Mark “Finch” Osborn recently wrote concerning passion and obsession. In his piece “Finch” compared passion and obsession as ‘twisted cousins’. He listed four habits, negative habits that we permit to harm our behavior.
“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,
All play and no work makes Jack a mere toy.”
• Failing to learn from our mistakes – Jack Welch commented on this, “early on while leading GE we went too slowly over and over again.” We are trained in school and at home not to make mistakes, the youngest student will not submit a paper loaded with errors; yet in the real world we make mistakes. We all need to learn from our errors.
• Refusal to delegate-knowledge is not power. Sharing the decision making, listening to other ideas and adapting permits each of us to do more and learn.
• Unhealthy lifestyle – if you can’t put your “smart phone” down, have to answer every email at warp speed-maybe you have a lifestyle issue. Stress, obsessive stress causes your heart to speed up, it shuts down other body functions; it’s not good. No passion is worth our long term sanity and health.
• The lack of goals – Goal setting is important! It’s important to have short term, long term and end game goals.
Passion or Obsession – We need a balance to our lives, to our jobs and our families.
Passionate people, passionate teammates are good listeners. They hear the spoken and observe the unspoken. They have empathy, respect and appreciate others and are vested in the development of others. These teammates have a certain ardor, an enthusiasm that includes stewardship and pride.
Obsessive people don’t have these traits.
Passionate people step up and can step it up. They are accountable and can turn it on. They always have another gear, a source of energy and power especially when helping others. The idea of linking passion to culture or highly successful personalities is not new; Aristotle stressed the following virtues-courage, good temper, temperance, friendliness, truthfulness, pride and justice.
He suggested three keys:
“Hang out with good people” – organizationally – we learn from our co-workers.
“Take care of the little things” – I need to focus here-too mnay tyepos-
“Cultivate a perceptive imagination” – most of us have powerful imaginations, too often we deceive ourselves. We need to see, hear and witness the truth, the big picture.
It’s important we are passionate, about our lives, our faith and our families.
Thanks for all you do.
All the runners in a race compete; only one wins.
Let’s run to win!
Leave a Reply