Passion & Urgency

About a decade ago is when It all began. I started to analyze my inner curiosity that had been cultivating for years and worked towards applying a self-development mindset to create a framework for my vision and the dreams I was determined to live out. Through journaling, meditation, exploration, and a self-starter mentality, the cloak of anxiety began to remove itself. I would set goals, I would go out and try to achieve them and if it didn't work out, I grew immensely intrigued by what variable was missing in the equation. In many ways this is what I thought life was all about, creating meaningful moments by driving towards something attainable with the hope of it all coming together. This way we can exit the void of pointless societal mechanics and begin applying the glue to keep us grounded on our individual paths. Not only was I obsessed with achieving but I began to look deeper. What makes motivation possible? Why are some of us excelling to go on to attain our greatest desires while others constantly watch the spark die out? I think we can all agree the first ingredient of motivation is having a spark to begin with.

We could be driving down the road or doing any other obligatory task, and we think of a great idea. We get excited, then sidetracked, then we go on to do nothing about it. Like most sparks, that's all they will ever be, the beginning stages of a fire, almost like passion in its infancy stage. This type of satisfaction is short lived and in the end often invaluable to ourselves and society. In many ways it seems to do the exact opposite, spawning regret. So how do we go from idea cultivation to a long term activated vision? I've broken it down to two important factors, multifaceted passion and urgency. 

Most of us know what passion is and have hopefully found it at some point throughout our life. It is the deep rooted profound feeling of enjoyment that gives you the sense that you're exactly where you need to be. That special activity or space where you simply belong. You no longer are trying to fit into life's complex puzzle, you are the piece snuggly positioned connecting on all sides. You are all in no matter the level of involvement. Understanding your passion is like communicating with an intrinsic function of your soul. So when you know there's passion involved, it's now time to remove yourself from this emotional state and realize there's always a subjective threshold to be measured. Balancing the ideology of you against the world is so important. I've found the only way to read yourself correctly on this is to be exposed to as many people as possible to gage where exactly you fit into the equation. If your desire is at an adequate level we can then graduate onto urgency. When we find urgency, we do. When we do enough, we eventually accomplish. Through accomplishment, we fast track our growth potential.

Everyone has completed the sequence but at what level of personal development? While keeping an open mind, I think early on in life it is our duty to allow others to judge, speculate, and push us one way or another, even when the pressure seems uncomfortable. The faster we are able to achieve a higher level of openness, the more things we try, the more information we gather to make better decisions, eventually this all leads up to a clear conscious when making decisions. While conviction is often a trait found in visionaries of the world, we can get closer to this type of understanding by learning more about ourselves. So, even if the path you're headed on is wrong, you'll hopefully be aware of this and learn from the experiences to make significant changes to get to where you need to go. Inversely, the downside of the sequence is as passion fades, comfort grows. To look at the focal points, through observation I've found that what separates the average American from the global phenoms is the latter has uncovered an uncanny ability to create an abundance of urgency.  If we wake up comfortable and satisfied, why would we push ourselves to the limits? We all don't have personal assistants and motivators on our hip so where does said urgency come from? I've watched people dive head first into their passions and while initially a noble decision, this type of jump doesn't create the greatest foundation in the long run. I find myself observing this idea from a different angle than the knowledge I've uncovered from other life coaches. You need to think broad first! What are your main driving factors in life and what proof do you have to demonstrate it? Do you want to help those in need? Do you want a successful family? Do you want a prosperous career? Do you want to travel? Those are some of the basic driving factors in our society and when you figure out your inner life-force, you can begin to work down the hierarchical chain of command. What will get you to those dreams? Of course, sharpening your pencil and the careful narrowing of these objectives is what will eventually help you tread uphill but the planning for the long game is what will help you sustain. This is what I describe as having the awareness to fluidly move up and down the chain of command. When you can flow along this line you always remember your purpose or why you're working so hard in the first place. It could seem silly at times but you have to have the perception to constantly tweak, narrow, and edit you visions to compensate for our ever changing human mind. Just realizing how often we change can help grow our level of commitment and help us stay more consistent because you start to visualize how sporadic we've been over the years.

We all have days when the passion becomes mundane and you might feel like you're just doing what you have to do but this is when the the COC comes in. If you can fluidly move along the line, the objectives you've set for yourself will have a dense fuel to burn each day. Speaking from my own experience, it's similar to what Alan Watt's counseled when addressing the possibility of mind-body convergence and to realize we aren't just observing the universe, we are the universe. When this happens, we can start seeing the many stages of success and materialize the ability to fly higher on the same energy source we've been using for years but only now we're putting it in a much more effective engine. When you've successfully flowed along this ladder you will have created your renewable energy source for you to tap into day in and day out.

To effectively create urgency you must have a deeper understanding of the tasks at hand and a healthy balance of the current time constraint. An example of this is a student who is enrolled at university full time. Throughout the semester they may figure out the necessary amount of work to get by at a certain grade level standard. This motivation and clarity to accomplish a task fluctuates but when the final weeks of the semester approach, someone without a deeper understanding of why they're attending college in the first place may become flustered and a level of stress and confusion may set in. A student with a very complete understanding of their current stepping stone at university may conversely make them feel much more congruent to the projects they need to complete and be able to block other distractions to accomplish the final goal. This is when urgency and understanding come together to create a flow state within ones own mind. This is the difference between people who complain and the people who naturally go and get it done but it doesn't stop there. If you can go from opposition and discomfort to naturally occurring movement, you can also reach of jovial movement upwards.

Another example may be a someone working a 9-5 job who wants more out of life but can't seem to find the time to start growing their own business. Someone intertwined with their personal chain of command, realizes there is much to learn when it comes to creating more time or to reducing time in insignificant areas of their life. The person out of touch with themselves, makes excuses and is unknowing to making the same mistakes over and over again. It's entirely possible to be more effective with your time but often, the spark is dead before you lift it out from the gutters of your mind. A thought exercise to combat this is to start thinking about all of the sparks you've let fizzle through the years, and what exactly allowed for the experiments to be so short-lived? Fortunately, this comes at the expense of your ego because often failed progression comes from lack of discipline. A lack of discipline in understanding one's self and abilities.

Another way to create urgency is to have an outside look at what puts you in your darkest places. Having a better understanding of how you manage your own deaths and rebirths will put you in a better place to navigate mundane events in the future. When people go through catastrophic emotions like illness, death, or failure, these events put you into a specific virus like state that the body wants to naturally overcome. Constructs around you shatter and you fall into a flight or fail situation. These downslopes along the human lifespan frequently inspire people to break out with new profound understanding. If we can meditate on these moments, or the moments yet to come, we can find extra fuel to burn.

Simply put, moving along this passion and urgency chain of command is associated with the philosophy we've all heard before; when you of wake up in the morning and give yourself a good look in the mirror, if you were die tomorrow, are you doing what you want to do? Consequently, what comes with a wiser headspace is the courage to keep moving again and again. As Jordan Peterson says, "The self is what manages the transformation." If we're able to manage ourselves extremely proficiently we recognize this is what it takes to grow as a person and with that realization comes exponential growth.  Our mind is like software the more we rework it, the better the odds we end up with a better program. To stay stagnant, is to fight a loosing battle with human biology.

Nick Uthe is a travel photographer, writer, and digital entrepreneur in Salt Lake City. He is the Owner of outdoor apparel and media brand GrandTaiga, and a Contributor for Outside TV, and HUMANFITPROJECT.

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[Tags] #motivation #psychology #passion #grandtaigatimes #poetry #selfhelp