This is Installment #3 of my serialized eBook, Lessons From The Passionist: How To Turn Passion Into Purpose To Create Greater Meaning and Joy in Your Life. Subscribe below to receive email reminders when new weekly installments are published. Enjoy!
Chapter 1 Not a Destination: My Personal Passion-Guided Journey
Before I begin to help you find your passion and create your fascinating life around it, let me share the story of the passion-guided journey that led me to write this book.
The idea for the book came to me one morning while I was taking my daily morning walk in the neighborhood where I live near Miami Beach. Every morning that I am home, I walk about four miles in an area known as the Venetian Islands – a narrow string of small residential islands bisecting Biscayne Bay. On this walk each morning, I encounter some of my favorite things in life:
- The Miami Skyline. I am a city person at heart, and although I love nature, I feed off the energy created by the hustle and bustle of urban settings. Miami is a beautiful city (it’s actually called the Magic City, and lives up to its name) with a great skyline that is accentuated by colorful sunrises and sunsets. On these mornings, I literally watch Miami grow, right before my eyes, into one the the world’s leading cosmopolitan hubs, full of commerce, art, food, music and life. Miami also has a vibrant Lifescape that oozes passion (A Lifescape is like a landscape, but colored by people and activity rather than plants and nature. We’ll explore Lifescapes later in the book).
- Water. In all directions, I see on these walks, beautiful blue-green water. Small inlets are everywhere, with boats docked beside beautiful homes, and there are expansive views of Biscayne Bay – which leads out to the Atlantic Ocean – from any one of the multiple bridges connecting the islands. My senses of sight, sound and smell are all activated on these walks, and the yellow orange glow from the sunrise always inspires my passion.
- Nature. Little iguanas, birds of all types, fish (sometimes I see dolphins swimming with such beautiful ease or stingrays leaping four feet out of the bay) and plant life of multiple varieties inhabit my little island chain and the ecosystem it encompasses. I especially like the coconut palms which give my walk the feeling of starting each day on a little tropical vacation. Who is not passionate about vacation?
- Finally, there are people. I see adults of all ages, walking, running, rollerblading, strolling with babies in carriages, walking dogs and skateboarding. Everyone is moving for fun or fitness, or just enjoying a morning moment of contemplation. I see many of the same people everyday and I assume that, as for me, passing across this little stretch of islands each day represents some sort of ritual, a way of easing in or fueling up for the day ahead. Same time, same place, same route, same pace, but somehow always a bit different, a bit special. After these walks, I always feel sharp, energized and ready to take on the world.
As I walked and observed the beauty all around me, I asked myself, “How did I get here?” It was a question born of intense gratitude. I looked around at all the things I love – the water, the city, the trees, the boats, the sunshine and the vibrant life energy of my neighbors – and I thought about my daily life and the fact that I have a job I love in a place I love. I just had to ask my self, with emphatic joy, almost giggling irrepressibly, “How did I get here?”
It was not a rhetorical question. On that morning, I found myself living a life that I’m sure I dreamt about when I was a boy, a life that would have been a more than satisfactory answer to the timeless question every young person is asked, “What do you want to do when you grow up?”. Here I was, grown up, doing what I would have wanted to do. “How fortunate am I? How lucky am I?,” I thought that day. And then I asked myself again, this time with curious disbelief, “How DID I get here?” I wanted the answer for myself, of course, but I also wanted to understand the specific influences, attitudes, behaviors, experiences and steps I took throughout my life to get here, so I could help other people get to their near perfect place in life. Then they could help other people on their journeys, and so on. I wanted to help create a Chain of Passion among the lives of people I encountered. I wanted to be a catalyst, creating an incredible Passion Reaction, that would drive people to pursue their unique version of a fascinating life.
The answer to my question was Passion!
Passion? “What kind of simplistic answer is that?”, you ask. “Give me the formula for this success, for this Passion Reaction you talk about. Give me the steps to get to MY happy, inspiring place every morning.” I will. Almost. While this book is not a scientific, one-size-fits-all, step-by-step manual, it is a guide that will provide some clarity and direction. It is based on a collection and recollection of my experiences and observations, and my understanding of the path I followed to find and harness my passions. This process began early in my life, and continues to this day. While I consciously developed and followed a plan many times, I also have been open to improvising when necessary, always looking for opportunities to fearlessly pursue passions, new and old, at every stage of my life, not always knowing where they would lead. Following passion requires a bit of faith, but its worth the risk and uncertainty.
