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Is it Passion, Effort, or both?

September 26th, 2022 by Kenneth Abrahams

Billionaire Mark Cuban wrote a blog post in 2012 where he proclaimed that the worst piece of career advice, or possibly just the worst piece of advice you could give or receive, is to follow your passion. Inc. Magazine recently asked Cuban about this and he did not shy away from his comments of a decade earlier. According to him, we should follow our effort, not our passion. We all have passion or passions; some have many of them. They can be things that we dream about or absolutely love, but it doesn’t mean that we will ever be any good at them. That is where he believes following your efforts is a better path. If you follow the things that you put effort into, you will get good at them and you will grow to love them. Cuban urges us to follow what we put our time into and we will reap the rewards.

Have we been wrong all these years? Passion for me has always been a huge thing. As many others have said, if you do what you love, you will never work a day in your life. Now, that may or may not be true. Most of us, even if we love what we are doing, have a few bad days that remind us that what we do is in fact work. Sorry Mr. Cuban but it is not as simple as you make it out to be.

When I was much younger, I loved video games. Countless hours and rolls upon rolls of quarters went into those machines. Asteroids was probably the game I was best at, but unless we unplugged the machines to reset the high score, my name rarely appeared at the top of the leader board. Athletics have always been something of a love of mine and I tried to master a variety of sports. Throwing a baseball against a house or using a pitch back screen occupied me for huge chunks of time. I tried to increase both my accuracy and my velocity, which I did slightly, but I was never going to be one of those kids picked early for neighborhood games or little league try outs. A few things worked against me, I was fat, slow and deathly afraid of being hit by a pitch, so I was a terrible hitter.  A losing combination if there ever was one. Effort was put in but results eluded me. In lacrosse, I was often dressed and out on the field early to work on ground balls, throwing, checking and conditioning. At night, there were sets of wind sprints up and down the street to improve my speed. Did it help? Not really. There was a key ingredient missing, I had no athletic ability or talent.

Mark Cuban is right to some degree. You see, I had passion, but it didn’t mean that it was enough. On the flip side, I put effort into some of these endeavors and never got any better at them. After a while without seeing results, I walked away and focused on other pursuits. There are other things that, over time, I have put far less effort into but have had success with. Cooking has been a passion of mine for decades. Sorry Mr. Cuban, it came with very little effort. My mom would show me how to make something and I would replicate several of her dishes, often putting my own spin on them. Over time, there were dishes that she stopped making and assigned them to me or my other siblings because she felt we made them better than she did. It is hard to explain it, but when in the kitchen, different flavor combinations seem to make sense to me. That being said, I have had my share of flops, for sure, but still keep coming back and trying to get it right or at least to taste good

So, is it passion, effort or both? If you ask me, it is a combination of those two, plus talent. Passion lights a fire under many of us. That fire can and often does push us to learn more about the subject/task, put effort into it, work harder, and in the end hopefully be good at it. Effort is in fact crucial. Yes, Mr. Cuban is correct that simply being passionate about something means nothing if there is no effort applied. We have all seen people that have a dream that languishes on the sideline because little or no work is put into making that dream, that passion, a reality. Let’s not discount or underestimate the third prong; talent. There are kids that go out day after day and shoot basketballs for hours at a time, they learn how to dribble and shoot with both hands, but they simply don’t have the talent that allows them to excel. Many people have taken thousands of photos but they will never be Ansel Adams, whose landscape photographs are still a standard today almost 4 decades after his passing. People like Julia Child and Martha Stewart revolutionized the cooking industry and magazine publications. They were/are both hard workers but also supremely talented.

All of us, if we stop and think, can find examples of people and situations where they had one or two of the three prongs, talent, effort or passion, but not all together. History is full of examples of colossal effort that amounts to very little. There are countless stories of supremely talented individuals that squandered that talent, leaving us to wonder what it would be like if they had put forth the effort, or were more passionate and really developed and nurtured that talent. Mark Cuban and I are perhaps not so far apart. Years ago, a college professor let me know that my writing was atrocious and at about a third-grade level. Over time, I have (I believe) gotten better at it, but it has taken years of continuous effort and lots of practice along with some great editing by others. Do I have a passion for it? Not really. It is more of a necessity. Is it something I enjoy? If we are talking the actual process, that is a hard no. What I do enjoy is the finished product and the hope that others who read what I have written will find some value in it.

For me, passion is still part of the equation. Mark Cuban wrote that piece in 2012 and a lot has changed since then. His tough love stance of just go out there and work at it, may not work for the teens and 20 somethings of today. There is no secret that I love what I do and I am passionate about it. It has absolutely taken effort, not just on my part, but by the whole FUN Enterprises Team, to provide products and services that seem to keep our clients coming back. Do I, or we, have talent for what we do? Who knows? We appear to have some aptitude for it. Perhaps mom said it best, “Anything worth doing, is worth doing right”.

About the author

Ken Abrahams is an avid, amateur cook and photographer. His athletic skills leave much to be desired. His high school football coach used to walk by him during warm ups and drills and either make a nasty comment or simply shake his head and laugh. For a number of years, he held the record in South Bend Indiana for grade school wrestlers of being pinned the fastest at 8 seconds. Apparently, a number of years later someone was counted out in 6 seconds. He is a big believer in following one’s heart.

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