Thoughts on passion, and the riddle of a definition
Randy Komisar's The Monk and the Riddle
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While the Monk and the Riddle drives home many points often ignored by those chasing wealth, prestige, and the thrill of competition, one in particular changed the way I think about my choices of commitments. Randy's distinction between passion and drive was eye-opening and new to me. I think a lot of us are able to put our mind to something we feel is fun enough and with some rational benefit. We're driven to complete things because our idenitites depend on it or it seems like the right thing to do. But a passion is something that draws our attention and calls out to us, perhaps even when it doesn't fit in the notion of a master plan you've been raised to be comfortable with.

Komisar's experience at Crystal Dynamics is analogous to mine at NVidia. At NVidia, I deliberately tested the idea that maybe *what* I worked towards didn't matter to me, but instead the process and activity itself did. Those three months were not a waste of time, because I learned that I unequivocally do care about what I'm producing. There is no perfect job or perfect circumstance. Ups and downs are inevitable. It is during those times that the journey, unpleasant at the micro-level, is only justified if higher-level goals are worth striving for. For me, as I've said before in written submissions :), better video rendering for surgical applications might have compelled me. Faster polygons for Lara Croft's oversized torso did not, even if NVidia was intellectually rigorous and a company with a sought-after, competitive internship.

As Bon Jovi explains in Living on a Prayer, "You live for the fight when that is all that you've got." ;-) (That was just playing on my iTunes as I typed.)

But Komisar's definition of passion -- something that pulls you in a direction you cannot resist (p. 83) -- is incomplete. The definition describes obsessive compulsion as well as it defines passion. The very notion of the passion being irresistable implies that we must resist it in order to know that it has that quality. While it seems like I'm just being a stickler for diction, I really do worry about the idea that I'll always be chasing after the ideas that I haven't pursued -- that the vision of work I'm passionate about (say, teaching) in the abstract will always have an advantage over the work that I *really* like but whose reality I'm engaged in, for better or for worse. For example, this summer, I felt a strong compulsion to just have time off to read, research, and maybe write about certain intersections of history of science and gender. For a few weeks, the pull was almost so strong as to be a "crush" on a certain kind of work. I certainly felt unable to resist it in the long run, though I was resisting it now to try to focus on my job. What scares me is that I can easily see pursuing that path -- doing a PhD, for example -- and having the same magnetic attraction to the advantages of the work I'm doing now, since it would then be the grass on the other side. Or worse yet, I'll find some other abstracted role that I have never had to feel passionately compelled to pursue.

How can we define passion then? I've mulled over a few ways to distinguish it, but I fell short every time. I don't think Komisar's picture is complete either. His definition sounds more like a crush or a strange attraction to me. I certainly am capable of feeling that for certain work, but I do know people who do not. Yet they find other ways -- values, big ideas -- to justify their work, even if they don't "have crushes" on their work like I might. I begin to think that passion is like love -- to try to define it in detail necessarily creates exceptions which limit the definitions usefulness. I am satisfied to define passion as something you could feel justified spending the rest of your life on. Some people want peace from their life, others a chance to focus on their families and do right by them, and others the more familiar University-nurtured passion to create knowledge or value. All seem valid to me. The only self-inflicted crime is sacrificing the everyday pursuit of what you yourself find compelling in service of someone else's needs out-of-line with your own.

I sound like an objectivist. But serving someone else's needs can fall right in line with your own passion. Altruism and helping others is built into -- rather than outside -- the system. But at every step, you had better be able to feel good about the implications of your work. Had Lenny applied this test, the shortcomings of Funerals.com may have been more obvious. Funerals.com

I feel like this analysis is incomplete, but I would like others' help in finding the holes and strengethining this notion. I can only go so far typing this journal entry alone. :)

Office Space -- Ye of Little Faith
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Maybe I'm lucky, but watching Office Space didn't remind me of workaday foibles I've lived through. Oh, wait, I'm not lucky. I just haven't worked anywhere for longer than six months (and those six months were broken across two summers). While it is easy to read Office Space as a cartoon of a worst-case scenarios, cartoons are funniest when they draw attention to parts of reality. It highlighted a reality that I know can be felt even in companies that seem wellsprings of enthusiasm, like Homestead, if you work there long enough.

What I saw in Office Space was the logical conclusion of what happens when a company does not trust its employees to be work in the interest of the company vision. (Could the reason be a lack of company purpose rather than lack of employee enthusiasm?) Such mistrust, betrayed by regulations like flair minimums and reports filed for every transaction, is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Rather than expecting and setting a tone for a culture where communication and expressions of enthusiasm happen naturally, the symptom becomes the law.

There seems to be a "common sense" rule that as a company grows larger and larger, employees alignment with the vision and expectation to be part of the company's success diminishes. So instead of taking a risk on trust, symptom-codification becomes the new order of things. Certainly as a company gets bigger, it is harder to maintain the tight social ties that help everyone work towards the same guiding vision with the same drive and passion. But would a probabilistic view of a motivated company serve everyone better in the end? If we rethink the goal to be not 100% goal accomplishment within the company, but, say, 85% accomplishment, with some notion of fault-tolerance built into the company plan, management may feel freer to place faith in the other components of the large machine. I would hope that the productivity and innovation gains among the majority of motivated employees would more than makeup for the ones who aren't interested in self-direction but instead just an hourly salary and algorithmic tasks. (Are the company leadership's expectations of employees so low that they expect everyone to be at their best a workaday drone?)
- posted by gleemie @ 4:04 AM