Updated Oct 10, 2008 – Nirmala, a KM professional joined the conversation with several insights on her blog. Thanks for the link Nirmala.

Prolog:

Teaching passion is one of my favorite areas. I started thinking about this again because i felt we have not been able to package the superb discussion that this topic has generated. Lots of people contributed to the discussion, but the main sparks were – Larzini’s Viral Passion idea, Milind Sathe’s Trigger, Sujatha’s 3 categories of people, Priya Raju’s Big Picture , Ganesh’s Learnt Vs. Taught and finally Archana Raghuram’s passive passion.

That insightful comment of hers has been ringing in my head for a while now. A few days ago, the proverbial light bulb went off in my head.

3 levels of passion

Where does being passionate about something lead you? It makes you better in that chosen area and depending on the degree of passion you have, you can truly become a world-class expert in that area over time.   The light bulb moment occurred to me, when i realized the connection between expertise and passion.

1. No passion – you just like music or cricket or dance or whatever, but the liking is not strong enough to even be at the passive passion level. In this case, the expertise over time grows at a snail’s pace. This is the lower most trajectory in the diagram above.

2. Passionate Consumer - you are passionate about something – you have a strong/distinct liking for the topic. You start gaining expertise. This is the second trajectory in the middle. Expertise grows more rapidly over time compared to the no-passion category.  For instance, i am passionate about music, and due to that i know a bit about music. I could not call myself an expert, but i know enough to separate the wheat from the chaff.

From Larzini’s comment, you can say that people that are virally passionate are also at this level. They are passionate about something, they do produce, but not yet that passionate – thanks to the infectious passion of the leader or a friend or a trigger or a powerful goal/vision.

3. Passionate Producer – You are so passionate about something, that you actually start producing/practicing. If you are passionate about paintings you start painting etc. The act of doing something/producing something that can either be self-critiqued or critiqued by others creates a powerful feedback loop in your brain pushing you to a greater and greater degree of excellence in that topic.  This is the third trajectory in the diagram above which shows expertise growing much more rapidly.

How to become passionate?

If you integrate all the 3 categories, you can see that exposure to new topics can help build passion, immersing yourself in that activity can increase the passion to the 2nd level and starting to produce can take the passion to the next level.

Ambition can provide the fuel for passion. In the corporate context, setting a powerful goal or creating a powerful vision can be that fuel to create viral passion. In all 3 levels, associating oneself with passionate people can have a great impact. Even if you are an expert, associating with other passionate experts can increase your expertise further.

A sense of competition can help create powerful goals/visions. As long as the competition is healthy, competition is a great driving force.

Although, technically you can become an expert in anything you choose to apply your passion to, making sure you have the aptitude for the topic, is important. Again a wide-ranging exposure may help you determine the things that you have the natural flair for.

Career

Recently we did some surveys inside our company and we found that passionate bloggers and passionate musicians (our Euphony band that i talked about) are top performers in the company. Once you are a passionate producer in something, that rubs off on everything you do including your job. If you look at it from another point of view, you have figured out how to build world class expertise. So you can apply that ability to gaine expertise to your career.  Career progresses when your expertise in the job improves.

If you are a leader, you can use this insight to make your team passionate about any type of producing activity (may not be business related) and then transfer that passion onto the company’s business. Aside from this, also explain the big picture, ambitious goals/vision to light the fire.

It is this fire that can launch the rocket ship as indicated in the diagram above.

Conclusion

In sum, passion can be taught, scratch that, it can be learnt. And once you are passionate, success follows.

Epilog:

I am sure there are some gaps in this. What do you think?

Notes & References:

1. The diagram above is an attempt to summarize this post – inspired by Kathy Sierra – Creating Passionate Users.

2. How to become an expert

3. Why effort/practice is more important than talent.

4. Are you an expert? – Charlie Munger’s wisdom on the topic.

5. For a neuroscientific rationale for why feedback improves performance/expertise – ABC Theory.

6.  To be accurate, each of the 3 lines in the above diagram should be an S Curve. I chose straight lines for making the diagram simpler.

Milind Sathe (http://milindsathe.wordpress.com) has posted a phenomenal response to my question. Well done Milind. He quotes examples from his personal life on how he became passionate about Ghazals and Golfing and comes up with the concept of a trigger. The idea being that one’s passion needs to be kindled by a trigger. Where I disagreed with Milind is his assertion that passion can’t be taught.

I was talking to my niece Archana Mahadevan about this and she is of the opinion that it couldn’t be taught as well. She is smart and I respect her (she is joining Google and I’m proud of her). She recounted how she became passionate about advertising. Archana Raghuram is also of the view that it couldn’t be taught. But since I wouldn’t accept it, she has sort of agreed but not entirely I think.

Sujatha Manivasagam also seems to think that it couldn’t be taught. That set me thinking and I think it could be an issue of semantics. Would it help you all if I asked “can passion be learnt” instead of taught? In my mind, if you have learnt something you have certainly been taught. Maybe not in the strictest sense of having a real teacher and going to a class but you have been taught all the same. If you look at Milind’s examples or Archana’s aunt’s story it is clear that you can learn passion for a new subject and you most often learn to be passionate. Except possibly for child prodigies no one really is born with a passion for a topic.

We all learn it due to a trigger to borrow Milind’s idea. Now to answer Milind’s questions:
1. Can you be passionate about something you are not good at?

I am very passionate about public speaking, blogging/writing but I can’t say I’m good at these to the extent I’d like to be.

2. Can you be good at something but not be passionate about it?

I used to be good at math in college but I wasn’t passionate about it. I was passionate about physics. Up next, myself and Archana Raghuram explored the connection between ambition and passion.

Do you have to have ambition to be passionate? What is the connection? What do you all think?

Can passion be taught is a question that I have thought about for a long time. I am yet to find definitive answers, but it seems that the answer is pretty close at hand. I’m sure you’ll all agree that Passion is one of the key ingredients for success. At the risk of over-generalizing, one could even categorically state that there is not a single person in the world that is successful without being passionate. Myself and Archana Raghuram have been discussing for the past 2 weeks or so about Passion. She described passion as being analogous to drugs in that it is addictive. Excellent analogy. If Passion is such a magical ingredient for a success recipe, is there a way we can teach people to be passionate? This is the question we were pondering. In the organizational context, this could be a great thing – imagine, if you’re able to teach your entire employee population to be passionate about your company’s line of work, your employees could work wonders. Even if you ignore the organizational benefits, if we could teach people to be passionate, lot more people could be successful and the world will be a much better place. When I looked for a definition of Passion on the internet, I found this very apt definition:
One of the seven modes. Its positive pole is self-actualization; its negative pole is identification. In passion mode, one releases one’s energy boundlessly, downward and outward.
The key here is releasing energy boundlessly.
We were exploring a few threads and I will write about the first one and invite your comments. I am also tagging Milind Sathe to write on his blog, which is focused on Excellence. By our definitionn, Excellence can’t be achieved without passion. Without further adieu, here is the first the thread – What is the connection between passion and one’s core strengths/capabilities? Can someone who is not good at a particular skill become passionate about it? For example, if I want to be a musician and I know I’m not good at it now, can I become a great musician by becoming passionate about it? Or should I simply pick the things I am good at and become passionate about it? Please write your comments as always.