How Your Passion Can Drive You to the Corner of Effort and Talent

“Set your life on fire. Seek those who fan your flames.” ~ Rumi

This is a continuation of Can You “Do Anything You Set Your Mind to” or Not?, Keep Calm and Discover Your Talent, and Five Dances of Effort.

Talent and effort are not sufficient by themselves. Passion is what drives you to the corner of effort and talent.

Passion and Effort

Effort is in this context is a marathon, not a sprint, and that marathon demands passion. Dancing through all phases of your life and enjoying your challenges through the long haul needs passion. Without passion you can’t dance. Without passion, you can’t recover from setbacks, to get ahead, or stay ahead.

You need passion to raise the bar. If you manage to jump over every hurdle in life, you are setting your bar too low. When you raise that bar you will stumble and it would take effort to get up and try again. You need passion to recover when all seems lost so you can visualize and take reasonable small steps toward success. These small steps will feed your passion so you can believe that you can move ahead. The ten-second barrier for 100 meters sprint and 4 minute barrier for one mile run was not broken for a long time. Once it was broken, other athletes knew that it could be done and that enabled them to passionately pursue the goal of breaking it. Now, the ten-second barrier is broken almost every time during the finals of international competitive events.

Meanwhile, I saw most others get in on their first attempt. Some of them were halfway through college, while I was still on the outside trying to get in. It took passion to endure and maintain the effort to break through. I had to leverage my passion to make a sustained effort so I could work through many challenging and/or boring aspects of the admissions process. I was relieved, not humbled, when I got in. I never understood when people arrogantly pretend to be humbled when they get a break in life, but that is a topic for another day. It is always a humbling experience to see others around you cruise through some aspects of life that are painful and difficult for you, and real humility is an asset.

Passion and Talent

Natural talent is not enough. This talent needs to be nurtured and developed for achievement, and you need passion to advance talent. If you are not passionate about something, it is hard to go beyond your natural talent to the point where you can leverage it to achieve greatness. Malcolm Gladwell claims in his book Outliers that a total of around 10,000 hours of practice is the key to achieving world class expertise in any skill. We can debate the number of hours need to be lower or higher, but I have found that advancing talent demands investing many hours and that investment requires passion.

Allen Iverson was a talented basketball players who is remembered for mocking his coach, Larry Brown, demanding that Iverson show up for practice. He went on a tirade in a press conference and expressed his frustrations about being asked to practice. “But we're talking about practice man. What are we talking about? Practice? We're talking about practice, man. We're talking about practice. We're talking about practice. We ain't talking about the game. We're talking about practice, ...” Iverson demonstrated a lack of passion to make a sustained effort needed to become a better player. He had flashes of brilliance but many fans believe that Iverson never realized his full potential.

I was blessed with a natural gift for spotting talent in professional life and was passionate developing that gift. I applied the same gift to spotting talent in chess and it is better to talk about chess because the information is already public. I spotted Rayan Taghizadeh when he was five years old and started coaching him. Rayan developed into an excellent player and went on to win several State and National Championships as well as a bronze medal at World Youth. I also spotted and encouraged, but never coached, Cameron Wheeler when he was five years old. Cameron also went had several State and National Championships as well as a silver medal at World Youth. Other coaches laughed at me when I predicted that he will win the State Championship in first grade, but I had the last laugh when he did win it.

Passion is what carries you through successive stages of expansion.

The way to develop your talent keep reaching for higher expand yourself to fill the new challenges. Every gamer knows the joy of leveling up. Every time you conquer a level, try something more challenging and you will see your talents expand to conquer the next level, or you will fail. If you fail, you will need passion to bounce back from setbacks. You will need the passion to raise your talents to the next level. Passion is what carries you through successive stages of expansion.

Corner of Effort and Talent

If your heart is passionate about something you will naturally find it easier to make an effort and invest in developing your talent. Otherwise, it would be exhausting to make any effort and it would be boring to develop talent.

If you are not interested in something, pretend it is interesting until it becomes interesting. This technique works practically. I found people uninteresting and that limited my effectiveness in teams and restricted me to whatever I could achieve in solo efforts. Through mentoring, therapy, and reading poetry, I learned to pretend to care for others until I really started caring for them. Over time, I have developed my feelings empathy and love. I avoided cats until my wife and children recently adopted two kittens, Apple and Mochi. I went from avoiding them to pretending to care for them to loving them.

My friend, Zachi Baharav, recently echoed similar advice. “Interest [and passion] can be developed, or nourished: There are very few uninteresting things. In many cases, it is related to expectation. Some people keep on looking for the ‘perfect soulmate’ for 50 years, and don’t find any, while others go with an ‘arranged marriage’ that grows into soul-mate after 50 years of life together.”

It took about two days to develop my passion for her and a few more days for her to develop her passion for me.

I took Zachi Baharav’s advice, about two decades before he shared it with me, when I decided to marry Azleena Salleh Azhar because she was the best I could expect due to a number of reasons. I don’t think either one of us would have waited out 50 years. It took about two days to develop my passion for her and a few more days for her to develop her passion for me. You have to be zen/sufi to understand how I can take someone's advice before he shares it, but that is another topic for another day.

There is nothing wrong with not developing your talent in something that doesn’t ignite your passion. There is nothing wrong with not putting in the effort in something that doesn’t fuel your passion. Yousef Azhar and Arman, my youngest sons, had a natural chess talent that got them early success but they didn’t have passion for chess to make the effort in tournaments, nor did they have the passion to develop their talents before the tournaments. Both are passionate about math and over the years Yousef has already taught me a few things in math.

Finding your passion is a keystone of success. What is your passion? What will get you to jump out of bed every morning? What makes you want to dance?

Yousef peaked in chess when he was eight years old and Arman when he was five year old. I hold myself responsible for stressing the results rather than inspiring their passion. Yousef and Arman, if you are reading this, please know that I’m sorry… discover your passion and find the corner of talent and effort. Finding your passion is a keystone of success. What is your passion? What will get you to jump out of bed every morning? What makes you want to dance?

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PS: I feel bad about the copyright notice but am in talks to publish some of these writings. I still want them available to others so you can critique and help me improve. I will acknowledge you if you do that.