Louis Pasteur on Enthusiasm

"The Greeks bequeathed to us one of the most beautiful words in our language--the word 'enthusiasm'--en theos--a god within. The grandeur of human actions is measured by the inspiration from which they spring. Happy is he who bears a god within, and who obeys it."

...And who obeys it.  That's the essential point.  All too often we ignore our own "god within" and look for external validation to decide whether our passions are worth pursuing.  I'm not saying that reality checks are useless and we should just let our freak flags fly.  But I am saying that it's easy to come up with good (rational, pragmatic) reasons NOT to pursue our passions, and it's important to recognize what a precious gift enthusiasm truly is.

Louis Pasteur quoted in Kay Redfield Jamison's Exuberance: The Passion for Life, and found via Tom Peters (in the PowerPoint at the end of his post.)

Comments

[Matthew Florence]

That should be San Francisco's motto. Though, the proportion of freak flags to reality checks here is often much higher. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Seriously, this is a great way of thinking about looking at our passions. Oddly enough, the wording brings your work around to a somewhat spiritual context. The definition of god that is built into that quote bares a striking resemblance to my own understanding.

Not to be terribly New-Agey or anything, but it's interesting to me how inter-related so many disciplines acctually are when you start to get down to the core. Web 2.0 butts heads with business management. Business management butts up against supervision and personal goals. All of that is closely related to coaching which has some threads that reach out toward spirituality -- or maybe a better way of saying spirituality here is personal satisfaction and the resultant ways we interact with the rest of the world.

[Ed Batista]

I like that network of relationships you just sketched out, Matthew. I'm not very New-Agey myself--I don't even think of myself as deeply spiritual--but I think it's essential to recognize the connections between our professional and personal lives, and to look at them both in a larger context.

And yes, the freak-flag-to-reality-check ratio in San Francisco is probably a little unusual. Some days that's one of the reasons I live here, and some days that's one of the reasons I occasionally think about moving ;-)

Ed

[Sage]

This brings me back to the Johnny Cash wisdom in your greatest hits entry. Those things we do in which the "I" completely disappears into the unity of the doing, this is the golden thread to follow. There are moments when I become one with my keyboard! It always amazes me how much ENERGY there is in allowing ourselves to move in the direction that beckons.

[Ed Batista]

That sense of "moving in the direction that beckons" (great phrase, Sage) reminds me not only of Tim Gallwey but also of Malcolm Gladwell's Blink and his emphasis on the adaptive unconscious, a concept developed by psychologist Timothy Wilson. Gladwell quotes from Wilson's Strangers to Ourselves:

"The mind operates most efficiently by relegating a good deal of high-level sophisticated thinking to the unconscious...The adaptive unconscious does an excellent job of sizing up the world, warning people of danger, setting goals, and initiating action in a sophisticated and efficient manner."

I read this as evidence that "the direction that beckons" often appeals to us for some very good reasons, even if we don't fully understand them.

[Sage]

Yes! It is probably a good thing that we don't understand what our adaptive unconscious is doing. Seems to me that it is our "understanding" that creates all the interference with our more authentic intelligence. Ed, each time I visit your blog, my "to read" list gets longer! What's a recovering perfectionist to do?!