How To Relate To Societies and Communities While Also Following Your Passion (Part 3 of 7)
Picturing passion as a plot of garden that only you can weed or seed. (Core Tenet #2)
In the book Purpose, Mighty Networks CEO Gina Bianchini talks about how we're all born into a community, if not several, and how each community gives us core beliefs and values that we grow up with. As we get older, we gain more and more independence and begin to encounter other communities unlike the ones we were born into, with different core beliefs and values that may be additive to what we already know and believe, or that may contradict our beliefs. Over time, it is the communities we encounter that help us shed tired beliefs and pick up new ones. They are the ones that help us redefine and refine and re-find ourselves all the time.
Passion is Infinite, But It’s Not Enough
To me, this is the literal meaning of following your passion. You follow your passion by finding your unique set of beliefs and values within which to live your life. And of course those beliefs and values go deep. They come from your personal journey, and no two people end up with the same experiences or come to the same conclusions.
Your passion is a journey, and it is a lifestyle, and it is who you are becoming, all in one.
I believe that passion is infinite because I saw within myself the unpredictable adn ever-evolving nature of my interests and wants.
But that belief still kept passion very self-contained. It showed me why I was always exploring and going deeper within myself. But it didn’t show me how that helped me relate outwardly to the world. It didn’t show me how I could explore and deepen my relationships to everything in my immediate world.
For that, I needed to note that passion is unique. It’s not just ever-evolving person by person, but also ever-evolving as we are in community with one another. And every person’s journey contributes to the larger community journey.
If you want to catch up on this series, start here:
What Does "The World Need Your Passion" Mean? (Part 1 of 7): https://theworldneedsyourpassion.substack.com/p/what-does-the-world-need-your-passion
How To Follow Your Passions Without Destroying Other Parts of Your Life (Part 2 of 7): https://theworldneedsyourpassion.substack.com/p/how-to-follow-your-passions-without
Passion is Unique, And It Informs How We Work in Community With One Another
One of my passions in life has been to help authors, clearly. But I've never fully shared why I’ve been so persistent at it.
My first community was my family, which was deeply ingrained in Roman Catholicism and the US military. Both of these colossal organizations have deeply rooted beliefs and values that I embraced as a young person.
But I felt suspicious of many of the beliefs I learned. As my world expanded, I had to take off some of those beliefs and try on new ones that seemed to fit me better.
The biggest one was around being a visionary and an artist. During my entire young life, I received beliefs that my entrepreneurial interests were a pipe dream. That art was wasteful. That education was pointless and expensive if I was just going to get married and have children. That dreams were for retirement or wishful thinking. That thoughts of grandeur, success, and fame were weird. That passion was something to stifle. That desires were sinful. That standing out was dangerous. That living any sort of life outside the bounds of my community was grounds for ostracization.
No shade to these two organizations, as there are many core beliefs and values that I did keep. I have a loving family that has ultimately supported me, I did eventually find a faith in a higher power that felt more comfortable to me, and I have a free-of-hype Midwest work ethic that I appreciate more and more over time.
But at the same time, growing up, I felt for the most part that my early communities didn’t want to see me for who I really was—An artist, a poet, a visionary, and someone who could turn all of that into products that had value to people.
I couldn’t truly see how to be a part of those early communities as…Myself. The common wisdom is to abandon those past communities and “find your people” but…Also those people were my people too? I’m in full support of leaving communities that are toxic and intent on never accepting you, but that wasn’t really what I was experiencing. The societal structures were not right for me, but some of the relationships from my early life were right. We were different, but love wasn’t lacking. And this was still my community.
One of my core beliefs is to gravitate toward love and pull it in closer, so I chose to feel integrated here. I chose to believe that these communities were put in my life path for a reason.
Ending the Hierarchy of Passion (And Why We Must)
As I got to know myself through the idea that passion is infinite, I came to understand that I was a creator of movements and experiences.
But all of that really left me feeling like a freak. I found myself self-inflicting labels around the weirdo, the daydreamer, the idea person (aka the non-doer that is dead weight on the team—something an ex-boss told me they couldn’t tolerate at their company).
