Why Your Passions Are No Accident & Why You Must Pursue ThemAn short essay on finding your passions & following them even though the road is difficult & uncertain
 It’s a rainy day in Mumbai city as I write this piece. In fact, there’s an “orange alert” issued by the Mumbai meteorological department because of excessive rain in the city from last night to today. Mumbai usually floods during the monsoon, in June & July, but this year it’s come as late as mid-August. Against the backdrop of the flowing downpour from the grey skies that hover around the city, I’ve just almost finished a podcast I discovered (which I’m planning to write a separate post about on my Medium), which has been an intriguing watch/listen. The show is the band Smashing Pumpkins’ lead singer, Billy Corgan’s podcast interview with Steve Vai. I haven’t heard much of Vai’s music, but I’ve heard of his guitar prowess & his story on the podcast was eye-opening. In the first part of the podcast, he talks about his “passion” to play the guitar. Astoundingly, Vai practised guitar for 9 hours every day as a teenager, something that saw him become a virtuoso and master of the instrument, soon leading to joining the legendary Frank Zappa’s band as an eighteen year old. He argues that following & flowing with passions is far different from “discipline” in that discipline is forcing your way through something you don’t want to do, while passion is more of an inner drive. He suggests that he isn’t the most disciplined person, but his unrelenting passion for music and the guitar led him to put in 9 hours of work on the instrument every day. It was just the relentless pursuit of excellence of his passion that led him to become an outlier of a guitar player. Passion is the fuel to the fire of your inner makeup. The way society is constructed, we’re taught to “be practical”. This is, in spite of the fact that practicality and passion are not mutually exclusive. Furthermore, the evidence, both anecdotal & scientific, tells us otherwise. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the psychologist who pioneered the concept of flow, discovered that when people are deeply immersed in activities they love, they perform at their most creative and effective. Passion is far from a distraction and, in most cases, is the fuel to the intellect. It’s what keeps the mind restless, curious, and willing to stretch into new territory. The things that inexplicably light you up & provide fuel for your curiosity, or the rabbit holes you dive into without noticing time slip away, and the obscure interests that others dismiss as trivial, are as essential as the jobs you seek for & do as a means of earning a living. They’re the compass you’ve been handed, though most of us spend a lifetime ignoring it. I once met this motivational speaker named Janet Attwood, who is the author of the book The Passion Test. My father held an event where she was the primary guest speaker at a hotel called The Sea Princess, in Juhu, Mumbai, a long time ago. Her book is a systematic process of uncovering your passions. At the end of the event, while we were leaving, she turned to me and said, “It’s been lovely, Gaurav. Remember, when in doubt, choose in favour of your passions.” And that was the last time I saw her. But what she said lingered on in my mind to this day. I was young and impressionable in my early twenties when this meeting contrived to happen. But now I completely get it. The irony is that most people already know what sparks them, what lights them up, and what is the driving force behind what they want to do, but they convince themselves that it’s random or irrelevant or disband them entirely to pursue their jobs. People say, “I love music, but that’s just for fun; I can’t make a living off it,” or “I could immerse myself in sketching, but I’ll never make a career of it.” This is where we mistake passion for coincidence, when in reality it’s the deepest clue we’ve been given about who we are. You can call it fate, biology, or genes or call it soul, or purpose, or whatever you like; it’s not arbitrary. But passions are the inner compass of what you should be pursuing diligently and spending your time on. When it comes to the argument between things being easy and pursuing your passion, it’s not a glamorous Hollywood film montage. It’s frustrating, lonely, and terrifyingly uncertain. There will be days when the very thing you love feels like it’s breaking you. But that’s the paradox: the struggle validates the passion. If it were easy, it would be fleeting. The difficulty is what makes the pursuit meaningful, just like the example of Steve Vai & his process of mastering the guitar. Coming to the tradeoff between earning a living and following your passions, this book I’m currently reading, titled Steal Like An Artist, by Austin Kleon, suggests that having a job is just be a means to fuelling what you really want to do & achieve. Through his lens, your job isn’t what defines you or is your main purpose in life, but a means to give you the tools & time to do what’s meaningful to you. So in this sense, your job is just a means to something else i.e what you really want to achieve & create or pursue. You work in your job role for your paycheck & use that paycheck to pursue your passions, whatever they may be. The American author, Joseph Campbell, put it bluntly in one of his quotes: “Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors where there were only walls.” — Joseph Campbell While the Irish poet David Whyte suggested: “The antidote to exhaustion is not rest. It is wholeheartedness.” Passion is that wholeheartedness. It is what makes the struggle bearable, and even beautiful. Why is pursuing your passions essential? Because they are far from coincidences. They are the fingerprints of your purpose. They are oftentimes the secret ingredients that connect your inner world and the outer one, like letters from the universe written to you that only you can open. To ignore them is to risk living a life that is forged by what society has handed out to you. You could be technically “successful” in your job, but it will leave you spiritually vacant. Uncover your passions and have the courage to pursue them. Passions aren’t an accident. The only real accident is failing to pursue & honour them. Thank you for being a valuable subscriber to my newsletter Light Years! If you liked this post & found it informative, feel free to share this publication with your network by clicking the button below… I hope you found this post informative & it helped you in some way. As always, feel free to subscribe to my publication Light Years & support it & also share it if you’d like. Get it in your inbox by filling up the space below! 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Monday, 18 August 2025
Why Your Passions Are No Accident & Why You Must Pursue Them
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