Passion of the Miest(er)

My  dad calls/called me the Miester all the time.  As in Scott-miester.   Hey, if you have a better title, we’re taking patches.

I saw Julie and Julia the other night and it got me thinking about passion.  Some time in the movie was spent not only talking about the two character’s passion for cooking, but also most interestingly, the time before they embraced their passion for cooking.   Julia Child’s time was especially titillating, as she spent these scenes in France, where I’d personally love to get a little lost, if only in terms of personal identity.

The time before great people realize what they are meant to achieve is always interesting to me because I’d like to duplicate their success, personally.  All right, I’m pretty sure I don’t want to write a book on cooking…but MealsZen is a cooking website.

Anyways let’s get down to brass tax.  What is passion?  How do you know when you have passion? and so on and so forth?  Well, here’s my theory.  Passion is when is the result of your creation is such ridiculous bad-assery that any amount of pain in the creation process becomes worth it.

Practicing isn’t fun.   Creating stuff sucks, especially if it’s time consuming.  Learning how to cook 524 recipes like Julie did sound’s  lot more fun then say, training for a triathlon, but it probably still starts to suck a bit after like number 5 and more so after say number 500.   I think that eventually your mind and body gets so habituated to practicing that you start to expect it and therefore, cease to dread it.  The fact is, we can get addicted to anything…good or bad. Seriously.  People get addicted to work all the time and EVERYONE knows how much work sucks…but they just get used to it.

Creating ceases to suck at the moment that you are done creating. At that point you are generally revelling in two things: first, that you are done creating and now you can go watch Adult Swim (sweet), and second, that you just created this THING.  Now, the being done part is always pretty much the same but this THING is always different.  In my opinion, how much you get excited about this THING is directly porportional to how passionate you are about this particular creation art.

So look at all the end results around you.   Does Beef Bourguigon sound like something ridiculously awesome?  How about Stairway to Heaven?