I just read a very honest story from Emma Newman where she shared how she learned to follow her passion versus doing what she’s ‘good’ at, and I applaud her opening up and having the strength to be vulnerable to share her story.  Too often we’re told to do what we’re good at, what we have the skills for, and I think that is absolutely the wrong advice.

In this posting, Emma shares how she tried to make a business grow with what she was good at, but struggled, and in the meantime her ‘hobby’ – what she enjoyed – started to take off amazingly.  And she listened to the signals and is following her passion instead of doing a ‘job’ that would wind up being largely clock-watching.

We are each ‘good’ at many things. That doesn’t mean doing those things are our best path.  Just because you’re good at it doesn’t mean you love it – that you’re passionate about it.  And when you have passion, you have drive, energy, commitment and the intention to make it happen.

In my book, passion, energy, commitment and intention trumps skill any day of the week.

What’s more, those skills may come into play in ways you never might have dreamed.  I know that from my own experience.

My first career was as a nuclear physicist.  Math came easily to me – it was like a second language – and it was kind of fun sometimes, playing with a giant particle accelerator – but only sometimes.  I wasn’t really passionate about it.

Fortunately I learned early on to follow my intuition and discovered over time that my passion is people, not eating radiation.  But, as I followed my path into large-scale organizational and personal change, I realized that my physics background actually gave me an edge. As a physicist I had mastered chaos and complexity theory, and that is how we are now starting to understand organizational change, human dynamics and even manifestation.  Who would have known?

I followed my passion to do what I love, and my skills as a physicist and mathematician have come into play in ways I never could have dreamed – because I trusted my intuition.  And when people roll their eyes when we talk about the Law of Attraction, I can sit down and have a nice 3-hour chat with them about quantum mechanics and quantum chronodynamics.

For some reason, nobody’s ever taken me up on that. 

So what do you choose to do? Do you do what you’re good at or what you’re passionate about?

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This entry was posted on Monday, February 15th, 2010 at 1:15 pm and is filed under Laws/Principles, Passion, Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.