Passion Pill

~ 2.5 Minute Read.

What the pas­sion pill can do for you:

  • Abil­i­ty to work 6 hours more af­ter 8 hours of oth­er work
  • Strong in­ter­est in an ac­tiv­i­ty which over­rules in­ter­est in oth­er ad­dict­ing ac­tiv­i­ties (video games, watch­ing se­ries…)
  • Giv­ing you more time to out­work oth­er peo­ple
  • Mak­ing mon­ey with­out feel­ing like work­ing 1
  • Un­beat­able work at­ti­tude, you work for the thing you’re work­ing on, not for the mon­ey (in­trin­sic vs ex­trin­sic mo­ti­va­tion)
  • Easy achieve­ment of “Flow” state 2
  • Rep­u­ta­tion as “The Guy Who Works A Lot” giv­ing you an easy ex­cuse to drop out of so­cial ac­tiv­i­ties like go­ing to the bar.

But, be­ware! The pas­sion pill can come with the fol­low­ing po­ten­tial side ef­fects:

  • Loss of in­ter­est in ac­tiv­i­ties out­side of the af­fect­ed top­ic of pas­sion
    • In­som­nia (lack of in­ter­est in go­ing to bed)
    • Self im­posed ab­sti­nence (Your “high­er lev­el You” 3 fight­ing your low­er lev­el you that there is no time for re­la­tion­ships, you want to work.)
  • Heavy ad­dic­tion – so strong that you can use it to counter many oth­ers
  • Loss of friends who are not like-mind­ed or at least un­der­stand­ing and just see you avoid­ing the so­cial ac­tiv­i­ties with them
  • Re­liza­tion that your job is not what you want to be do­ing (in case it’s not your pas­sion al­ready) with the ac­com­pa­ny­ing pain of with­draw­al, po­ten­tial­ly frus­trat­ing you un­til you can fi­nal­ly take the pill again.

I com­pare pas­sion to a drug, be­cause it doesn’t on­ly give you the ec­stat­ic high or eu­pho­ria that drugs do while be­ing sim­i­lar­ly ad­dict­ing. Prob­a­bly be­cause pas­sion gives you an easy way of be­ing pro­duc­tive, which re­leas­es the re­ward hor­mone dopamine 4. Easy, be­cause it doesn’t feel like work.

Pas­sion Pill is not an ac­tu­al thing of course – be­fore peo­ple start ask­ing me where to get this drug. You need to find it your­self. Find your pas­sion(s) – it will make your life mean­ing­ful.

In­ten­tion­al­ly writ­ten on a Sun­day.

Rough idea for those who be­lieve they are work­ing on their pas­sion, but feel un­hap­py: It may be that you’re scop­ing your pas­sion to big. My pas­sion is not “pro­gram­ming”, it’s more spe­cif­ic, con­strained to a low­er lev­el way of pro­gram­ming usu­al­ly ac­com­pa­nied with vis­ual feed­back is some way.

1
I heard about this, but did not ex­pe­ri­ence it first hand yet :P
2
About “Flow”, TED talk by Mi­haly Csik­szent­mi­ha­lyi, or Wikipedia: Flow
3
“Low­er/High­er lev­el You” is a con­cept you can learn more about in Prin­ci­ples: Life and Work by Ray Dalio, in­cred­i­ble book, I rec­om­mend it as Au­dio Book.
4
Si­mon Sinek on dopamine “Why Lead­ers Eat Last”

Writ­ten in 50 min­utes, ed­it­ed in 10 min­utes.