Who was I to create movements and experiences? For a long time, I tried to model the hierarchical structures I saw regarding this.
The narrative I kept telling myself and kept seeing reflected back was that I was trying to be the “leader” of my community but didn’t really have the skills to follow through.
Eventually, I realized that I wasn’t even called to lead, and I wasn’t meant to do everything. I couldn’t. As cliché as it is, teamwork really does make the dream work!
My passion wasn’t complete without my community. And my community wasn’t complete without me.
I first saw this in my birth family. I mean, they loved me even as I rejected both my military and religious upbringings in various ways! My birth family was not complete without me, and I was not complete without them.
I found that in my immediate family as an adult, too. I am married with two children and the family could never be complete without any one of us. We are a 4-pack.
I also noted that my own passion included the desire to be a partner and a mom. I literally could not have expressed my full passion and desire for either of those things without other humans—without community.
In the last couple years, I’ve begun to understand my purpose in the author community as well. So many people misunderstand what I’m doing and what Writer MBA is trying to accomplish. One of the questions I get asked the most behind the scenes is, “Why didn’t y’all keep teaching Kickstarter?” This “stay in your lane” question has mostly been asked by people who care about us and have good intentions for us. But I’ve probably never given a satisfying answer to those people until now:
It’s not my passion to keep teaching it.
It’s also not my purpose to keep teaching it. It never was.
My purpose in teaching in this community has always been to drive some writers to also use recommendation engines (retailers) to find their audience, and some writers to also use direct sales to build relationships with and better monetize their audience. Both are critical to building a stable business, in my opinion. Wide + direct. Growth + monetization. And as writers develop both sides of their business, I hope to push the industry as a whole deeper and deeper into the Creator Economy, where there are better business models with higher ceilings to sustain more creatives for a longer term.
(There is a whole separate post about why this matters, that revolves around more writers making more money doing more of what they are passionate about. That post is for another day, though.)
The reason I withdrew from actively teaching Kickstarter is that crowdfunding is a small part of “writers making more money,” but it’s not the end game. It was and still is a beautiful and expedited way to show many writers what is possible, and we did that! For that reason alone it was worth investing the time we did. But it’s not the end game. The work continues to introduce more writers to Kickstarter, and it also continues to evolve beyond Kickstarter—and I wouldn’t have it another way!
Both Russell and I recognize that Kickstarter and other crowdfunding platforms are only going to become more relevant to writers over time. We need resources and people who will stay with the topic of crowdfunding and bring people up to speed.
And this is where our evergreen work like our book and courses come in.
And it’s also where community comes in! Because lots of people are working on educating other writers on Kickstarter, and have their own language and approaches that may hit different. I am doing my part on Kickstarter, always. And that part has led me “away” from Kickstarter and “out of my lane” according to some people.
There’s No Conflict Between My Passion and Your Passion
In thinking about passion, and deciding I believed that it was infinite, I learned that no part of my passion could conflict with another part of my passion.
I then extended this idea to others and realized…For following my passion to be “realistic,” it couldn’t conflict with another person following their passion either.
It makes no sense if you choose to believe in the good of people and of the world. Two people following their passion—and having conflict as a result—is terribly inefficient. It also feels bad to both people, for the most part. I don’t think we humans truly ever enjoy being in conflict—friendly competition, yes, but not conflict. (Friendly competition is play. It’s a game, which is wildly different from real conflict.)
If you expand these hierarchical paradigms of conflict to a whole community of people, and put us in true competition with each other for scarce time, energy, money, and resources, we are basically building our worst nightmare and terrible life conditions for ourselves.
I didn’t really want to operate under a beliefs system where passion could only be for the lucky few in any given community. Not because I didn’t think I could be one of those lucky few, but because I honestly just wanted to have more hope for and faith in humanity.
So once again, I decided. It was a choice. Passion had to be unique to the individual. And the working out of that needed to be…Both magical and mysterious. I needed to trust a greater intelligence than myself to figure that part out.
