeing things 10 moves ahead and analyzing what needs to happen to get me where I want to be 10 moves from now.  There are a lot of folks who can’t see the big picture, especially related to practicing the passion of life.  Luckily, I’m pretty good at identifying who is an emotional time-suck when it comes to not being able to follow the vision and path.

Practicing the passion means it isn’t always easy, but it’s always worthwhile.  So look around, ask yourself if you’re practicing your passion and more importantly, make sure you aren’t standing in the way of somebody else practicing theirs.

Thanks LO, for teaching me such a simple phrase that I apply as a gut check to everything I do.

-th