Answer to the reader who wrote me about passion

Joachim De Posada

By Joachim De Posada

Dear reader:

Thank you for writing me. You make very good points about following your passion. You provide the example of a young want to be actor that has to wait tables in Los Angeles until the right opportunity comes up. If he is single and 25, he can do so and in fact many artists have done so and have become Hollywood stars, most people that have done haven't become stars and have had to find other careers.
If a person is married and has the responsibility of raising a family, and what he or she has passion for doesn't provide an acceptable income in order for him to raise his family, then he has to bite the bullet and do what he needs to do.
In that case he would have to work at whatever and at night go to theather classes or write scripts or do something that would keep him at least in some way connected to his passion.
I will never forget a waiter who used to work for my ex wife in an events company who was so good that clients would request him as a waiter. One day after a wedding in Casa Espana in San Juan, PR, I approached him and congratulated him for doing such a good job. I then said, "you must love being a waiter, you were born to do this". And he said "I hate being a waiter. I am a dentist. My family had to leave Colombia because of the FARC (the communist guerrillas), they were going to kidnap us and since we didn't speak English, we came to Puerto Rico. I am studying weekdays to revalidate my career here in PR and start practicing as a dentist"
This man is doing what he needs to be doing in order to attain his dream of practicing dentistry.
In life, you will have to sacrifice things you love to do in order to pay the price and be able to get them down the road.
I don't define success by passion as you write in your email. Passion is an ingredient of success but I often talk about "well being" that is much more than success. Well being is a state that can be achieved by balancing financial stability, health, career, social and community.
Balancing these five I think you can get as close as possible as happiness.
So, in the case of our husband, he must continue doing his work and taking care of his family but at the same time he must find areas of his work that he can find passion for. Sometimes we only focus on the negative but if we look for positives, we find many that are right before our eyes and we don't see them.
If he absolutely hates his job or career, then he must start looking for something else that more resembles his passion but keeping in mind that job one is taking care of himself and his family.
He might not be yet ready to switch so he must adopt the "not yet" mentality, in other words, he is on his way but not quite ready.
You know, his problem is one that a lot of  unemployed people would kill for. He has a job and makes relatively good money. I suspect that he has an attitude problem and he should work on that.



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