Big points if you know what TV show gave me the quote in the title. Bigger points if you can even name the episode without Googling it.
No introduction or anything tonight. I guess I don't have much to say before I get to...
Today's Topic: Passion
What is passion? "Passion" can be defined a lot of different ways. The first thing that pops into one's mind when you think about passion is probably passion for a person. It's why we fall in love, get married, make babies, grow old together, yadda yadda. That's the easy part. It gets a bit harder, but not impossible, when you're talking about passion for a thing: think about passion for cars or your favorite sports team. Then you get to the point where you're talking about passion for an idea or a cause or an abstract principle, and this, I think, can be the hardest type of passion to really understand.
Here's why I started thinking about this: On Thursday, I attended a recruiting event for a local business that has put together a web tool allowing businesses to track their resource usage across time. It's an interesting idea. Unfortunately, there were two things that may have killed my opportunity to get an internship with them (aside from the fact that it turns out they're looking for someone for the spring and not the summer like I expected):
1) I showed up late. This is because a) I'm always late, and b) I was expecting something different. I was expecting this to just be an informal meet 'n' greet session where you could come in, meet the business owner, ask some questions, do some networking, etc. To me, that meant "drop by when you get a chance." Instead, what I got was an actual formal presentation. So under my mistaken impression, I started wandering towards the event just as it was supposed to start. Then I ran into Sara and talked to her for a few minutes. At the end of that conversation, I mentioned where I was going, and she says, "Oh, then you better get in there, because the guy running it just lectured everyone about being on time." Shit.
2) I left early. This is not my fault. I looked at my phone and realized it was 12:56, and that I needed to be in my TA class in a mere four minutes. So I asked a quick question, told the guy I had to get to class, and ran off. What else was I supposed to do? I had to work. If it were just one of my own classes I wouldn't have cared about showing up late, but I kind of have responsibilities here. Hopefully he realized that.
But what was more concerning to me was his comment early on about passion. This guy encouraged us to ask questions about the company and the web tool, because, he said, "asking good questions shows you have passion, and I'll remember that, because we're only looking for people with a lot of passion for what we're doing."
Hmmm.
This poses two problems: First, I don't come up with questions very readily. You give me a presentation like this and I'll go, "Huh, that's neat." Then I'll come up with ten questions over the next two days and send them to you in an e-mail. But when I'm in the midst of things, I just don't think of questions very easily.
More importantly, though, is the idea that I have to find a way to show passion. This I don't know how to do. Or at least I don't think I do. Especially when it comes to abstract concepts that might underlie a project such as this. Look: I am not by nature a passionate person. Or at least I'm not an outwardly passionate person. It takes a lot to get me riled up about something, either in a good or a bad way. Most of the time I just sit there stoically and observe what's going on around me. I have a hard time getting passionate about something unless I make it personal.
Therein may lie the problem. I envy people who seem to have discovered their calling early in life. I feel like I'm surrounded by people who have found causes (the aforementioned abstract principlese) and are energized to go out and change the world because of this. Me? I've had to work at it. Hard. And I'm still not 100% sure that I've found it. Even if I have, my problem is that, not being a passionate person by nature, I have a hard time being "passionate" about the abstract principles I support. I put that in quotes because passion is relative, and the way that each person shows that passion is very different. Mine is an intellectual passion. I care more about affecting the underlying structures that have put us on an unsustainable path than I do about the "sexy" things that I (and by extension, everyone else) take as more visible signs of passion. Composting? Yeah. Sure. You go out and you do that. Meanwhile, I'm going to work on the big things, like finding the mix of regulations and economic incentives that effect worldwide structures and will lead to the end of pollution, smarter urban growth, and better energy systems so that living sustainably just becomes automatic because it just doesn't make sense to do anything differently.
So my problem, then, is that I care about the background, the things going on behind the scenes, the intersection between power, policy, politics, and economics that conspire to put us on a road to destruction. This is inherently un-sexy, and I find it difficult how to show passion about regulations and global climate treaties, at least in the way that the activist-types can show passion.
So how exactly do I show this "passion" to prospective employers? I have this gonzo image of imitating John Cusack in "Say Anything" by standing outside some company's office holding an iPod over my head while playing "An Inconvenient Truth." Otherwise, I'm at a bit of a loss. Tonight I spent two hours trying to tell the IU Office of Sustainability why I want an internship with them, and then threw what I wrote in the garbage because it sucked. That has a lot to do with having trouble putting my thoughts into words, but it also gets to a basic inability to express what I care about in a way I think would be interesting to others. But the bottom line is that I feel like my personality and my particular intellectual interests are difficult to express in a passionate way, and I'm afraid that's putting me at a disadvantage.
Or it could be that I'm overthinking the whole thing again. Yeah, that may be it.
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