Uncontrollable events like this happen all the time and they remind me of the fragile and fleeting nature of life and the importance of living it to the fullest now. If you're still putting up with a mediocre life in hopes of getting something out of it at the end, please reconsider.

One way to live a fulfilling life is to ...

... follow your PASSION.

Passion is one of those words that people use often without really understanding the original meaning of the word. When most people refer to "passion", they use it to mean strong emotions reflecting an intense desire or boundless enthusiasm (At least, that's how I've always heard it used).

It was only after reading Aspire by Kevin Hall and confirming with the dictionary, did I realize that "passion" originally meant:

A Willingness to Suffer for What You Love

The most famous example being the passion of Jesus Christ. This definition has changed my perspective on passion. I no longer use it to describe something that I feel strongly about or that excites me. I use it to describe an activity, goal or cause that I care about so much that I am willing to suffer for it. This new standard makes it easier to discern whether something is truly my passion or simply a strong interest.

People who make a difference in their own lives and the world do so by following their passion. This means making the conscious decision to give up other enjoyable activities to focus your energy on the most important activities. Great parents naturally do this when they have children and similar to raising kids, doing what you love is very hard work yet rewarding at the same time. The good news is when you pursue your passion, you'll not only like where you end up but enjoy the journey along the way.

Look at your life and highlight the things you love that you're willing to suffer for. This self-reflection will give you insight into what you're passionate about. If you're not sure, just pick something you enjoy and see if you're willing to give up other activities to spend more time on it. Remember that in life you can choose and change your actions - just also keep in mind that you're responsible for the consequences.

Don't settle for a life that is only so-so.

Start living your best life today.

“There comes a time when you ought to start doing what you want. Take a job that you love. You will jump out of bed in the morning. I think you are out of your mind if you keep taking jobs that you don't like because you think it will look good on your resume. Isn't that a little like saving up sex for your old age?”

-Warren Buffett

For those of you who read the entire article or just scrolled to the bottom, here is a bonus word (also from Kevin Hall's Aspire):

Compassion = Com + Passion = Willing to Suffer with Another

If you want to show true compassion, share in the suffering of the other person. Interestingly, when we all become more compassionate, there will probably be less suffering in the world.

Photo by Andreas Schalk

The post The Real Meaning of Passion appeared first on Embrace Possibility.

I came across this commencement address while writing up a recent interview I had with Mr. Zinsser. He told me about this speech in our interview and how it inspired several professors attending the commencement to quit and pursue their own dream.

I was intrigued and after reading it, amazed. If you don't want to have a fire lit under you to pursue your own passion, don't read this speech because you won't be the same after. This speech will give you courage to live YOUR best life. A fair warning: If you value stability, you'll be offended. If you want the easy life, you'll be disgusted. If you've blamed bad luck for your situation, you'll be ashamed.

There are many great lessons and I'll let Mr. Zinsser teach them in his own words. (I've bolded and underlined some parts that really resonates with me.)

The sportswriter Red Smith was one of my heroes. Not long before his own death he gave the eulogy at the funeral of another writer, and he said, "dying is no big deal. Living is the trick." Living is the trick. That's what we're all given one chance to do well.

One reason I admire Red Smith was that he wrote about sports for 55 years, with elegance and humor, without ever succumbing to the pressure, which ruined many sportswriters, that he ought to be writing about something "serious." Red Smith found in sportswriting exactly what he wanted to do and what he deeply loved doing. And because it was right for him he said more important things about American values than many writers who wrote about serious subjects--so seriously that nobody could read them.

Another story.

When I was teaching at Yale, the poet Allen Ginsberg came to talk to my students, and one of them asked him: "was there a point at which you consciously decided to become a poet?" And Ginsberg said: 'It's wasn't quite a choice; it was a realization. I was 28 and I had a job as a market researcher. One day I told my psychiatrist that what I really wanted to do was to quit my job and just write poetry. And the psychiatrist said, "why not?" And I said, "Well, what would the American Psychoanalytic Association say?" And he said, "There's no party line." So I did. We'll never know how bit a loss that was for the field of market research. But it was a big moment for American poetry.

There's no party line.

Good advice. 

You can be your own party line. If living is the trick, what's crucial for you is to do something that makes the best use of your own gifts and your own individuality. There's only one you. Don't ever let anyone persuade you that you're somebody else.

My father was a businessman. His name was William Zinsser, and he had a business called William Zinsser & Company that had been founded by his grandfather, also named William Zinsser, who came to New York from Germany in 1849 with a formula for making shellac. He built a little house and a little factory way uptown at what is now 59th Street and Eleventh Avenue. I have an old photograph of those two buildings, all alone in an open field full of rocks that slopes down to the Hudson River. That business stayed there until 15 years ago--a 125 years. It's very rare for a business to stay in the same family on the same block in mid-Manhattan for a century, and I can assure you that it builds a sense of family continuity. One of the most vivid memories of my boyhood is how much my father loved his business. He had a passion for quality; he hated anything second-rate.

Seeing how much he loved his work and how good he was at it, I learned very early what has been a guiding principle of my life: that what we want to do we will do well. The opposite, however, is also true: what we don't want to do we won't do well--and I had a different dream. I wanted to be a newspaperman.