If passion was a journey, and a lifestyle, and who I was becoming, all in one…Well, I wanted all of that to feel good and be for everyone. I had to accept that it wasn’t really possible for it to feel good to me to pursue my own passions unless it was possible for everyone.
Passion had to be unique to the individual.
I didn’t want passion to be for the privileged. I didn’t want passion to be the thing that I did but at the expense of someone else (family members, team members, etc.) working a job they hated but that made money or got the “real work” or the “dirty jobs” done. I didn’t want passion to require the huge sacrifice of many for the glory of the few. I didn’t want passion to be limited by some external label that some viral quiz or personality test on the internet, or in the medical community, gave me. I didn’t want passion to be something that could be taken away from me, or that I could take away from someone else. I didn’t want passion to have a time limit, or a resource limit.
The Garden and Your Patch In It
I started to imagine my passion as a garden patch that only I could tend to.
I could weed the garden patch and clean up my side of the road, to speak—which mostly meant improving my health, mindset, energy, and capacity to hold space through healing.
I could also plant new seeds. Those were my desires. And as those desires shifted, I could weed what was no longer needed of the old desires to make room for the seeds of the new ones. For example, I could release and sell my old house to make room (and have the finances) to buy my new house.
My garden patch was mine alone. No one else could weed or seed on it, and anyone who attempted to would make no real energetic progress. I was still required…In a good way.
But I also had neighbors—my community, with garden patches of their own to tend to. I couldn’t weed their gardens (heal them, fix them, change them, etc.). I also couldn’t seed their gardens (create for them). In spirituality, it’s often said that “no one else can create in your reality.” This is a more visual way of saying as much…What’s assigned to you is yours and yours alone.
At the same time, this garden is ever changing, ever expanding. It does not know the bounds of space or time.
Passion is infinite - Me + my desires over time and space, expanding endlessly
Passion is unique - Us + our desires over time and space, expanding endlessly
What this ultimately meant to me:
Competition was over. Not only could no one compete with me—not even on the same topic—but also, no one could do my work. No one could weed or seed on my garden patch. This meant I had infinite time to pursue my own journey, and that I was actually called to do so. Time was going to pass either way, so I figured I might as well make real energetic progress on my garden. In the same way that no one but me will respond to my own crying child, no one but me could respond to the call of my true passion and purpose. (Okay, not the perfect example as my child does have other caregivers…But you get the picture!)
Letting go of the things that were not mine not only freed me up for what was…It also made space for others to claim what was theirs more easily. They could claim it either way, to be clear! But me not trying to claim what was not mine made the gaps more prominent to see. When a problem is being worked on, even poorly, it is easier to ignore your own calling to it. So I released and continue to release all the problems that I’m not called to solve, leaving those gaps for others to fill.
There was no hierarchy in the garden. Everyone had a flat patch next to other flat patches.
The game was not climb to the top. The game was to weed and seed your own garden, which helps others weed and seed their own gardens (in many ways, including releasing energy that is not yours, and modeling new ways of being).
The garden was by its nature, a community project. Yes, all the members were on their own journeys, pursuing their own passions, and at the same time everything was coming together beautifully, too. This requires a pretty large bit of magical thinking, to be honest. But I will say, that as I’ve gotten older, I’ve only seen this become more true with advances in technology, namely the internet. And, I acknowledge that we as a planet still have a long way to go.
Now, this may sound like utopia, or it may sound obvious and possible and how things already work in your world, or it may sound irritating and “that’s not how the world will ever work” to you. I totally understand all reactions! This was the only way I saw that following your passion could work. It was the only thing I could believe in that met all my criteria.
But the vision gave me a lot of challenges:
What about competition and two people being passionate about the same thing…Or the same person?
What about privilege and people who had things handed to them versus people who seemed to be handed challenge after challenge that kept beating them down?
What about terrible things happening in the world? What about bad actors in the community?
What about survival and making money?
