Of all the wonders of life, few can top the stories every human being can tell about what has happened to them.
And so it was during a recent morning walk that I met a man who was putting the final touches on his new self-designed street-side mailbox. After I told him how good it looked, he introduced himself as John, and we drifted into the subject of our respective pasts that brought us both into the latter stages of a good life. That’s when he told me a story.
He was born, raised, and educated in Chicago. His first job was with a national company that had planned for him to work at their headquarters there. Instead, they sent him to Denver, Colorado, to be supervised by a much older and highly successful employee.
Despite John’s uneasy feeling about the arrangement, all went well in his effort to become familiar with his new surroundings. As his first week was coming to a close, his boss told him the two of them were going to take a drive. Soon after entering one of the oldest parts of Denver, his boss drove into an old and somewhat unkept cemetery and parked.
As they got out of the car, John began to wonder what it was all about, but decided it best to just wait and see. They slowly made their way through the myriad of tombstones that marked the graves of some of Denver’s earliest settlers, business owners, prominent political leaders, and notable social types. Buried there too, were those who had committed many serious crimes including robbery especially of stage coaches during the early days, then trains and banks.
As they were returning to their car, his boss asked John what he had seen. John replied he had been impressed by all the interesting tombstones. His boss then asked what else he had seen, and John said he had noticed the wide range of people buried there — from early settlers to outlaws. Sounding a bit impatient, his boss then asked John if anything else had come to mind. But rather than wait for John’s answer, he explained the reason for his questions.
He said that every one of those tombstones was rooted in passion. The passion of those early settlers had to be strong enough to overcome the hazards of the long journey from the East to the vastness of the as yet untamed West. Only by having a strong sense of passion had those leading citizens been able to guide the citizenry to higher levels of accomplishment that paved the way for Denver to become one of the West’s greatest cities. And had it not been for passion, even the deeds of the criminals would never have made the headlines.
Then his boss looked directly at John and with measured words urged him to be passionate about everything he did. Passion, he said, is what drives the search, the discovery, and finally the reward or success of the effort. With that, his boss drove them back to the office.
John never forgot that incident and from then on, he became passionate about everything he attempted and accomplished. No matter what, passion was always in, doubt was always out.
Webster defines passion as “strong feeling, the emotions as distinguished from reason.”
Consider these examples from America’s golden age of manufacturing. Henry Ford became famous not because of his cars, but because of his intensely passionate search and discovery of how to build cars faster, better, and cheaper.
It happened during an off-chance tour of a livestock slaughtering house. There, he saw the just killed animals placed on a slowly moving conveyor belt. On both sides were workers assigned to remove certain parts according to a specific procedure until there was nothing left but the carcass. That’s when Ford was struck by this question: Why couldn’t cars be built the same way? He answered his own question and revolutionized car manufacturing.
Andrew Carnegie had the same passion during his long and eventually successful search for an economical way to make steel. And had it not been for passion, Thomas Edison would never have struggled through more than a thousand failures before finally inventing the light bulb.
And now we come back to us. Does it apply to what we do in our lives? Of course it does.
For proof, get to know anyone who looks upon life as an exciting adventure. Maybe all you see is them steering toward a target, but under the hood and driving it all is the power of passion.