Unfortunately, my father had three daughters before he had me. I was his only son. He named me William Zinsser and looked forward to the day when I'd join him in the business. (In those Dark Ages the idea that daughters could run a company just as well as sons, or better, was still 20 years off).

It was a ready-made career for me--lifelong security--and maybe I also owed it to my mother and my sisters to carry on that hundred-year-old family tradition. But when the time came to choose, I knew that that just wasn't the right thing for me to do, and I went looking for a newspaper job, and got one with the New York Herald Tribune, and I loved it from the start.

Of course, that was a moment of great pain for my father--and also for me. But my father never tried to change my mind. He saw that I was happy, and he wished me well in my chosen work. That was by far the best gift I ever received, beyond price or value--partly, of course, because it was an outright gift of love and confidence, but mainly because it freed me from having to fulfill somebody else's expectations, which were not the right ones for me.

The Herald Tribune at that time was the best written and best edited newspaper in America. The older editors on that paper were the people who gave me the values that I've tried to apply to my work ever since, whatever that work has been. They were custodians of the best. When they made us rewrite what we had written and rewritten, it wasn't only for our own good; it was for the honorableness of the craft.

But the paper began to lose money, and the owners gradually cheapened their standards in an effort to get new readers (which they therefore couldn't get), and suddenly it was no longer a paper that was fun to work for, because it was no longer the paper I had loved. So on that day I just quit. By then I was married and had a one-year-old daughter, and when I came home and told my wife that I had quit she said, "what are you going to do now?" which I thought was a fair question.

And I said, "I guess I'm a freelance writer." And that's what I was, for the next eleven years. It's a life full of risk: the checks don't arrive as often as the bills, or with any regularity. But those 11 years were the broadest kind of education; no other job could have exposed me to so many areas of knowledge.

Also: In those eleven years I never wrote anything that I didnt' want to write. I'd like you to remember that. You don't have to do unfulfilling work, or work that diminishes you. You don't have to work for people you don't respect. You're bright enough to figure out how to do work that you do want to do, and how to work for people you do want to work for. 

Near the end of the '60s my wife said she thought it might be interesting to live somewhere besides New York and see what that was like. Well, to suggest to a fourth-generation New Yorker that there's life outside New York is heresy. But I began to discuss the idea with friends, and one of them said, "you know, change is a tonic."

I didn't know that.

I was afraid of change; I think most people are.

But I seized on the phrase "change is a tonic" and it gave me the energy to go ahead. I had always wanted to teach writing: to try to give back some of the things I had learned. So I started sending letters to colleges all over the country--big colleges, small colleges, colleges nobody had ever heard of, experimental colleges tha I actually went and visited; one was in a redwood forest in California and one seemed to be in a swamp in Florida--asking if they had some kind of place for me.

And they didn't, because I was not an academic--I only had a BA degree, like the one you'll have in about five minutes--and it was very discouraging. But finally one thing led to another. It always does. If you talk to enough people about your hopes and your dreams, if you poke down enough roads and keep believing in yourself, sooner or later a circle will connect. You make your own luck.

Well, one thing led to another, and one day I got a call from a professor at Yale who said he would take a chance and let me teach an experimental writing course for one term (by the way, that was almost two years after I had started sending all those letters). And on that slender thread we sold our apartment in New York and moved to New Haven, a city we had never seen before, and started a new life.

Yale was totally generous to me, though I was a layman from out of nowhere--a journalist, god forbid. I was allowed to initiate a nonfiction writing course, which the Yale English department later adopted, and I was also allowed to be master of one of Yale's residential colleges. So those were rich years for me--years of both teaching and learning--because they were unlike anything I had done before.

Now the fact that Yale let me do all this is the reason I'm telling you the story. I didn't fit any academic pattern. But finally, being different was not a handicap. Never be afraid to be different. Don't assume that people you'd like to work for have defined their needs as narrowly as you think they have--that they know exactly who they want. What any good executive is looking for is general intelligence, breadth, originality, imagination, audacity, a sense of history, a sense of cultural context, a sense of wonder, a sense of humor, far more than he or she is looking for a precise fit.

America has more than enough college graduates every year who are willing to go through life being someone else's precise fit. What we need are men and women who will dare to break the mold of tired thinking--who just won't buy somebody saying, "we've always done it this way. This way is good enough." 

Well, obviously it's not good enough or the country wouldn't be in the mess it's in. I don't have to tell you all the areas where this wonderful country is not living up to its best dreams: Poverty. Inequality. Injustice. Debt. Illiteracy. Health care. Day care. Homelessness. Pollution. Arms-spending that milks us of the money that should be going into life-affirming work. There's no corner of American life that doesn't need radically fresh thinking.

Don't shape yourself to a dumb job; shape the job to your strengths and your curiosity and your ideals. I've told you this story of my life for whatever pieces of it you may have wanted to grab as it went by... If I had to sum up why my work has been interesting it's because I changed the direction of my life every eight or nine years and never did--or continued to do--what was expected.

