The other day, I was talking to a friend of mine who explained to me how his childhood hobby eventually became his passion, and this passion grew throughout his life, and today he freely admits that it is an obsession. It is interesting when we advise and educate our young people that we work very hard to help them find their niche. Something that they are good at, that they enjoy doing, and hopefully this will stimulate a new curiosity and need to continue discovering in their other endeavors and schoolwork.
Fortunately, this concept works quite well because as students become good at something, they take those same skills of success and achievement and apply them to other things in their life. If a student is good at music or sports, her grades also go up in school. This is because they are learning to excel at something, and those kinds of skills are universal to almost everything we do. Those things that we enjoy doing we do well and we reward our brain with chemical splashes when we begin to realize that what we are doing we are doing at a higher level.
Over time, these hobbies become habits and we prefer to practice them before anything else. They become our passion. Passion is important for success and happiness in life. Having a cause, a reason to live and something meaningful is paramount. The passion for Americans is an extremely important thing as it goes with freedom, freedom and the pursuit of happiness. However, our society also believes that obsession is when passion goes overboard, when people unnecessarily sacrifice other parts of their lives and most of all seek to engage in these exciting activities.
Sometimes this occurs at the point of psychological damage and destruction of one’s life. In retrospect, perhaps we should be concerned that we are pushing our children into their hobbies and passions to the point where we are causing the future obsessions that we seek to eliminate in our society. Am I suggesting that we need to rethink this strategy in K-12?
Shouldn’t we push children to find their niche, their path in life, or push them into interesting hobbies? Shouldn’t we help kids find their passion? And when we do, where do we draw the line and at what age is it not okay to passionately pursue what matters to the point of obsession?
Interestingly enough, almost all successful people will tell you that you must have passion to be successful at anything, that you need to love what you do, if you hope to do it well. Many of these super successful people are absolutely obsessed with whatever it is they’re doing. Is that really a bad thing? Don’t we want people to have great passion, don’t we want the standouts, the outliers or those people who inspire us?
What’s wrong with passion turned into obsession? Why are we forcing people to have a balanced life when the best people in each sector seem to have a great obsession? We need to make decisions about this if we want to be successful in building humanity’s superstars out of our K-12 kids; after all, who will lead us in the future? In fact, I would like you to consider all of this on a philosophical level and think about it.