We're Three Years In
I remember writing a few short pieces of writing on my phone in the fall of 2019. It wasn't a new habit. In fact, I had grown an unhealthy habit of writing paragraphs of my thoughts while my pastor preached his sermons on Sunday in church. Believe me, it wasn't that he wasn't interesting, it was just that I had an idea, and I wanted to get it down. Fast.
What I found through those quick writings and many other moments was that I had finally found an outlet for my creative energy. My imagination is always churning with crazy ideas, and I find that writing them down gives me the external processing I need to express them. Even my wife will often say, "you have a LOT of energy" when I come out of a time of writing. In her defense, it takes a lot of patience to listen to someone who has 12 new goals and ideas for their life every day. But what it does to a person like me is provide a medium of expressing what I love: goals, ideas, content, and much more.
Flash forward to today. As of this Friday, I will have been writing these weekly blog posts for 3 years. Even to say that out loud seems unrealistic, because I doubt I would have said I'd be here today 3 years ago. What started as me getting some ideas out and building a website for fun on the weekend turned into a habit that now feels unbreakable. No one pays me to write every week, and no one forces me to do it when I don't have a specific idea planned for Monday morning. What gets me to do it is the simple fact that I love it. It is the definition of passion in the most personal way.
Here's the funny part about it, too: maybe I'm a terrible writer. Who knows at this point? I certainly don't have the formal education for it, and I don't care to. What I do care about is cultivating a consistent habit that benefits me and other people over a lifetime. If that occurs, it's all worth it.
What I hope you find is encouragement. I talk to people almost every day who have not found a productive habit that they love. They are searching for it, but keep missing and missing, wondering if there is a passion of theirs out there. I promise you there is. It may be a clue from the past or a hint in the future, but it exists. Others might have already had a passion. They are either newly into it or 30 years down the road. But they too should look behind them to see the path they've laid. Because it's not just for the creatives like me who have passion, it's in all of us. There are people everywhere that have something outside of work that they are dramatically excited about, and it's worth doing. So keep doing it.
As you're searching or working for your passion, be encouraged by this quote that once transformed my desire for writing to be done for the right reasons. Author Jon Acuff wrote, "I learned a simple lesson about being awesome: always play to the size of your heart, not to the size of your audience. Awesome doesn’t let the crowd determine the size of the performance. Awesome gets up for two people or 200. Awesome writes great books even if no one is going to read them. Awesome sweeps the parts of store floors that no foot will ever touch. Awesome can’t help itself. Awesome has a huge heart. And that’s what it always plays to."
Keep developing your passion, your awesome, your habit, or whatever word you want to call it. Be encouraged that there are passions in your life, especially outside of your work, that are lurking, fighting, and developing for you. Chase after it.