A good friend and business colleague, Bruce Turkel (you should read his book, All About Them) and I eat lunch together every other week at one of Miami’s great restaurants. We are both passionate about good food. Besides enjoyable banter and tasty fare, these lunches provide a frequent opportunity to bounce ideas off each other, and have actually yielded some productive solutions for each of our businesses, as well creating a few new business collaborations. One day, while we were pondering our purposes in life over a dish of perfectly cooked pasta, Bruce looked at me and said, “You know what you are? You’re The Passionist “. I looked at him quizzically and asked him what he meant by that. “You are all about passion and helping people find their passions and giving them the courage, tools and encouragement to pursue them. It oozes out of you. You are The Passionist.”
I had never really thought about what I did in those term before, but I do instinctively try to help people in that way all the time, not because I think I have all the answers, but because I want people to be excited about their lives. Because I am usually so positive and excited about life, and have experienced a variety pursuits for work and pleasure, people often ask me how to pursue a particular activity, dream or burning desire they might have, whether it’s to open a business, become a singer, become a world champion athlete, or even write a book (this is my first!). It must be a calling. So that day, I became The Passionist. Thanks, Bruce.
My whole life then flashed before me as Bruce went on to help me understand my new found purpose. Every dream I have ever pursued, every achievement I have ever attained, every mistake I have ever made, every failure I have ever had and every breath I have ever taken in my life, has been driven and infused by one thing. Passion. Passion has been the theme of my life for as long as I can remember. I’ve never pursued anything half-way, and I rarely say, “someday I will do that.” If I want to do something, I find a way to make it happen, make a plan and get to it.
As a young boy, my passion was to be a professional athlete. I played baseball first, and set up tires in my garage to practice pitching into targets. Night and day, I would pitch into those old tires, imagining that I was on the mound for the Boston Red Sox, with the crowd cheering loudly as I wound up and fired away. I could hear the television announcer calling the play-by-play in my head. It was magical and I got pretty good from all that practice, resulting in lots of success playing Little League baseball. That was my first lesson that practice did indeed pay off, and by age twelve I had a wall of trophies to prove it. It was also when I realized how much fun it was to pursue a passion, although I didn’t think of it in those terms at that age. I was just a kid having fun in life. Too often, we lose that perspective as we age.
I also loved playing ice hockey. I was always around ice rinks as a child because my older sister was a figure skater, so I learned to skate at very young age. At some point, I decided that maybe I didn’t want to be a baseball player. Maybe I wanted to play hockey for the Boston Bruins like my boyhood idol, Bobby Orr. So my pitching targets in the garage became a hockey goal. Serendipitously, I would eventually meet Bobby Orr. It happened after losing a tennis match in Boston when I was seventeen. In a ironic twist, he was actually watching me play that day, and after a hard fought battle against a talented competitor named Peter Palandjian, the son of one of Orr’s Bostonian friends, he came down onto the court to tell me I played a great match. “Chin up,” he said, “there will be other matches. Learn from this one.” I sat slumped on the court, still dazed from my loss. It happened so fast, it took me a while to realize who had just taken the time to offer some words of encouragement. How cool is life? Always be ready for the unexpected.
I continued to play both baseball and hockey, but as fate would have it, things were about to change in my young life. My mom took me for my first tennis lesson was I was eleven. I’m not sure why. I knew nothing about tennis and never asked to learn how to play. In fact, I had only seen it played a few times before that first lesson. I wasn’t that excited about it at the time either, because in my neighborhood, boys played hockey, baseball and basketball (after reaching all of 5’9”, it’s a good thing I didn’t pursue that sport!). But I loved tennis almost immediately. I didn’t really know who the great players were, what the Grand Slam tournaments were or any of the details I knew about baseball and hockey players. I just knew that I liked running and hitting that ball. The sport was fast like hockey and required precise eye-hand coordination like baseball. Unlike hockey, size was less important in tennis. The sport grabbed me instantly. So much so, that by age twelve, I quit playing my beloved hockey to have more time for tennis. Now I was left playing and enjoying baseball and tennis, practicing both as often and as diligently as any sports obsessed boy could in a twenty-four hour day.
