Teachers CAN Stoke Your Passion: How Have They Helped You?

by Robert Mazzucchelli | Apr 22, 2017 | Lessons From The Passionist

(This in installment #8 of Lessons From The Passionist: How To Turn Passion Into Purpose To Create Greater Meaning and Joy in Your Life.  Last week we explored the influence of friends.  This week we look at teachers, and how they can help ignite and develop our passion.  Maybe you have had an influential teacher somewhere in your educational experience?)

Teachers we encounter during our school years can have significant influence on our ability to harness passion in our lives.

All of us have had a teacher or two somewhere in our past who made an impression and helped shaped our life in some way.  I’ve had a few at various points in my educational journey, each of whom demonstrated enormous passion and increased my excitement about learning, while opening my eyes to possible ways I could create a fun and amazing life for myself by pursuing my passions. Three stand out.

I should preface this section by acknowledging that until about tenth grade, I was reasonably disinterested in school and viewed it as a necessary evil I had to endure until I could get to the hockey rink, baseball field or tennis court.  My heart was set on becoming a professional athlete when I was young, and school was just the nuisance I was obligated to attend because my parents and the state said so.  Had it been up to me, I probably would have preferred to spend all my time pursuing the sports I loved.  Thankfully, I had tough parents and a respect for the law, or I probably would not be writing this book today.

My tenth grade english teacher at LaSalle Academy was a guy named Michael Mosco.  He was a short, wiry, well-dressed, brown-haired guy who spoke with excitement and energy all the time.  His passion for words and sentences just oozed out of him as he paced back in forth in front of his classroom.  I had always been a decent writer (my mother posted “grammar rules” signs in the kitchen when I was growing up, so English was drilled into me and my siblings when we were young).  English was a class I tolerated and often coasted through with little extra effort required.  But this time, things felt a bit different.  I sensed I might have to really think and work to do well in Mr. Mosco’s English class.

I walked into the classroom on the first day of school and written on the board was a question — “What is universality?” Okay.  I looked at the question, took a seat at a desk in the front of the room, and joked around with some friends that I hadn’t seen all summer.  We were immediately startled as Mr. Mosco asked an urgent voice, “What is universality?”  “What is he talking about?”, I thought.  My classmates and I just looked at each other.  We were all probably thinking the same thing, which was, “Who is this guy and why is he so excited at 9am on the first day of school?”  Was he a BIG coffee drinker?  No, it turned out – just a guy with an incredible passion for teaching English.

Mr. Mosco was asking a deep philosophical question to a bunch of kids who had probably never thought that deeply in their lives.  He was challenging us to think, while also putting us on notice that his class would not be one in which we could coast or just hide in the back of the room and get by.  He walked between the rows of desks that day and asked each and every one of us what we thought about his question.  He got in our face.  What did we, a group of fifteen and sixteen year-olds think about universality!?  Really?  The question and the teacher’s passion for exploring the answer somehow woke up my brain in a way no teacher had up to that point, and I started to think and engage in a conversation unlike any I had had in school before.  We were debating, for forty-five minutes, the meaning of a WORD. ONE word.  We were learning.  We were growing.  This was actually cool.  And fun.

That year in Mr. Mosco’s class, reading great books and participating in long conversations, debates and arguments, gave me the first glimmer of hope that maybe school could be more than just sitting in class waiting for the bell to ring.  It was like being in John Keating’s class (Robin Williams’ character in Dead Poets Society – “carpe diem, seize the day…”).  Maybe I could be engaged and excited by something other than chasing a tennis ball around a court and hitting it in places my opponent could not reach.  Maybe school would have a purpose beyond wasting the daytime hours during which I preferred to be outside playing my favorite sport.

For forty-five minutes, three-times a week, over the course of a few months, one man with a passion for words and sentences changed my perception of high school and learning in general.  He opened my eyes to thinking about words, something I took for granted until then, and how they convey meaning.  He introduced me to Elements of Style, the seminal book on good writing that still sits on my desk and is embedded in my brain.  He taught me to enjoy discussing and debating ideas and concepts, a process and skill that would be essential years later in my advertising career, where every idea and word used can make a huge difference on the impact the work will have for clients.  Mr. Mosco transferred his passion to me during my time in his class.  The Chain of Passion was at work again.

