When you decide to change your life, improve your world, or reclaim your dreams you will come to a time when you get really excited about something you consider ‘silly’ or ‘trivial’ — and in that moment, you have discovered magic.
Think about it — how often do you get excited in the day-to-day? Not pleased, not happy — little kid excited. Won a trip excited. Finished the race excited. And more importantly, what do you do with that information?
Hopefully, you are already feeling happy pretty often, and doing fulfilling things sometimes. But excitement — telling strangers, breathless squealing excitement — true, rousing joy, how often does that happen?
But don’t tell me it doesn’t happen. You may just have ignored your passions for so long that they can only whisper to you. More likely, you think the things you love are silly, pointless, or a waste of time.
For myself, television writing is like that right now. I love, love LOVE watching great shows, and the bit of teleplay writing I’ve done has been very scary and exciting. But I love novel writing too (and blogging!) and maybe do see prose writing as more serious or legit. And teleplay writing scares me, it scares me to death. I wrote half of a pilot, reread it, and it terrified me — because it was good.
Fear doesn’t necessarily accompany this excitement, but the voice of ‘reason’ often does. What moves you is probably something there’s not enough of in the world, at least in your mind, but if you start telling a friend how you spent eight solid hours decorating one cupcake, you may get a lot of push back. Or a look of incredulity.
That’s okay. What you love isn’t for everyone, but if you love it passionately enough, you will transcend ridicule and find admiration. Maybe not from everyone, but if you’re madly into something, there has never been been a better time to find and connect to all the people worldwide that share your passion.
Because, while you don’t have to transmute your excitement to anyone else, many passions (and most of our great art, writing, inventions, etc.) plus lots of great careers, begin with a desire to share or inspire (the root word of enthusiasm). So when something excites you more than other people, know that means that you would be willing to work longer, keep perfecting, and dream about this thing more than the average person. And as you know, there’s no traffic jams on the extra mile — there’s only people doing what excites them every day and living out their dreams.
So don’t worry about if your passion could be your paycheck — if it contains any kind of true magic and genius at all, it will probably look like the opposite for quite a long time.
That’s all right, because when you follow the things you love, you’ll be grinning like an idiot and having the time of your life.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a teleplay to write.
Stay Extraordinary 