Then one night, in the summer before I was to enter LaSalle Academy in Providence, Rhode Island, the high school alma mater of my father and two older brothers, my dad called me into the living room after dinner and changed my world again. He said, “Rob, we need to talk.” Hmmm, was I in trouble? Or…was it time for THAT talk? “Your getting ready to enter high school,” he said, “and baseball and tennis are sports that happen in the same spring season. You need to pick one to focus on. You can’t play both.” Wow, really? I had to choose? I had to give one up? Was I really confronting my first big life decision? At twelve?
I knew my dad was hoping I’d say baseball. I’d been a Little League All-Star and was quite good at second base and hitting home runs, and the LaSalle Academy coach had already expressed interest in having me on the team. I must have been a mature twelve year-old, because I remember thinking in that moment about my future and how this decision might effect it. Something told me that this might be one of the biggest decisions I would make in my life and, as it turned out, it was. You’ll understand why and how it’s relevant to this book as you read on.
As I sat with my dad, I thought about my family excursions to Fenway Park to watch the Red Sox. It was an historic ballpark, a baseball shrine where you could sit all day and watch a double-header, eat hot dogs and feel the presence of baseball legends. People spilled “beah” (that Bostonian for beer) when they got excited and the crowd went crazy when the Red Sox scored. Boston sports fans are passionate, to say the least, and the energy at Fenway was infectious. I thought about the beautifully manicured turf and what it might be like to actually play on that field one day. I had achieved enough success in baseball by twelve, including pitching a no-hitter and hitting a game-winning grand slam, to believe that I could actually make it happen.
Tennis, on the other hand, was still a new game to me. I had played only a few tournaments, with almost no success. In fact, I got destroyed in my first few tennis matches. I couldn’t even beat my brother consistently, which drove me crazy! He was two years older than me and didn’t play any other sports, but treated tennis like a chess match, calculating each shot with surgical precision. I would just lose it on the court when he beat me. I eventually figured out how to stay calm and beat him, but my matches with him were not my finest moments of either tennis skill or behavior on the court. Maybe baseball would be a better option.
However, even with my limited success, I was really starting to enjoy competing in tennis tournaments and my passion for the game was growing every day. I watched Jimmy Connors and Bjorn Borg on television and went to see a few professional tournaments in person. There was something special about tennis for me. Something about the sound of the ball being struck and the fact that you were out on the court alone, doing battle face-to-face with your opponent. There was something glamorous about the crowds, too, especially back in the 70’s, when tennis was enjoying its first heyday as an international sport. The sport’s great champions of that era were some of the first global sports superstars. I’m not sure why I noticed all of this at twelve, but I did.
Nobody, except for a few Bostonian expatriates, knew who Carl Yastrzemski or Bill Lee (Red Sox stars) were in Germany or Italy or Brazil , but I was sure they knew Jimmy Connors, who had just won Wimbledon about the time I was pondering my sports future and trying to answer my dad’s question. All of these thoughts passed quickly through my mind, and I looked at my dad straight in the eyes and said calmly, “Tennis. I’ll play tennis.” He paused, looking a little surprised. Then he asked if I was sure, and if I was prepared to work hard to learn a game that I really wasn’t very good at yet, maybe hoping I would change my answer and pick baseball. I told him I would work as hard as it took to become good, great even. I told him that I would try to get good enough to earn a scholarship to college, and maybe become a pro someday. So, tennis it was from that day forward. Thankfully, my parents would offer unconditional support and encouragement through all of the unanticipated roller-coaster emotions and outcomes that tennis would create in my life over the next several years.
Tennis became my driving passion, and one that would shape my life and continue to influence its course in many ways. It still does every time I get invited to play in a pro-am or meet some business contact over some club doubles. I even helped a good friend write a tennis instruction book that became a video series, which I also directed. The sport has just taken me in so many directions and created so many opportunities in my life, even though I was never a big time champion.
It’s important to note here that the pursuit of a passion is not a smooth ride, as I have learned through first hand experience. Often the road is bumpy and rocky, and the journey lonely. Being passionate doesn’t guarantee success, only that you may have a better chance to succeed. Failure is always a possibility staring you coldly in the face. Pursuing a passion forces you to test yourself, to believe when no one else might believe and to persist when you feel like quitting. Sometimes there is little logic in the pursuit of a passion, just a gut feeling that tells you “I am doing the right thing, keep going” even when your own mind and all of your family and friends are telling you that you are crazy. Passion and fear are not friends. Passion and certainty are not friends. Pursuing some passions, such as competing in a sport or starting a business, often requires near-blind faith in yourself.
