My whole life I have been told to follow my passions in order to do something with my life what I love. However, listening to Kel Newton speak in the lecture today I was shocked to realise that maybe that was the wrong way of looking at things. He began his talk referring to Steve jobs and his misunderstood words referring to follow your passion in life. Newport then went on to say that its not about following a pre-existing passion in your life and making a career out of it, because there are studies shown that, most people cant even find a passion. But rather to be successful in a working life you love and are passionate about only comes with hard work and skill building, to be so good at what you do that ‘they’ meaning employers and people in general cant ignore the skills you have built up and thus you create a passion for yourself within the hard work you have achieved.

So I guess I knew this subconsciously I always have, I’ve always thought that the people that love what they do are talented in that region. I mean look at singers for example, none of these famous talents seem to be living an unhappy life, and they are ‘following’ their passions because they have that talent. For my whole life I thought that was unfair, how someone could be genetically blessed with a talent and skill and why I, 19-year-old Nat never landed any special skill to show the world. I have always struggled with that… but then again maybe these talented people that I was so sure were simply just ‘born’ with it had struggled too, working hard to be better and always perfecting what skill they already had, and thus were able to live passionately.

I guess realising this is both a blessing and a curse, firstly to know that with hard work I can achieve and find a passion In what I do, but also a curse because its hard to be passionate about something you are being forced to learn or be good at. For example the reason I wanted to do media in the first place was to be a director, but after year 12 media I couldn’t think of anything worse, this thought was based solely on the fact that the forced workload had ruined my pre-existing passion for media. But maybe that passion wasn’t there anyways. Which brings me to my next point… how do I even work hard at something if I know it’s going to ruin the way I feel about something and take away the passion? Maybe I’m not built to do anything well its like finding out a double whammy 1. I don’t have a passion until I work hard and 2. I know myself and that hard work deters me from being passionate about something. Maybe that a maturity thing I will learn in time. For now I know that soon I could live passionately if I work hard to get to the place where forced isn’t forced anymore and I genuinely love what I do.