Don’t you admire those people who have always known what they were meant to do and are doing it? No second-guessing. For them, the road less traveled is closed for repairs, and they don’t care. Take a guy like the late Dave Thomas, who grew up with one goal: to own a restaurant. He might have ended up creating the Wendy’s chain, but what made his eyes light up was saying with obvious delight and pride, “I’m a grill man.”
Then again, what about those people who believe in finding a passion, go in search of one, find it, and then see it slip away. Say you decide on — I don’t know — taxidermy. Say you even tell people without irony, “I didn’t find taxidermy; it found me.” Or, maybe it’s teaching, which, come to think of it, is taxidermy without the black rubber gloves. Either way, after a decade you realize that you don’t love coming to work anymore. What do you do?
You can’t say to people, “I lost my passion.” It’s like “The Importance of Being Earnest” where Lady Bracknell asks the young Jack Worthing about his parents and he says, “I have lost both my parents,” to which she replies, “To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.” It’s like that with losing passion.
What got me thinking about a passion search was the remarkable admission by a NASA engineer/executive that he had lost his, and the story of how he set about reclaiming it. That executive is the charming, soft-spoken Steven Gonzalez, who I got to know while doing creativity work with him at NASA. He’s now head of strategy for the Johnson Space Center. However, nine years ago, nearly a decade into his career with NASA, he went to a management conference where he saw a video that followed one violinmaker on a pilgrimage to Cremona, Italy, to pay homage to the great Stradivari. Seeing the devotion of the young violinmaker made Steven envious, and thus he had to admit that his workplace joy has slipped away, unnoticed. As he put it in article for a NASA publication, “I cannot put my finger on a single event, but I no longer felt the passion that I once did.”
Part of the change was not in him, but in NASA — downsizing and privatization, turning work over to outside contractors. He wrote, “Rather than rocket scientists, I felt we were more rocket contract managers.”
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Following Footprints
Even to those of us who aren’t rocket scientists but who grew up with the space program, it’s painful to see NASA neglected. The Russians and Chinese have more ambitious programs than we do. There’s an airport shop in Orlando, Fla., near Cape Canaveral, that sells space-program memorabilia. My favorite was a large photo of the first footprint on the moon. However, consider this reality: The first footprint on Mars might not be made by an American boot, but by a Chinese or Russian one. My eyes glisten, just writing that sentence.
Thank God there are people at NASA like Steven Gonzalez. He didn’t mope or slink off to a higher-paying job in the private sector. No, he sent an e-mail to the members of his team and broke the code of the rah-rah by asking them, “Do you still feel passionate about your work?” Doing so, he tapped into a vein of renewed energy. He created a group of dreamers to look out into the future “to take us beyond the next decade, beyond the next two decades even. We selected the year 2076 as a target date, the tercentenary, one that was so far in the future that it could continue to fuel our dreams for the rest of our careers.”
And so they rediscovered the energy of caring. But that doesn’t put fuel in the rocket tanks … or does it? Steven writes, “We went to management and explained our vision, and they said it sounds great but we’ve got Station and Shuttle challenges, and right now we can’t fund this.” Yet, undeterred, they sought partnerships with private industry, and soon had Cisco, Silicon Graphics and others offering up more than a million dollars worth of equipment.
That was years ago, and Steven is still at NASA, still dreaming, still finding a way. The formula for what made America what it is: find a passion, find a way. And should you lose your focus and your energy, perhaps you don’t have to start over elsewhere; what Steven’s example teaches us is that you can find a new path back to the old passion and fall in love with work all over again.n
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Dale Dauten is the founder of The Innovators’ Lab. His latest book is “(Great) Employees Only: How Gifted Bosses Hire and De-Hire Their Way to Success” .