I also want to note that…I don’t always feel like singing kumbaya in the ever-expanding garden of harmony. Sometimes, I worry that there’s too much competition, or I get jealous of others. Sometimes, I get upset about something horrible that just happened that I have no control over. Sometimes, I worry that someone is going to harm me, or my children. Sometimes, I worry that the money is not possible, or that there really are some dreams that require luck, or that AI is going to destroy publishing, or whatever else.
I am not saying that believing all of these things is easy, or simple…But I do know that I want to believe them, and that is often enough to send me in a more positive direction when my deepest fears about pursuing passion inevitably come knocking.
I know what happens when I choose not to believe in them. The fear and the bad paradigms that everyone else uses just take over. Oh, goody, another doom scroll session to find evidence of how I’ll never succeed or how there are too many books and not enough readers or how the economy is exploding.
Thank you, next!
There are lots of challenges with working in community with others, and yeah, I’ve had to work through them and I’m still working through them. But I thought I’d open up those thoughts here and share what I think I’ve figured out about it all:
How Competition Works in the Garden
In the author industry, Amazon has built a ranking system that ensures books are pitted against each other like it’s Squid Games. Create a leaderboard, create leaders winners and losers.
For plenty of years, I operated under the assumptions that I had to claw my way to the top of Amazon’s bestseller lists or my dreams of being an author would die in the seventh circle of Loserville. And I definitely see others still operating under that oh so fun paradigm!
A lot of my work has been around authors going wide, or authors going direct. And that has been helpful to many people in breaking free of believing so deeply that competition is going to keep them from following their dreams or passions.
But of course, those have their challenges too—namely that discoverability gets harder when you go wide or direct (even as profits increase).
We’ve created Author Ecosystems to help people find the marketing work that comes most naturally to them, or the marketing work they need to start growing their audience, or scaling their audience. And that has its challenges too!
All of this work has been to help authors connect to the idea that they are not really competing with anyone. More and more, we try to show people that they can find business models that work for who they are (aka they enjoy what they’re doing). Our efforts in direct sales show people that they can also create for who they are (aka, they don’t have to just create books as an expression of themselves).
And there’s so much more work here and so many people who are already contributing to these efforts. But in short, yes, I really do believe that all creatives can succeed at their dreams and goals.
How Advantage and Privilege Works in the Garden
Like many creators and artists out there, I struggle with advantage/privilege—both the shame and guilt of having it in certain circumstances and the betrayal of not having it in others.
Early on, I remember feeling so behind others. If only I had had even one successful entrepreneur or artist in my family, maybe I could have started earlier or believed in myself more or cut my struggle in half! More recently, I learned that a friend of mine is a secret multi-millionaire due to an inheritance. I couldn’t help but think, what I would do with the money that was just handed to this person—and, gosh, they are really not doing anything worthy with it. (Not my greatest moment of manifestation!)
At times in my life, I’ve wondered what would have happened if I weren’t a female, or a minority (I’m half Pacific Islander and spent most of my childhood overseas in Europe and Guam, which is a US territory near East Asia).
Would my business have grown faster…?
I’ll never know, but I also don’t need to. Not just because I can’t change those things. But also because I see the connections backward and how my life story since being born has all contributed to the precise work that I’m doing now. It was all designed for me to be here, and to do this, and to be sharing the unique insights I have on the topic.
Passion is unique.
Here’s how I’ve worked out privilege: Your dreams and wants are not the issue. But there may be more challenges and obstacles for you to work through to get to where you’re going, depending on your advantages or privileges in life.
A lot of people think this means you’ll get there later, or it will be harder. And I have spent…A long time thinking that too.
But my belief is slightly different:
That the inner work can collapse time (as I noted in the “Passion is Infinite” essay), so time really isn’t a thing. Someone could blast through 50 challenges with inner work while someone else struggles through one challenge by not doing the work.
That the challenges are designed to perfectly contribute to your ultimate purpose (for the most part). This does not apply to terrible people doing terrible things. But me being a woman, for example, allowed me to give birth, which enabled me to understand being a creator on a deeper level.
