When I was a child, my dad took me to the golf course, gave me a sawn-off golf club, put a ball down and said, ‘give it a go.’
I took swing after swing, either missing the ball completely or slamming the club into the grass surrounding the ball. I was probably there for 20 mins, swinging like a maniac. But then I hit the ball, once. I hit it SO cleanly and crisply that I thought I missed it. It wasn’t until I saw this tiny little ball fly like a dart through the air that I realised what I’d done. It felt SO good.
So, I tried again. And sure enough, 20 mins of frantic swinging and missing went by again before ‘bang’, I did it again. Not as good as the first time, but still pretty good.
I had never been on a golf course before, never swung a golf club, but 40 mins after trying it for the first time, I became interested. I was driven to reproduce that feeling of hitting it cleanly, and so I didn’t stop trying.
I spent every afternoon after school practising at the golf course. Over time, I hit the ball more often. Then, I focussed on hitting it better. The more I tried and failed, the more interested I became in mastering it, the more I uncovered the game’s depth and complexity. I discovered that it was as much a mental game against oneself, as a physical one against others.
At 11 years old, I didn’t know that golf could be a passion. If the advice my dad had given me was “follow your passion”, I never would have found golf.
I can’t help but think that the romantic notion of ‘passion’ that underpins our current cultural narrative, “we’re all meant to do one thing on this earth, we just need to find it” is entirely and utterly false. In my case, I arrived at passion through persistence. And I’m not the only one.
Humans like the idea of ‘searching’ for ‘that one thing’ but we are probably more malleable than we realise. Each of us are multi-dimensional, complex organisms; it doesn’t make any logical sense to have ‘one thing’ that we’re good at or interested in. So what’s the solution?
In my experience, I needed a few things to get truly and deeply interested in golf:
- Opportunity. Had Dad not taken me to the golf course, I never would’ve got there myself. I needed something external to prompt me. Dad had liked golf, so he thought he’d share that with me. Now, with the internet, there are hundreds of meetups in communities around the world that it would be SO easy to find a group (or a person) who might be able to share their interest with me to see if I like it.
- A rapid feedback loop (and some level of success) for your first try. Like me, it took 40 mins of aimless effort before I saw that ball fly into the distance and get that feeling that maybe this is something I could do. Some activities, like writing a novel, take years. It’s probably not the best place to start. But, if writing is something you might want to try, perhaps a short story or even a flash fiction is a good way to start? You can write one of those in a day and get feedback quickly.
- Persistence. Once you discover a glimmer of interest or a feeling you like, you only make progress by persisting. If you wrote one flash fiction that showed you that you could do it, write another, and another. Some will be as good as the first, some even better, but there’ll also be a lot of crap. Perhaps doing this will lead you to discover some books, advice, or a course that can help you get better, to weed out the crap ones and slowly improve over time.
Deciding whether to continue pursuing an interest (at the expense of pursuing a new interest) is a very difficult thing. In my case, I almost became a pro at golf but, for various reasons, I slowly decided on other priorities, and now I no longer play. Instead, I spend time writing and illustrating stories—another ‘passion’ I’ve found along the way. The learning curve of writing and illustrating stories professionally, even adopting an art practice, is steep and infinitely deep. Right now, I’m happy there, but who knows what will come. After all, cello is always something I’ve wanted to try, too.