Passion is an intense enthusiasm for something or someone. It’s at the core of all great human accomplishments, along with self-importance and pride.

But, when passion is allowed to rule and dictate every action, you will find yourself in very unpleasant situations.

Passion must be coupled with rationality. Rationality will determine the proper course of action — it’ll help you figure out how to live for your passions. Rationality will determine what to do, and what to avoid on the path of expressing and harnessing your dreams.

Unbridled passion will ultimately result in your downfall. Passion is like all motivating emotions and conditions such as anger, happiness and sadness. For example, too much anger will hurt you more than you think, due to stress and hasty judgements, but a proper amount of anger will motivate you to change your condition.

Too much happiness will leave you ill-prepared to deal with an unforeseen negative circumstance, but a healthy amount of happiness makes life worth living. Too much passion will make you act blindly and impulsively, it’ll make you a slave to the motivating force behind all living things, but passion coupled with rationality will bring you unheard of amounts of success.

It adds color to the grey repetition of daily life.

Soren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher and theologian famously said, “What our age lacks is not reflection, but passion.”

Soren’s words ring even truer 175 years later. His observation can be seen throughout our daily lives. A majority of our actions are done without passion, without intense enthusiasm for what we’re doing. I’m sure very few of us wake up with passion. We sulk and weep and wish for more rest. Imagine waking up with the intense enthusiasm that defines passion. Passionate to exist and be alive. Passionate to be an individual and work on becoming the greatest version of yourself possible. Passionate to be alive.  

Without passion, life becomes very dull. I’m sure it’s not hard to imagine a time when you were bored. Imagine that feeling consuming every waking moment of your existence. That feeling comes from a lack of enthusiasm about what is going on around you. In order to combat the feeling of dullness and boredom, it’s necessary to find something to be enthusiastic about in every waking moment. Whether it be your homework, your significant other, your exams or even drinking water and eating food, do so with passion. When you’re passionate about everything, and work to combine that passion with rationality, nothing will bore you and nothing will stop you from expressing yourself to the absolute fullest.

Passion is an underestimated virtue. Can you imagine a world filled with passionate people? Filled with people willing to be intensely enthusiastic about everything around them? Filled with people enjoying every moment knowing it’s all they have? Filled with people living their life to the absolute fullest because they’re passionate about everything?

I can, and I promise you, it’s a beautiful world.