Purpose > Passion

[This original post can be found on We Move Media]

Dear team,

While I’m used to crisp fall weather, pumpkin spice lattes and the transition to winter jackets at this time of the air, I’m experiencing quite the opposite this year as the hottest and most humid days are quickly dawning upon Dar es Salaam. I spent the past month becoming a SQL ninja in efforts to turn our project statistics into meaningful numbers, and likewise, turning those numbers into digestible reports. In summary, it was a great month as we hit our December target on November 24. This month was spent making necessary improvements to the eVoucher program, fighting many, many unforeseen fires and beginning to adjust our plans for 2012. Professionally, November was a great month.

Personally, I’ve been thinking about the difference between passion and purpose. We talk a lot about passion. About finding our passions, living life passionately and acting on our passions. We’ve also talked a lot about why being passionate in itself is not enough.

Passion is a creative engine that forumaltes reasonable ideas in your mind and much further than that, it’s the driver of these ideas. Passion is emotional. It keeps you awake at night, wakes you up in the morning and has the potential to provide but joy. Purpose, on the other hand, is practical. It’s built on the foundation of necessity.

Purpose is the milestones achieved as a result of passion. It goes beyond emotion (note: not meaning that purpose is not emtional) and works to fill economic or social voids.

This past month, I turned 25 (side note: for some unknown reason decided to Google ‘top 25 under 25‘ to benchmark myself) and this age bracket, I’ll be putting my efforts towards answering the question of purpose based on my knowledge of my passions. Doing what I love is still only about me. Doing what the community, city, country or world needs from me, that is truly self-less.

Peace & love / kris