So why pursue passions? The answer is simple. As humans, we are feeling beings. Our emotions are part of what makes us tick and they cannot be ignored. If you have a burning desire to become a chef and open a cafe, that desire will stay with you, even when you have decided to become a lawyer because your mother told you it would be easier to get a job and less risky than owning a restaurant. You can ignore your passion and suppress it, but every time you step into a kitchen or eat in a restaurant that you think could be better if you were running it, you will be facing the question of why you chose not to take the leap of faith and be the next Julia Child, Emeril or Mario Batali. If it’s truly a passion, it will haunt you.
It’s okay to postpone pursuing your passions. Many people often pursue them after retirement or as second careers or even hobbies. But life is enjoyed most fully when you can make your passion your life’s work, because you will spend most of your waking hours working. Let’s face it, we don’t know when our lives will end. If you put off pursuing your passion today, thinking that you will get to it someday, and that day never comes…well, that is a tragedy that happens all too often. The choice to take that risk is yours. I choose not to. I want to live with no regrets, and have for the most part.
The other great thing about following your passion everyday is that it helps you find new passions. Because you are so immersed in what you are doing, and living every moment with such a sense of purpose and awareness, you get better tuned in to yourself and what makes you tick. You reach a point where you only want to spend your time doing things that fully engage you. You lose interest in doing things half way. As passions beget more passions – and truly engaged, fascinating and highly accomplished people enter your life – life ultimately becomes an amazing daily adventure of doing the things you truly love with people you love being around.
I did work hard at tennis, as I promised my dad, and I did get a tennis scholarship to attend the University of Richmond. I played four years at Richmond, two as team captain and became a nationally ranked player while in college. After graduation, and still intensely passionate about the game, I began pursuing my goal of becoming a professional tennis player. I did not think that tennis would be my ultimate career, but I wanted to see how far I could get if I really gave it my full attention. I wanted to see if I could get ranked among the top two-hundred tennis players in the world. That was ambitious, but I always liked to dream big. After all, I had devoted countless hours of my life to playing the sport and had hit probably a million of tennis balls trying to perfect my technique over ten years. I was, in fact, a good tennis player. Not a great one. Undeterred, I went off to the satellite tour (the minor, minor league of professional tennis), with whatever money I had saved from teaching lessons and the generous donation I received from my parents in support of my dream.
Professional tennis was hard. There were thousands of great players from all over the world competing for a very few spots in the big time events. Only the top fifty or so players actually make a decent living playing tennis. I was not among them. For me, winning matches was not a very fruitful business venture. In fact, I lost much more than I won, and spent more time hanging around the tournaments practicing than playing matches. But there were ample rewards for my time and effort. I travelled to places I never would have otherwise visited, stoking my lifelong passion for travel. I played tournaments in clubs I never would have been invited to join, giving me access to useful contacts. I practiced and trained my body for several hours a day, fueling the passion I still have today to stay in the best shape possible. Most importantly, I met remarkable people who would become life-long friends and became part of the global tennis community, in which I am still an active member. So as it turned out, pursuing my passion for tennis did actually serve an important purpose in my life. It was just not the one I planned, which was to make it on the big tour. Sometimes, when you are on a passion-guided life journey, you need to flexible and open to a variety of positive outcomes. You just never know where life will take you.
During the down time I had at the tournaments, I spent hours in the VIP sponsor tent taking advantage of the free food (I loved FREE food) and making small talk with the sponsors and their guests. Often, I would ask the sponsors why they had spent so much money to have their brands’ associated with tennis tournaments. Having studied communication in college, I was considering going into the then burgeoning field of sports and event marketing after my tennis playing days were over, so these conversations held great interest for me. I also knew the contacts I was making in these corporate tents might be useful to help me get a job one day. So I tried to meet everyone I could at these events.
The answers I received from the sponsors regarding why they were involved in the tournaments were not what I expected. They ranged from a CEO’s wife telling me, “my husband just loves tennis, so he sponsors this event” to, worse, a CEO telling me, “my wife just loves tennis, so I sponsor the event.” Wow, those were the reasons? I expected some in depth business explanation from the sponsors. I was expecting some strategic discussion about how the demographics of tennis fans offered a good opportunity to reach consumers for the company’s products. In today’s data driven marketing world, a calculated business justification would be imperative. But in 1986, it clearly wasn’t. I’m sure the shareholders of these companies would have loved to hear the rational I was given as to why the sponsors were supporting these tennis tournaments. Who knows, maybe they didn’t think I would have understood the real reasons if they gave them to me. But knowing what I know now about the business, I doubt it. It was mostly a boondoggle.