When I arrived at the University of Richmond to start my freshman year, I had only a vague idea about what I was there to learn.  I hadn’t even given a possible major a lot of thought when picking the school.  I went there to play tennis, which is like a full time job in college, and believed that I would spend several years after graduation playing professionally.  What happened after tennis, I thought, would unfold in due time.  I liked business, but had no concrete plans or keen academic interest I was excited to pursue.  But I was always making money with small businesses as a kid, shoveling snow, stringing tennis racquets or detailing cars.  So I figured I would most likely major in business and hope for the best.

I took the core classes during my freshman year to qualify for the five-year, juris doctorate/MBA program offered at the University of Richmond (the program sounded efficient to me, more bang for the time I would have to spend in school).  I signed up for an ambitious schedule of accounting, statistics and logic classes, along with required French and Biology classes.  All classes that I hated.  As fate would have it, I also signed up for two elective classes: The History of Entrepreneurship and Introduction to Speech Communication.   I was allowed to choose these classes my freshman year because I had scored high enough on a assessment test to exempt me from the required basic freshman English classes. Thanks, Mr. Mosco (and Mr. Scott, a great English teacher I had at Kent School.  He taught me the life lessons contained in Melville’s Moby Dick, one of my favorite books.  Coincidentally, his bother had been a professional tennis player and writer).

The speech class was taught by Dr. Jerry Tarver.  He was an amiable, good humored, slightly rumpled, graying man in his early fifties who wrote speeches for CEO’s and politicians when not teaching.  His somewhat high-pitched, southern-accented voice had a unique way of cracking when he spoke, which for reasons I can’t explain, kept your attention riveted on what he was saying.  He was always smiling and joking.  He was a passionate and engaging man who loved his subject, and had even written a book on speechwriting, which was the textbook for another one of his classes that I took during my senior year.  After a few speech classes with Dr. Tarver, I saw my future standing in board rooms making presentations (about what, I still had no idea).  Because of his influence, I decided to change my academic focus from business/law to business/communication (I ended up majoring in Communications and Economics).

Why the switch?  It was simple.  My passion for words and language far outweighed my passion for numbers and rigid legal precedents.  I was, I discovered, a creative person at heart.  Dr. Tarver taught me the power of using words and speech effectively.  He sensed that I loved making speeches and communicating with people, and he encouraged me to improve my skills in this area.  I do love persuading people to do things, and have made a career of it.   Apparently, I was always persuasive – as my family and friends are quick to point out – but I didn’t understand why or how.  Studying communication gave me the tools to be more intentional and focused in my speech.  After a few classes and some guidance from Dr. Tarver, who became my academic advisor, there was no doubt what I would be doing for a career after my tennis playing days ended.  I would be using words and ideas.  Writing and speaking would not only become my craft, it would become my passion.

The University of Richmond added a student speaker to the commencement program the year I graduated.  It was the first time they had done so, and the speaker was to be chosen by a competition judged by a panel of professors and administrators.  With the help of Dr. Tarver, I wrote an excellent speech and entered the competition.  It was a thoughtful, hopeful speech that challenged my fellow graduates to do something meaningful with their lives after leaving Richmond.  The process of writing and presenting the speech even made me think I might pursue a political career someday (am ambition that was quickly discarded after living in Washington D.C. for seven years and meeting actual politicians.  I’ve met criminals I trusted more!).  I felt I had a chance to win the speech competition. When the five finalists were chosen from hundreds of submissions, I was among them.  But when I saw the list, my heart dropped.  Of the five finalists, I was the only male student.

I could have written the Gettysburg address and lost that competition.  I knew the school would not pick the only male finalist on the list.  It was still the pre-PC era, but I knew I would lose and I did.  When I pressed Dr. Tarver, who was on the speaker selection committee, about the results, he obliquely confirmed my suspicions and told me I had written and delivered the best speech.  Of course, that was only his opinion.  But I knew my speech was good.  That loss, and the lesson it taught, me did not diminish my passion in any way.  After my tennis career was over, my speaking skills would be put to good use.

