Passion, not Dreams

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It seems that the spirit of the prompt is to include some sort of philosophical life lesson or self-discovery that one has made throughout their time in secondary education. Luckily, I don't think I 've had an epiphany in any matter: the extent of this so-called epiphany is at most a reaffirmation of my beliefs.

I've been lucky to always have had the foresight to know what it is that I wanted to do in the future: become a computer engineer and revolutionize computer hardware. This was nothing but a pipe dream at the start of high school, but I've put in the effort to make realizing that future a bit less of a pipe dream. You could tell me that it's a grandiose ambition, but I wouldn't listen to you.  

I'd say its fair to say that most of us have some sort of dream that we are working towards, but the lesson that I had realized doesn't really matter what the end goal is; it's more of how I got there. I spent my time doing the things that I truly cared about, things that I actually enjoyed doing. For those of you that know me, you know that I'd voluntarily spend my free time doing coding projects, cadding something for robotics, or taking things apart to figure out how it works. My passion lies in problem solving, and so I spend my free time doing just that. And that's an honest reflection of myself; those are things that I'm passionate about. Notice how what I'm passionate about isn't just my dream. Really, my dream is a subset of that passion.

There are though a lot of people who seem to do things for the sake of a resume, or for college, or for god knows what. To them, I ask when is it over? Once your dream of getting into a certain college is realized and you don't have passion for something, what's left of you? Is there an identity past that? Look around and I'd say that someone immediately comes to mind that fits that description. 

It would be ignorant of me to say that I don't have similar dreams. Yes, I want to get into the best college I can, and yes, I want to have a good resume. But that's not my end goal. The fact is that if one day I accomplish that dream, there's still the me that enjoys solving problems for fun. There's some sort of saying that goes "The worst thing you can do is accomplish your dreams." If that's not a real saying, it's my quote now.

This was a bit of a stream-of-consciousness, but my takeaway is you have to be passionate about something bigger than just your dreams.  

If anyone's actually reading this, I'd take everything I've said with a grain of salt (a bit more to err on the side of caution). I'm only 17 and writing this blog post made me feel all high-and-mighty. I feel the word passion is thrown around way too lightly and too often, and it feels that I'm just contributing to that.  To close this out an a different note, to answer the question of "what game is now a part of [me]"? Canadian Fish. 10/10 best game for a group of 6 or 8 people :P



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