However, my curiosity and passion for marketing was ignited by these conversations, and the more often I had them, the more I was sensing a new career direction. Playing tournaments was fun, but clearly a short-term plan for my life. I was running out of money fast. Maybe I could combine my love of tennis and my interest in marketing to create my next career move? Finally, after only two-years, I ended my short-lived professional tennis career. Ironically, I was in Miami (my current home town) when I realized that I had reached the end of my tennis dream. I packed my car with all my belongings and drove for twenty-four hours to my apartment in Alexandria, Virginia. From there, I would take my next step in life.
It turns out my that my little passion-guided detour through the pro tennis world was just what I needed to identify and ignite the passion that would become my primary career for the next few decades: marketing and advertising.
The business of sports marketing was in its early days as I was ending my life as a tennis professional. Sports marketing back in 1987 was a loose term for lawyers cutting sponsorship deals for their famous athlete clients. Most of the deals were based on little more than some arbitrary, perceived endorsement value, proposed by an athlete’s agent, and then justified by a CEO or brand manager hoping to rub elbows with their favorite sports star. Everybody seemed to believe and trust lawyers back then, and there was a lot of back slapping and deals based more on relationships than business judgement. There was also very little marketing strategy or data behind the sports sponsorship process, just some great selling ability and contact mining that made a few pioneering sports agents (all lawyers, not marketers), like IMG’s late founder Mark McCormack, very rich. Much richer, in fact, than most of their superstar athlete clients.
I initially assumed I would take the conventional route into the sports marketing industry, and interviewed with the leading companies of that time, IMG, Advantage International and ProServ (all these companies have since been gobbled up in mergers by big advertising and entertainment conglomerates, although IMG still trades under its original name). I was offered a job in event management and sales at Advantage International for a what I felt then was a pittance, but recognize now was a very health starting salary for 1986. But the idea of going to work for a company that was doing exactly the types of sponsorship deals that I felt made no sense for brands did not sit well with me. It did not ignite my passion.
Some marketing strategy was beginning to creep into the sponsorship game around this time, and a company called International Events Group, or IEG, started publishing a weekly newsletter and hosting an annual conference about sponsorship. People in the industry, sponsors, event producers and agents, started paying closer attention to why and how companies were spending their sponsorship money. The hunch I had while downing a free sandwich in the sponsors tent the previous year, about sponsorship needing better planning and justification, was correct. Helping brands make sense of their sponsorship investments was turning into a big business. If I took the job at Advantage International, I wouldn’t really be on the cutting edge of this new thinking. If I worked for one of the glorified sports agents dressed up as sports marketers, how would I be making things better in the industry by perpetuating the traditional, a la carte menu, sponsorship selling process that sadly still persists to some degree today? My passion was to make sports and event marketing better, not simply go through the motions and make mindless deals to make a good salary. Excellence, not money, was my passion.
My dad gave me this great anonymous quote when I was a teen, and I still have it hanging in my office today:
“Excellence is achieved. It is not stumbled onto in the course of amusing oneself. It is built upon discipline and tenacity of purpose”
I was twenty-four, broke and trying to sort out my life. My dream of being a professional athlete was over. I tried, but it was not meant to be. I wasn’t really upset, because I felt I gave it all I had. Not one to brood, it was time to move on. I had tenacity of purpose and was ready to put it to use. As luck would have it, so did my lifelong best friend and first business partner, Steven Roberts, who had also just quit bouncing around on the lower tier of the pro tennis tour.
To be fair, tenacious does not even begin to describe Steven Roberts’ personality. When we played tennis as kids, he would come off the court with bloody knees from diving for shots. At fifty-two, he still dives for balls. He is a passion driven machine who dares to dream big and live big. We even had a mantra growing up. “Think Big. Be Big!” It was our way of reminding ourselves not to limit our ambitions to conquering just the little State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations (yes, the smallest state in the U.S has the longest name!) in which we were born and raised, but to go out and conquer the world. Soon we would have a chance to put our mantra into practice.
…Come back next week for the continuation of Chapter 1. You’ll learn where this journey led me next and how it relates to helping you find and harness your passion.
Until then, Let Your Passion Create Your World!
Robert (aka The Passionist)
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