Why Does It Bug Me When People Tell Me I'm Passionate?

I was standing at the front of a high school classroom, rows of empty seat-desks laid out in front of me in a nice orderly grid. I prepared to give a talk on entrepreneurship to my friend and business partner’s eleventh grade class, when she tried to pay me a compliment. I don’t recall her exact wording, but Karen said something like, “Scott, I just always admire how passionate you are about GameTruck.” Now, I found this moment weird for two reasons. First, I always think it is strange when someone else wants to tell me how I feel, even in a nice way. Second, I didn’t receive it as intended, a compliment. I received it as an argument, a misattribution. I bristled. I recall thinking, “No it’s not passion, it’s focus!” If you want to know how I built GameTruck into a national brand, I will tell you, I am happy to share, but please don’t assign me some fable and expect me to like it.

And then I immediately felt ashamed. Who does that? Who receives a compliment and then feels even a little angry about it? I mean she really meant it. Karen Mendoza is one of the kindest, nicest people you could ever meet, and I’m arguing with her over a compliment. Yet, there was something deeper there which wouldn’t leave me alone.

Why am I so resistant to the idea of passion? I get that it’s popular advice to follow your passion, but the way I see it, passion is an emotion, and emotions are ephemeral feelings. An emotion can’t carry you through the hard times. When you make passion your guiding light, you make something fleeting your compass. Therefore when you lose the feeling, you lose your way. I didn’t build GameTruck into a national brand because I was passionate. I built it into a successful company because I was focused on making darn sure it didn’t fail.

Isn’t Focus Just Passion with Better PR?

Okay, point taken. From the outside passion and focus probably do look like the same thing. Emotions are hard to read.¹ Sure. I can see how it looks that way from the outside. But if my passion really did drive my work, if focus is just passion dressed up in a business suit, then wouldn’t my ability to execute and stay on task vanish the moment the feeling passes? In my experience, intense focus allows me to tune out my feelings so I can do what I need to do. In fact, focus allows me to do what needs to be done, even when I experience intense resistance to the task at hand.

As I sit here and write this, in some generic hotel room in Minneapolis². I really did not want to take this trip. But, I gave my word, and my field team in this market was counting on me to show up and help them get a trailer ready to run events this weekend. As my team lead Travis Olson put it, “When you are here things happen faster.” We had two days to get ready for a busy weekend. When I show up, shit gets done. I don’t believe that has anything to do with passion, but everything to do with getting everyone, including myself, focused on what needs doing now. And what we needed to do now was get a trailer ready so we did not disappoint 100 kids over the next three days.

If there is any feeling I have in the moment, it is appreciation for my team and how hard they are working. And yet, I’d still rather be at home with my wife. Is that passion? Doesn’t feel like it to me.

But Successful People Say to Follow Your Passion!

Yeah, I hear it all the time. That still doesn’t make it true. Scott Adams once wrote that many successful people extol passion as the secret ingredient because “It’s the people’s talent.” It’s kind of a dick move to stand in front of a crowd of people and tell them you’re successful because you’re smarter and better than everyone else (which has its own set of problems). So you talk about passion, because anyone can have passion! But… that still doesn’t get to the heart of it. The main reason I rail against passion is the evidence doesn’t support it as a good strategy to get where you want to go. And let me be clear, when I talk about Passion, I am including in this what Anne-Laure Le Cunff calls the Epic Script.

But here’s the surprising thing. Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck³ and her colleagues found that mantras like “find your passion” increase the chances people will give up on a newfound interest when they run into the inevitable hurdles that come from trying something new. In her paper, she wrote, “Urging people to find their passion may lead them to put all their eggs in one basket but then drop that basket when it becomes difficult to carry.” From where I’m sitting, it was not “passion” that led me to Minneapolis this week. It was something else.

So What Should You Chase Instead?

So if passion, or love, or dreams are not the answer what is? The best I can conceive, there is actually a system here, and it starts with an emotion, but that emotion is curiosity born of frustration. It’s easy to get irritated, the real move is to push beyond the moment into what my old boss used to call “morbid curiosity.” It happens when you stop fretting over your own specific situation, and you start to wonder, what you can actually do about it. When I reflect back, the earliest feelings I can find always start with questions like: What’s wrong with this? or Why doesn’t this behave the way I expect?

GameTruck didn’t start because I loved the idea of putting video games in a trailer. GameTruck started because I paid a lot of money to throw my son a shitty birthday party.⁴ Intuit understood this. In the early days of building their Quicken software, they told team members to follow customers home⁵ and watched them use their software. When people got frustrated, the researchers asked them: “What are you trying to do, and how do you think you should be able to do it?” They never mentioned passion. They focused on problems and sought out answers.⁶

I saw the same thing coaching kids to play baseball. That was the most visceral proof of all. Kids learning to play might start with enthusiasm, but that fades fast once they dive into learning. People get this wrong about play all the time. Play can be frustrating. Real play happens right at the edge of control. Working at the boundary of your ability is hard. The kids on my teams didn’t show anything remotely like passion until after they developed enough skill to be competent.

My Recommendation? Find the Frustration

What I didn’t get to say to that class, I would tell you here. Much more useful than “passion” is focused curiosity born out of frustration and insight. It looks something like this.

1. What’s wrong? What’s bugging you?
2. What should it be doing instead?
3. What can you do about it?

And in that moment, if any part of passion were to show its pretty little face, it would be two final questions:

4. What do you want to do about it? and
5. Who else has this problem?

When I started GameTruck, I was looking for a new career. I was looking to start a business. I needed to keep my commitment to my wife and kids; A roof over head and food in the pantry. (and health care, can’t forget the health care.) And I wanted to be home to be around and be a husband and father. The idea for GameTruck came up because I found something that was busted (bad birthday party), and I knew a lot of other people who shared my frustration. The clincher came when I realized I wanted to take a crack at solving that problem. Two decades later, I’m still wrestling with it.

Focus has carried me for 20 years, through the good times, and the bad.

The Compliment I Almost Missed

And maybe, at the end of the day, that is what I missed.

Upon reflection, Karen’s real compliment was probably a little different. I think what she meant to do was to congratulate me on how engaged I was with GameTruck. Her words might have been about passion, but her tone said: “You have earned the right to be fully engaged in what you do.”

People just call it passion.

But passion was never what I chased. It’s what followed me.

But I’m curious, what has your experience been?