Why Your Passion Must Serve Your Purpose

Why Your Passion Must Serve Your Purpose

Warwick Fairfax

November 29, 2024

To bring your vision to reality you have to have passion. At Beyond The Crucible, we say that to bounce back from your worst day, your crucible, to get beyond it and live a life of significance, a life on purpose dedicated to serving others, you have to be off-the-charts passionate about your vision. That is true. Passion is important.

But as you are on the journey to make your life-affirming vision a reality, there will inevitably be setbacks. Passion helps us have perseverance to get beyond those setbacks. There are people we want to help. Our passion is like rocket fuel helping to propel our vision forward.

Unfortunately, it is often the case that that which is good can also have a downside. Left unchecked, we can be so passionate about our vision that we can sometimes unintentionally hurt other people. We are so focused on the task of bringing our vision to reality to help others we can actually hurt the people on our team. We can become short with them, become irritable and impatient. Our team members may offer suggestions to make our vision better or have it happen in a better way, and we just don’t want to listen. If those suggestions might cause delays in the rollout of the vision, even if those delays may indeed make sense and may be prudent, we are too impatient to listen. We are fueled by our passion to move forward, but we can leave a trail of destruction in our wake.

Too much passion can indeed be dangerous. I know this from personal experience. Beneath my often calm and reserved exterior, I am at heart a passionate person. I have strong convictions about many things. I just don’t happen to talk about them all the time. But they are there nonetheless.

My cautionary tale of too much passion was my $2.25B takeover in 1987. I had graduated from Oxford University, spent time on Wall Street and received my MBA from Harvard Business School. My father had died earlier that year, and I felt the company had strayed from the vision of my great great grandfather John Fairfax, who had founded my family’s 150-year-old media business in Australia. I also believed that the company was not being well managed. Fifteen years earlier in 1976, other family members had removed my father as chairman of the company. All this produced a huge amount of passion within me. I felt my father had been wrongfully removed, the company had strayed from the vision of the founder and was not being well managed. As I was coming back from Harvard Business School, I felt something had to be done and done now.

And so in late August 1987, just a few months after graduating, I launched my takeover. Things went wrong from the beginning. Other family members sold out, not wanting to be trapped in a privatized company run by the 26-year-old that I then was. Within the three years the debt was so high that when Australia ran into a recession in 1990, the company had to file for bankruptcy. My actions led to friction within the family and instability within the thousands of employees of the company.

What had gone wrong? How could an Oxford graduate with a Harvard MBA have launched such an unwise takeover? In short, too much passion. It led to hiring the wrong advisers, who told me what I wanted to hear, and ignoring the good advisers. My passion clouded my judgement and caused me to make rash and ill-advised decisions. It was a powerful and very painful lesson. From then on, I have sought to keep my passion in check, or perhaps better put, make sure my passion is channeled correctly and wisely. My passion needs some guardrails.

So how do we have our passion fuel our vision, but not cause destruction?

1. Recognize the danger. Passion is not bad, but it can cause destruction and hurt people. It comes with a warning label, “Handle with care.”

2. Knowledge is power. We use this phrase on Beyond The Crucible often. When we realize that passion can be dangerous, we can begin to understand that we have to be careful as we seek to bring our vison to reality. We can begin to understand how our passion manifests itself and when it does so in an unhealthy way.

3. Be vulnerable. One key step of wisdom is to admit to our team and those that could be affected by our passion, that we sometimes can have a problem. We believe in the vision so much that sometimes we can go over the top and unintentionally cause some damage that could also hurt people and relationships.

4. Ask for help. Having recognized the danger and admitted that you have a problem, ask your team members or those potentially affected by our passion for help. If they see you going over the top with passion, your team members can really help. They can say something like, “I can see you are very passionate about this. Is there something that has come up that has touched a nerve, because I feel your passion is at another level at the moment?”

5. Reflect on why you are so passionate at the moment. Try to calmly understand what is going on within you as this sea of passion is rising up.

6. Pray. I am a person of faith, so when I feel that my passion may be getting a bit out of control I pray. It is something like this, “Lord I feel so passionate about this. But I don’t want my passion getting in the way of this mission. I certainly don’t want to hurt people. Please calm my spirit.” That does not mean I don’t want to have passion, I just want it not to overwhelm me or others.

7. Channel your passion appropriately. Having recognized the danger, been vulnerable, asked for help, reflected on what is going on and prayed, there is another step. Having calmed down a bit, reflect on what strategies you will use to channel your passion appropriately. You may be at the point where you can begin to think rationally. You may also feel someone else on your team may be better positioned to calmly and forcefully advocate for your mission.

In the years since my failed $2.25B takeover, I have tried to channel my passion appropriately. It doesn’t mean that I never have some passion go over the top, like lava coming to the surface, but I feel that my passion serves me better now. When I feel almost too passionate, I now for the most part realize it. I am vulnerable. It could be with my wife, my team or with a number of people in ministries I am involved with. Sometimes I even apologize for having too much passion. That leads to discussions about who is the best person to talk about the issue, which may not be me. I pray as I have mentioned for the Lord to calm my spirit so that my passion does not get in the way of what I or the organizations I am involved with are trying to achieve. With my spirit calmed, I can then begin to think rationally and chart a course to continue bringing my vision to reality. Sometimes what I think is an urgent issue, is not so urgent. Sometimes when I think something must be said, it really does not need to be said.

I still have a lot of passion, but my passion is serving me better. It is fueling the vision I have and is helping it to become reality. But my passion is now serving me, rather than me being beholden to or controlled by my passion. In short, your passion needs to serve your purpose. If it is not, you need to get your passion under control until it does.