I didn't go into the family business; I didn't stay at the Herald Tribune; I didn't stay in New York. And I didn't stay at Yale. In 1979 I made a resume, like every Yale senior (they showed me how to do it--how to make it look nice), and went job-hunting in New York, and got a job with the Book-of-the-Month Club, which was still another new field for me, and in many ways those eight years were the most interesting years of all. So don't become a prisoner of any plans and dreams except your own best plans and dreams.

Don't assume that if you don't do what some people seem to be insisting that you do, in this goal-obsessed and money-obsessed and security-obsessed nation, it's the end of the world. It's not the end of the world. As my experience with my father proves, something very nourishing can happen--a blessing, a form of grace. Be ready to be surprised by grace.

And be very wary of security as a goal. It may often look like life's best prize. Usually it's not....For you, I hope today will be the first of many separations that will mean the putting behind you of something you've done well and the beginning of something you'll do just as well, or better. Keep separating yourself from any project that's not up to your highest standards of what's right for you--and for the broader community where you can affect the quality of life: your home, your town, your children's schools, your state, your country, your world.

If living is the trick, live usefully; nothing in your life will be as satisfying as making a difference in somebody else's life. Separate yourself from cynics and from peddlers of despair. Don't let anyone tell you it won't work. Men and women, women and me, of the Wesleyan Class of 1988:

There's no party line.

You make your own luck.

Change is a tonic.

One thing leads to another.

Living is the trick.

Thank you.

What are you going to do now? Is it time for you to make your own luck?

The post William Zinsser’s Commencement Speech at Wesleyan University 1988 appeared first on Embrace Possibility.

2:37pm...

2:40pm...

Is this what work is like for you? Constantly checking the clock and watching the time slowly crawl by?

Are you bored at work and find yourself either surfing the internet or spending more time socializing than you do working?

Do you wonder how your company can afford to be paying you to do almost nothing?

To some, this may seem like a great arrangement but not to you.

You want to be challenged, to be fulfilled, to be excited at work.

I know where you're coming from.

Being bored at work is draining and I'm going to show you what you can do about it.

Before we look at how to improve your current situation, let's look at why this happened.

People are usually bored at work because they're:

• Over-qualified -  The work is too easy for you and you are able to finish your work faster than the allotted time for it. There is no challenge and you are not given  assignments that will stretch your current competencies.
• Given too little work - This is similar to the first reason except the work is not easy, they're just not giving you enough. This is usually not common since most companies now try to squeeze as much productivity as they can from their employees. Unless you're great at pretending to be busy, this may be a warning sign that either business is bad and/or you're about to lose your job.
• Doing boring work - I find creating useless reports, accounting and general admin work (filing, copying, scheduling, etc.) boring. You may find writing articles, facilitating workshops and conducting coaching boring. We are all entitled to our interests and if you're doing work that is boring for you, time will pass slowly even if you're busy all day.

So what you can do about it?

Find what interests you and do more of it

What do you find interesting?

Think about the highlights in your life.

What have you done where you lost track of time doing it? What do you like to do on your days off? Is there a common theme among all your favorite activities?

Take time to be aware of what interests you. Maybe you enjoy planning events or researching deals online. Perhaps connecting with people or helping them with their personal issues energizes you.

Whatever you're interested in, try to find ways to do it in the office. If you like to plan, volunteer to organize your department's next event. If you enjoy research, propose to take on projects that require research.

Don't be afraid to add responsibilities to your current role by doing things that you enjoy that further your department and/or company's goals. As long as you are not doing anything illegal or using too many resources, do first ask later. It's easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission. If you understand your company's objectives, your boss will appreciate you more for taking the initiative.

Understand that you work for yourself

No matter where you go and what company you work for, you actually work for yourself.

When you understand that, it no longer makes sense to be lazy because you're only stealing your own time. Wherever you are, your goal is to make yourself more valuable by learning transferable skills and gaining knowledge.

If you find your current role boring, learn about how your role connects with other positions in the company. Connect with people in different departments and ask them to teach you about their processes. This will put your role into context and help you become more creative in finding the intersection between your job responsibilities and tasks that you are interested in.

The key point is, no matter what you do, give it your best because that is the fastest way to build your competencies to a higher level.

Leave work early or forever

If you're bored and you're done with your work, ask to leave early or at least on time. Many people feel pressured to stay because everyone else is staying for "face time".

While it's important to make a good impression, keep in mind that you work for yourself, not your boss or your company. If you're no longer benefiting from being at work, leave. If you don't want to leave early, then find project or activity that is going to build your skills.

If at any point you feel that you are no longer gaining any more knowledge from your company. It's time to look for another job. There is no point staying at a company that does not develop and challenge you because at the end you will lose out. Gone are the days of pensions and lifetime job security.

If you're staying because you want more experience, then make sure you're building experience. Working for 20 years doing the same thing is not 20 years worth of experience, it's a year's worth of experience 20 times.

To be successful, build your own brand now and make yourself valuable.

Don't get stuck waiting for time to pass.

Which method did you find interesting? How do you prevent yourself from being bored at work?

The post Are You Bored at Work? appeared first on Embrace Possibility.