I sadly don’t remember the name of the professor who taught the History of Entrepreneurship.  I wish I did because I‘d like to thank him.  I was vaguely familiar with the word entrepreneur back then, but unclear about its actual meaning.  I knew an entrepreneur was someone who started businesses.  The word wasn’t as thrown around in pop culture in 1981 the way it is today.  Entrepreneurs were not yet the rock stars they are now.   But I liked starting businesses, so the class seemed like a good fit.  The professor, unbeknownst to me at the time, would change my life.  Here’s how: about three weeks into the class, he assigned a book for us to read called Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of the American Industrial Enterprise.  As the title suggests, it was a book about how companies developed their structure and strategy.  Did strategy create structure, or did structure dictate or inform strategy?  The book compared and contrasted Ford and General Motors as examples of two car companies that developed and operated very differently in pursuit of the same objectives.  The details of the book aren’t important here, but my experience with this book in this class, and how it unleashed a passion, is important.

I knew a little about the corporate world prior to entering college because my mother had bought me a subscription to FORTUNE magazine when I was seventeen (why she did, I still wonder but she obviously really understood me and prepared me for my life – an amazing mom).  I had taken a job teaching tennis at Woodway Country Club in Darien, Connecticut during the summer between high school and prep school (I did a post graduate year at the Kent School because a tennis related injury prevented me from attending college immediately after high school, a story I will tell in more detail later in the book when we discuss how to sustain passion in the face of setbacks…).

During my three hour train rides from my home Providence to the club in Darien (a suburb of NYC) every weekend, I would read FORTUNE cover to cover.  Like a sports fan following their favorite athletes, I studied the performance of the CEO’s of all the top companies.  This was my first exposure to the business world.  My father was a dentist, so business wasn’t really discussed at the dinner table.  I had to teach myself, and was motivated to do so that summer because almost all of the people I was teaching were major business executives.  In fact, I ended up teaching a few of the CEO’s I read about in FORTUNE that summer at Woodway Country Club.  One, David Kearns of Xerox, even ended up being my college commencement speaker!

Like my mom, the professor teaching the History of Entrepreneurship sensed my passion for business and paid particular attention to me in class discussions.  The day he assigned us to read Strategy and Structure, he asked me to meet him after class.  He told me that he felt, after a few weeks of interaction in class, that I had a unique ability to understand the concepts of entrepreneurship.  He wanted me to teach the next few classes based on what I would learn from the book.  Whoa! Talk about trial by fire.  I was eighteen, new to college, and this guy wanted me to teach the class.  Great.  Now I really had to focus on the content of that book.

I devoured the book, organized my thoughts and reviewed my syllabus with the professor (damn, I wish I remembered his name).  He made a few changes and then it was show time.  The class had about fifteen students, so it wasn’t too intimidating.  I’d given tennis clinics to bigger groups of people.  As I started to talk about the content of the book, and ask my fellow students questions, things just flowed.  The time flew by.  I felt fully engaged in a way that I had only felt on the tennis court up to that point in my life.  I enjoyed the topic of entrepreneurship and I liked teaching people.  My passions for business, teaching and leadership were stoked in this class, and I owe that professor a big hug.

By the time I reached my junior year in college, I was pretty clear about my life.  After graduation, I would pursue my passions for tennis and entrepreneurship.  My core business skill would be communication (which is exactly how things turned out).  Frankly, I was ready to leave school and get started on life at that point.  My senior year of college seemed like a waste of time in many respects, but I begrudgingly endured it (even sitting through the graduation watching another student give the speech I thought I deserved to be giving).  Such is life.  It has all turned out quite well, and the learning and adventure continue to be fueled by my passions.

We hear people talk about the impact teachers have on students.  Sometimes it sounds obvious and trite.  I can say that from my experience, the impact is profound in many ways.  For me, and for many people I have interviewed, teachers have been a major source of inspiration.  They often inspire passion, either by introducing a student to a new passion or helping to stoke the flames of an existing passion.  Or sometimes, as in the case of Jerome Sordillion of Cirque du Soleil, a teacher can be so negative about the odds of success in pursuing a passion, that the student works hard to prove the teacher wrong!   In either case, passion is fueled and the result can be a fascinating life.

