I read a great guest post today by Mary DeMuth about Finding Your Passion in Three Steps. In it she talks about a simple exercise to help you find your passion… Just list your top three movies of all time. Then find a common thread that runs through them. This thread will closely resemble (if not mimic) your passion in this life. I did a similar post a while back and found my top three movies were…
1. Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo
2. Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window
3. Forrest Gump
For my three movies, the integrating themes are mystery, interesting people, facing fear head on, and the ability for ordinary people to do incredible things. It really ties in with a passion to find out what drives people to overcome obstacles and find success.
In my previous post I put together a quick download to help you distill your movie choices into a mission statement. You can search the IMDB for keywords and quickly write out a passion statement. It’s a great exercise and one that is fun to do with a group or with your co-workers.
Once you have your statement written down, here is a question for today…
Are you putting in the time to see it through?
I’ve been re-reading Malcolm Gladwell’s great book Outliers this week. In it he talks about the secret of 10,000 hours of practice. How most of the worlds successful people have this in common. They all have put in the time to get where they are at.
"Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good."
— Malcolm Gladwell (Outliers)
So a simple question… Are you putting in the time to see your passion come to fruition? Or is your time spent doing routine and mundane things? It’s certainly a wake up question, especially for me. We all have 24 hours in a day and most of us have some say in how we spend it.
We can watch TV for hours on end (the average in America spends 6 hours per day) or we can do something more productive. We can play video games, surf the web, and read e-mail, or we can take control of the keyboard and start writing a book, and article, or a blog post.
Just think of those scenes from your favorite movies. Are the people watching TV or are they doing something more important?
Why not put yourself in the scene and take the first step?
After all, life is like a box of chocolates… You get to pick the one you want.
Question: What are your top 3 movies of all time?
