0 → Passion is not a dream
Juan asks two speakers the same two questions, at what age did you find your passion, and what advice would you give someone who hasn't. The answers accidentally produce the distinction. Miriam says seventeen: she decided she wanted to work at a big company and reach the highest position, and she did exactly that at American Express. But she had just spent her whole talk describing leaving it, which breaks the answer, and Juan's read is that she answered with a dream, not a passion. A dream is a destination you can arrive at and then find yourself bored inside. A passion is closer to the core, the thing that keeps being true after the destination changes. The NVIDIA engineer said she'd had many passions over her life, then described them all as science, different areas, same thing: building tools for scientists. One passion wearing different clothes.
// trace: where this idea came from
- ↳ video diary @ 1:12:31 (le pregunté a la señora a qué edad encontró su pasión y qué consejo daría a quien no la ha encontrado)
- ↳ video diary @ 1:14:47 (a los 17 dije que quería trabajar en una empresa grande y llegar al puesto más alto, y lo consiguió)
- ↳ video diary @ 1:15:16 (yo creo que ella confundió pasión con sueño; uno puede tener sueños y la pasión es el core de uno)
- ↳ video diary @ 1:23:44 (la de Nvidia dijo que ha tenido muchas pasiones, pero era la misma ciencia en áreas distintas)
- ↳ Entry 270-1: The compass (la misma búsqueda del core que produjo la brújula, ahora preguntada a desconocidos)
- ↳ Entry 273-2: The prototyper's job (prototipar resultó ser la respuesta a esta pregunta en su propio caso)
Sitting in the front row, Juan decided to ask the speakers the question he has been asking himself for months, the one the compass was built to answer. Two questions, actually: at what age did you find your passion, and what advice would you give someone who hasn’t found theirs ▸ 1:12:31. He was, by his own account, terrified, standing up with his voice possibly shaking, worried he’d get the name wrong or forget the question.
Miriam’s answer was seventeen. At seventeen she decided she wanted to work at a big company and reach the highest position in it, and that is precisely what she did at American Express ▸ 1:14:47. She prefaced it by saying the answer might sound counterintuitive given the talk she had just given, and she was right, because the talk she had just given was about leaving that company. If the thing you named as your passion is the thing you walked out of, the word is doing the wrong work.
un sueño es un destino; una pasión es lo que sigue siendo verdad después →
Which gives Juan the distinction, and it’s the entry: she confused pasión with sueño ▸ 1:15:16. A dream is a destination. You can name it at seventeen, spend thirty years walking to it, arrive, and discover you’re bored standing there, which is exactly what her son told her had happened. A passion is the core, the thing underneath, and it keeps being true after the destination has been reached and left behind.
The second answer, from the NVIDIA engineer who spoke after her, tests the distinction and confirms it. Asked the same thing, she said she has had many passions across her life ▸ 1:23:44, which at first sounds like a refutation. But when she described them, they were all science; what changed was the area. Julia and Juan land on it together: her passion is probably building tools for scientists, and that single thing has worn several different sets of clothes. She’d been reporting the clothes.
So the working definition, arrived at by accident in a conference hall, is useful for anyone doing this search. If the answer names a place you could arrive at, it’s a dream. If it names something that survives changing fields, changing employers, changing mediums, it’s closer to the core. Which is exactly the test the compass applied to him, and why the answer it gave was a verb, prototyping, and not a job title…
// continued in
no entry has continued this idea yet: the arc is still open