Passion Journey Exercise #3

Take out a piece of paper and write down the answers to these questions:

• In which ways have I been influenced by my teachers, and has that influence been positive or negative in my life?
• Name one or two teachers who have had the most influence in my pursuit of a passion in life.  What was the passion and why is it so meaningful to me?
• Has a teacher ever encouraged me to pursue or discouraged me from pursuing a particular passion?
• Have I have had any teachers that have made a life-changing impact on my life with regard to my pursuing a passion?
• Do I pursue any passions in my life today that I would not have pursued if not for a particular teacher?  What is that passion and who was that teacher?

Use the answers to these questions to explore your motivations for pursuing your passion. Is there a passion you have today that was stoked by a particular teacher?  How did they help you ignite that passion?  Retrace those steps and see if you can rekindle the feeling that got you hooked on that passion.  If it’s a passion you’ve set aside, but still have, see if this exercise can help you bring it back into your life.  Who knows where the process might lead?

In the next section of Chapter 2, we’ll explore the influence coaches can have on our passion.

Until then,

Let Your Passion Create Your World!

Robert (aka The Passionist)

Following your passion today? If so, maybe you need to thank a friend.

by Robert Mazzucchelli | Apr 13, 2017 | Lessons From The Passionist

(Installment #7 is the continuation of Chapter 2: What Drives You To Do The Things You Do from my book, Lessons From The Passionist: How To Turn Passion Into Purpose To Create Greater Meaning and Joy in Your Life.  In this installment, I explore the influence friends have on our ability, desire and courage to follow our passions in life).

Early friendships, both close and casual, have enormous impact on our attitudes and behaviors.  Therefore,  they can also have a significant and life-changing impact on our ability to harness passion in our lives.  My own experience serves as a crystal clear example.

I introduced you to my great friend, Steven Roberts, earlier in the book.  I didn’t go to school with Steven and didn’t even live close to him in Rhode Island, where we both grew up.  We met at a tennis camp and shared the same tennis coach for part of our junior tennis careers.  We traveled to tournaments together as kids, we practiced together every week, and we even drove Steven’s white diesel Puegeot across the country during on summer break from college, playing in tennis tournaments each week as we explored the United States, city by city, town by town.  Suffice it to say, we’ve spent a lot of time together.   We’ve been friends for over forty-years, and we still talk every week.

Steven and I had a saying when we were young: “think big, be big!”  I’m not sure exactly when we adopted that saying as our mantra, but for years we would repeat it, and we both knew what it meant.  It was our way of saying that even though we were from the smallest state in the United States, and not the epicenter of tennis or any industry we hoped to be in at some point in the future (it ended up being marketing and advertising), we did not want any limits set on our potential achievements. “Think big, be big” was our battle cry, our refusal to let anyone or any circumstances dictate how we were going to live and who we were going to become.

As a result, we both left Rhode Island for college.  I went to the University of Richmond on a tennis scholarship and Steven went to California, first attending the University of California at San Diego and then Berkeley.  We both traveled the world playing in professional tennis tournaments in the summer, something only a handful of tennis players from Rhode Island did (although there were a few great one.  My frequent childhood sparring partner, Jane Forman, became a world top-fifty professional who battled tennis great Martina Navratilova on Centre Court at Wimbledon). Our tennis adventures were the first manifestation of our “think big, be big” slogan.

After we both realized that a future in the business of playing tennis was unlikely, we opened a sports marketing company, Pinnacle Promotions, together in Alexandria, Virginia.  At the time, Washington, DC was a major center for sports marketing companies, and we wanted to play with the big boys.  So we set up shop in their backyard.  Forget the fact that we had no experience, no money and few contacts to help us get started.  “Think big, be big” would carry the day.  And it did.

Within one year, we landed a national promotion contract to promote a new product, Sneaker Be Cool, a short-lived sister product to the famous Gold Bond Powder that was then owned by Block Drug Company.  Through that contract, we introduced consumers to Sneaker Be Cool at running races and events across the United States, rubbing elbows with other big brand sponsors and sports marketing experts, and getting one step closer to the big time.