This is a hot take, but victimhood and victim blaming are truly two sides of the same coin. I think in so many ways that lacking privilege in any area is a gift…Our challenges don’t just break us down, but they also polish us into shiny, beautiful souls. (Yes, I think I just wrote a rock tumbling metaphor.)
The thing about the inner work is…The work is not greater when you are marginalized, disadvantaged, or underprivileged. The most privileged people in the world have as great or greater amounts of inner work to do.
Once I figured this out, I was able to break down some of the hierarchy of privilege, too. Because I saw that even just knowing about the inner work route was my secret weapon and super power.
And I have also worked through a lot of shame around my privilege. Born in a wealthy country, to middle class parents. Able to go to college. A native English speaker. All of these things have made me aware of how easy some things have been for me, but the greatest privilege or advantage that I have ever had is being born into a family with parents who truly loved me.
Being loved. It’s the kind of advantage that wipes out so many other ones, and the kind that can never be repaid. My parents are not perfect, but they have always loved me to the depths of their capacity, and never asked for anything in return. I learned to receive so deeply, which is an incredible gift that so few people on this planet get. When I was in college and questioning my religion in big, uncomfortable ways, one of my friends noted to me that no matter what conclusions I came to, I would always walk around with a big energy of faith and hope. I never forgot that. I think that comes from the most simple thing: being loved.
When I hear others’ stories around this I sometimes feel guilty, but I know that doesn’t help. It’s a little wild to feel shame around being loved, after all. This is something that should be and is our baseline inheritance! And as much as I will poke fun at Instagram memes and twentysomething TikTok coaches, it’s very obvious to me that the internet has made unpacking trauma, setting boundaries, and loving ourselves more accessible and egalitarian than ever before in the history of the world.
Yes, I was loved—and I acknowledge that it is among the greatest advantages of all.
The only thing I can do with the gift of love is pay it forward to my own children.
And, pay it forward to this community. Passion is about love. And that gift that I received…Well, the only way to receive it is to expand it. To believe in people. To encourage them to follow their dreams. To share all the things I’ve unpacked for myself freely, in case it’s helpful.
But what about truly underprivileged and disadvantaged people? The teenager with cancer? The starving children in Africa? The casualties of unrest and war? Sometimes individuals are truly faced with incredible challenges and horrifying circumstances. In the past I was often told, “Everything happens for a reason,” but I don’t believe that. Instead, I believe that some things really are unfair and difficult, but that none of it necessarily disqualifies you from pursuing your passion.
Anne Frank, for example, wrote one of the bestselling books in the world despite living through absolutely horrific times and being murdered. I’m not going to say, “everything happens for a reason” with Anne Frank. There is no doubt that her premature death is a great loss to humanity. Terrible people did terrible things to her. And…She pursued her passion through all of that. In that way, she lived a good life to the extent that she could.
And that seems like about as good as any of us can do.
I cannot tell you that you will not face major disadvantages in the future, nor can I tell you that your current disadvantages will not continue to challenge you greatly. But I can say that I believe pursuit of passion at your own pace is the answer, even in the face of those challenges. Your right pace is critical in this. I’ve seen people, myself included, try to shame and blame themselves into more progress on the inner work side. But you have infinite time to weed and seed your garden. No one is going to take away your assignment from you.
How Terrible Things Work in the Garden
Back to the whole “terrible people doing terrible things” that affect us. I do not believe in victim-blame-y BS that some circles push. Messed up things happen not by our design, not by the world’s design, not even always by man’s design (though yes, sometimes through man’s design).
And…No one who does horrible things is “following their passion” in any way. Passion doesn’t lead a person to illegal or harmful acts. It is actually the extreme disconnection and disassociation from passion that leads a person to do terrible things.
While I don't have a solution for people who are so disconnected that they instead sometimes go to the extreme of harming others…I do believe the thing that's in our control is to demonstrate what it looks like to follow passion. I fully acknowledge that for some, expanding passion might feel a bit like eating more vegetables to crowd out the junk food. But it is what we can each do.
