Kenneth Baucum

Could you take your passion in life, right now, and do it for the rest of your life, regardless of whether it ever earned a single cent? Would you continue to share your knowledge with the world for free? Is it worth sacrificing for?

The answers to these questions will help you identify your passion and determine just how passionate you truly are. Words are great, but what about action?

I’ve been thinking for the past two years about work and passion – including the relationship between the two. I’m looking at the idea of a zero-hour workweek, and the existence of true passion. A place where you are so passionate about what you do – your skills, talents and abilities that you share and contribute to the world – that you could care less if you ever earned another cent for it, and you would still sacrifice your time and possibly money to contribute that knowledge to others. Mix this idea with one where your work and play are indistinguishable from each other and your paid to merely do what you love. This is the Passionate Zero-Hour Workweek.

What is greatest about this is that anyone can do it. If and only if it is truly your passion and others can see that passion in you. There are people who do this everyday, and they are not all millionaires, but they are all happy – at least in a human sense, and at least temporarily. These concepts do, at first blush, leave God out. However for a Christian, this makes you reliant on God to help – for God to step toward the middle as you approach from the other side – and helps build your relationship with Him further.

I’ve found it takes a few restless nights and a couple heartbreaks to really start to wrap your head around the whole concept. Sometimes, you can’t fully get the idea until you’re at the bottom looking up. At some point, when you get it, and decide you’re dedicated enough and passionate enough to go for it – you’ll jump off the diving board at the top of this skyscraper of thought and you’ll trust God and trust (some of) your built-in instincts to build your own parachute on the way down, deploying it into the wind with enough time to glide over the ocean that separates thinkers from doers and finally come to rest on the other side in the Promised Land.

Turn your thoughts into action and succeed.

Step 1: Get excited—done!
Step 2: Buy guitar—done!
Step 3: Throw out all other to-do lists and spend too much time trying to master the guitar in one day. —done!
Step 4: Repeat step 3 on a smaller scale…

I’m now ready for step 4. Wish me luck!

Everybody has a story.

Each person around you is writing a chapter in their story every second of every minute of every hour of every day. Each person has a timeline that they are traveling through. For many of the people you interact with daily, your place on the timeline is not the same as someone else’s place on theirs. Everyone is taking life at their own pace.

When you interact with someone, realize this—your story of how you got to this very moment is not always public knowledge. You have your own thoughts, desires and passions that shape your reactions to different experiences that you’ve had. Not everyone around you has had that same set of experiences. And you have not likely had theirs, either.

As you write down your story – based on the decisions you make and your reaction to things around you – bear in mind that what may be the last straw for you, on your timeline, may not even be an issue in someone else’s journey. So before you get mad, consider this – does the person you’re about to respond to understand where you are and where you’re coming from? Will they really see it the same way you do – once you’ve made your response? If the answer is not 100% yes, then there should be more thought in your answer. Period. I’m as guilty as anyone else.

Consider others. Everyone has a story – don’t start writing in red on someone else’s pages.

“Let your speech be always with grace, seasoned with salt, that ye may know how ye ought to answer every man.” -Colossians 4:6 KJV

“Let no man despise thy youth; but be thou an example of the believers, in word, in conversation, in charity, in spirit, in faith, in purity.” -1 Timothy 4:12