Have passion, or get out!

I had the honor of listening to a talk by Vincent Gorguze last week.  Vince is a "street kid from Detroit" and a College of Engineering alum from the class of 1941.  He's Chairman of Cameron Holdings, and at 95 years of age still works his butt off every day at the office.  Why?  He loves what he does.  During his talk he addressed the students present, reflecting on the importance of passion. "If you aren't passionate about what you are doing, get the hell out and get a new job," he said.  

Last week I wrote about the 10,000 hour rule: the notion that you have to put in 10,000 hours of deliberative practice in order to achieve mastery in any field. Deliberative practice is activity that is designed specifically to attack your weak points and improve in those deficient areas.  It's playing the scales on the piano, or solving 50 different differential equations with constant coefficients and exploring the results, or shooting 1000 free throws every day, or machining the same part 10 times to get it right.  Deliberative practice is usually not fun.   So why do people do it?  Because they have passion for their craft and want to get really good at it.

It's a hard leap -- it will take hard work, and not always extrinsically fun work, in order to excel at something you really enjoy.  But if you are passionate about your work then the deliberative practice that makes you better can feel good because you are slowly getting better.  But the motivation must be intrinsic.  It must come from within.  So if you aren't passionate about it, get the hell out.