And what about freak accidents? I could get hit by a bus tomorrow. Yes, it would suck, but also…I followed my passion, and I kept doing it until my (untimely) death. That’s about as good as it gets. I don’t want to get hit by a bus…But I’m not going to have a lot of regrets about what I tried to do here on earth if I did.
When I see terrible things out in the world that I have no control over, I tell myself:
There is someone out there in the world who is passionate about saving people from getting hit by buses…Who believes it’s possible to completely eradicate vehicle accidents. How do we encourage and empower that person to pursue their passions? Because I think someday, there will be no more “hit by a bus” accidents. People are already trying to solve this problem.
And I follow this thought pattern about all the darkest and most terrible things that can happen in our world. It’s often horrifying. And—I know there is someone or maybe even many someones who are in their hearts assigned to this work.
This doesn’t mean bury my head in the sand. It doesn’t mean neglect my responsibility about it. It doesn’t mean avoid and ignore and go numb with regards to the thing.
It just means…Do I really feel a passion to solve this? If not, why am I spending excessive time worrying about it or even thinking about it? What purpose does that serve in my energy?
Is this a garden I am assigned to weed? Or can I let go of the shame and guilt of not weeding it, knowing that my efforts would be fruitless because it’s someone else’s patch?
And sometimes the answer is yeah, I am called to do something here! And I will write something about it, or weave it into my books, or make a donation, or call a representative, or have a conversation about it. Every calling is important, no matter how small.
Other times, I can put it out of my mind completely. Not my garden, not my weeds.
The world is a scary place, and it’s so easy to give into all the fears. And I do sometimes! But mostly, I think about how if everyone followed their passion, the world could be a lot less scary. Happy, healed, loved people expand their happiness, healing, and love.
Maybe I am wrong in this approach to terrible things, but it is where I have landed for now.
How Money Works in the Garden
But what about money? How do you follow your passion and also make money?
It’s a complicated question that I think will be addressed further in the next parts of this series.
What I can say is that right now, in the writer community, it feels to most of us that you have to produce way more than is comfortable to get a comfortable amount of money.
A big part of that is unsustainable business models. It’s somewhat obvious that you can’t plug sustainable productivity into an unsustainable business model and get sustainable money.
But we are mostly presented with the unsustainable business model over and over again, so we compromise on one side or the other…Leading to burnout in both places.
And…This usually relegates “winning” to the lucky few creators—those who can write and produce fast enough, those who have more time to work, those who have good health, those who just get lucky and have a book or series or Substack take off, those who have been here the longest, those who hit the algorithms well across social media, retailers, or advertising networks, those who like to write popular niches or tropes, etc.
I have bought into a lot of this in the past but at this point my answer to money is that:
I believe that there are sustainable business models for all types of writers and more broadly, creators, that will take their sustainable input (their productivity) and give them sustainable output (an amount of money that is sustainable for them).
That is A LOT to say. And it definitely falls into the, “when will people stop getting hit by buses?” arena of life, in that we haven’t fully figured this out yet in the creator world! (In my opinion, of course.)
I don’t exactly think it’s possible today for every creator’s math to math, and I think creatorship has a long way to go in understanding the complexities and nuances around this. (And by the way, I also don’t think that’s any creator’s fault—there are huge cultures and external forces at work here too!)
At present, each creator needs to forge their own path and find the combination of platforms or activities that works well for their business. Ideally, one of those is primarily a growth platform and the other is a monetization platform. (Of course, most platforms do both the some extent—that is where algorithms come in.)
And yeah, how do we answer sustainable productivity and sustainable money? Answers pending as we continue to build the internet.
More on this in Part 4 of this series, in many ways the thesis of the series: Tenet #3: The World Needs Your Passion!
Do You Like This Series So Far?
We’re about halfway through, and it would be helpful to me if I had some feedback. That way I can address questions! I don’t claim to have all the answers, but I do have plenty of thoughts on how I navigate the topic. Let me know your thoughts on the topic!