One satisfying note on winning the Sneaker be Cool business was that the company we beat out to get the account was Advantage International, the major sports marketing firm whose job offer I had turned down to start Pinnacle Promotions with Steven.  When I declined their job offer, which was an entry level project management position, the person offering me the job said, in a mocking tone I might add, that I was crazy to even consider trying to compete with them by starting my own company.  In the early days of the sports marketing industry boom, which created great athlete/brands like Arnold Palmer, Bjorn Borg and Air Jordan, people who wanted to be in the business would have given their left arm to get that job offer with that company.  But I turned them down because I believed I could do more on my own.  Crazy?  Maybe.  But the offer as an entry level project manager didn’t fit the “think big, be big” philosophy.

I was young, had nothing to lose, and wanted to conquer the world of sports marketing with innovative thinking, not just work as an entry level “step and fetch it,” a position that might last a few years before I could make a meaningful thought leadership impact on the industry.  I was impatient and willing to put in whatever time and effort were required to succeed.  So Steven and I started Pinnacle.  Although we ultimately didn’t overtake any of the big companies in the industry, our small successes created bigger successes.  We made a name for ourselves as being innovative and creative thinkers.  This reputation helped us win business in other areas of marketing, not just sports in sports and event sponsorship.  Our small company’s success was big enough to create new and bigger career opportunities for me and Steve.   About seven years after I declined the Advantage International offer, I ran into the guy who offered it to me at the U.S. Open Tennis Championships in NYC.  I was then president of Bates Promotion Group with an office in the Chrysler Building and several leading brands as clients.  He still had the same job as when I interviewed with him.  Imagine where I would have ended up had I taken his offer!  Probably not sitting here writing this book.  Score one for “think big, be big.”

The point of this story is that my friend, Steven Roberts, influenced my life view and I his, in that we shared our “think big, be big” philosophy and supported each other in our efforts to live life true to our beliefs and dreams.  We fueled each others’ passion to live not by anyone else dictates, but by our own.  And we continue to support each other to this day.

I mentioned Cirque du Soleil star Jerome Sordillon earlier.  When we spoke about how he became a world-renowned circus artist, he told me that it was his best friend who told him to quit the construction internship he hated.  It was that same friend who asked him one day to join him on some vaguely described trapeze adventure two hours away from their home in Lyon. That adventure on the trapeze turned out to be a job interview with Club Med, where Jerome was immediately hired because of his athletic skills.  At Club Med, he met a women who also recognized his enormous talent.  She suggested he attend apply to the prestigious Ecole National de Cirque in Montreal, which only accepts twenty students a year out of thousands of applicants.  He applied and was accepted.   Upon graduation from that school, he was found by Cirque du Soleil and hired to be a featured performer with arguably the best circus performance company of all time.   His friend was the catalyst for the whole chain of events that changed Jerome’s life.  Who knows where Jerome might be had he not had that friend?

Pay attention to your friendships, past and current. They reveal a lot about your own life and just might be an important key to whether or not you are following your passion today!
Passion Journey Exercise #2

Take out a piece of paper and write down the answers to these questions:

• In which ways have I been influenced by my friends, and has that influence been positive or negative in my life?
• Name one friend who has had the most influence in my life. What was the influence and why is it so meaningful to me?
• Has a friend ever encouraged me to follow or discouraged me from following a particular passion?
• Do I have any friends that I feel have made a life-changing impact on your life?
• Name one friend that I have influenced in some way? How did I influence them?
• Do I pursue any passions in my life today that I would not have pursued were it not for a friend? What is that passion and who was that friend?
• Do I have any friends in my life today who are encouraging or discouraging with regard to me pursuing my passion? Who are they? What are there reasons for their feelings? Do I believe them?
• Are any of my friends helping me or holding me back from pursuing my passion today?

Use the answers to these questions to reflect on your own life and attitudes. Were you encouraged by your friends to develop and pursue your passions? Are there passions you had when you were younger that were squashed by a friend, that you would like to rekindle now? Are there thoughts or attitudes that were influenced by your friends that are holding you back (or helping you succeed) in pursuing your passions or attacking life with a passionate attitude?

Depending on your answers to these questions, you might be really lucky and have a great supportive friend network. Or you might need to rethink which friends are helping or hurting your ability to create the life you want. Give it some thought and make sure you are surrounding yourself with the right people everyday.

Next week, in Installment #8,  we will explore the influence of teachers in out life.  Until then…

Let Your Passion Create Your Life!

Robert (aka The Passionist)