Passion 8

I think passion is overrated. This is a myth on par with living happily ever after. I'm sure there's a select few couples who are so in love with one another, that it feels like this mythical magic perfect relationship that movies and fairy tales espouse that simply want to make you gag.

Kathy Sierra, for example, believes companies ought to create passionate users. The idea is both fascinating and mildly repulsive. On the one hand, she stresses the idea that companies should make the best stuff they can that make users want the product so much, that they can't help but brag about it to their friends. This would, presumably mean not only better products for us all, but also happier customers. Who wouldn't love that?

But then it suggests that we, as consumers, became slaves to the consuming. How many people, ten years (or less) of living in the same place, staring at the same furniture, the same walls, want to remodel, redecorate? They're tired of living in the same place, seeing the same things. Their friends are remodelling. They want to remodel.

You know, this has rarely affected my parents. Many, many things are twenty years old. We have wallpaper dating to the 70s. It looks as tacky now as it did then, but they never think about replacing it. Why bother? They don't need to show off the house. They don't need the snazziest furniture. Why waste money?

And yet, having companies make these snazzy products that allow users to "kick ass" means you're asking people to spend money, to consume. Ipods are great, I admit. But I have a friend that's broken everyone he's had. Why do they break so much? Indeed, I bet most of the business of the genius bar is trying to fix broken Ipods.

There's something vaguely distasteful to me about trying to get consumers to get products, something akin to brainwashing. Having said that, I have to agree that if I am going to be consumerist (and alas I am, far more than my parents), I'd rather buy "good" stuff.

Although I cringe at the word passion for this reason, this time I'm going to write something positive about passion.

I was reading an IM message sent a few days back from Ken. I had somehow missed it because it was sent to my home computer, and I wasn't paying attention to it until yesterday. He said, why yes, he did have lots of books on running, even some on physiology. This, to me, is a kind of passion, though one could call it obsessive-compulsive.

Obsessive-compulsiveness is a trait that many software guys have. Who else would sit hours poring through code, searching for bugs. It's not particularly fun (even if some sick people seem to relish the challenge), and yet there you are, trying to figure out which, of many hundreds of lines of code, caused the problem.

I'd have to think Ken, as much as he likes programming and such, is more passionate about running. I wonder if he worries about getting older, about not being able to train like he's able to do now. I suppose you try not to worry about such things, and just do what you do, and adjust as needed. One could argue that any activity that one does while young might no longer be possible when one is older.

I'd also imagine that if he could simply make a living running, maybe he would. There are people I know that have hobbies that they really enjoy, but society makes it difficult to make a living out of it. Heck, there are plenty of video game players that enjoy playing video games, and some who wish they could make a living out of it. But then, you'd probably have to compete against others, and that might make it less fun.

But the point I want to make is not whether one could make a living doing a hobby or activity you really enjoy, but to think about what drives a person to want to excel. Now, Ken, I figure, isn't the fastest runner, or the guy with the most endurance, or what have you. In all reasonable measures, he's not in the "elite". But where he does excel is that he knows a lot about what he does. He tracks it, he reads about it, and he tries to maximize what he does for himself, without causing injury.

It's a bit like the commentators and columnists in baseball who realized they lacked the physical skills to play professionally, but had the acumen to understand statistics, and began cranking away, trying to use their superior math skills to compensate for athletic talent they weren't born with.

It makes me wonder, how passionate are people? And I don't necessarily mean that people are on some emotional, ecstatic high when they do stuff, but how much they feel compelled to push themselves to do something as best they can? I suspect a large number of people are not passionate about anything.

Some people loving shopping, and I suppose it can be considered a passion, though as a non-shopper, I can't begin to imagine how to quantify this. With Ken, I could probably ask him a bunch of questions, look at the various stats he's collected. I don't know what I'd do with all that information, but it would give some quantification over being passionate.

I remember many years ago, I knew this guy who was trying to finish a computer science degree? Anyway, he used to spend a tremendous time trying to get good at tennis. When he was young, he used to train in martial arts. Perhaps that gave him discipline to learn tennis, realizing he needed to learn the "right" technique, so he could master tennis as quickly as possible.

He would take lessons, read up on tennis, get videotapes (I think) on the subject. He'd devote at least three days a week to tennis, even trying to cut back on work so he could play. His wife thought he was taking tennis way too seriously, that he was completely obsessed about it. And perhaps he was.

But I figure most people would find being too obsessed about being really good is better than not caring about anything. Our society, in general, prefers people to excel rather than to be average. Indeed, sports is all about this.

Now, to be fair, we work in a company where most of the developers are pretty good, better than average. I could say we all have a passion for software development, but, at least for me, that's not quite right. Perhaps because I don't know what that means exactly. Perhaps when I see a sliver of what Ken does, I can more readily recognize that as a kind of passion, and wonder what that must be like.

I could point to my prodigious blogging as a kind of passion, but it would be great if I had more interesting things to say more often. I don't mind, as I find practicing writing useful.

Well, that's it for now. Ciao!