When tapping on your passion, one thing that should be uppermost in your mind is that you need to leave a legacy for others.

When you are young, your motivation for working and living lies in larger income, better standards of living and in general having a good time. But as you grow older, your priorities change. You want something more fulfilling.

You seek to achieve goals that you will be remembered for. A sense of urgency begins to set in as time passes. And the source of your passion arises from wanting to leave behind a legacy.

That legacy may take the form of social change brought about by your work. Or it can be in an enterprise or institution founded by you. Many successful businessmen set up foundations and trusts in the pursuit of noble causes.

Thus they seek to perpetuate their name or family name for posterity. An invention or a new process or a novel product can also enshrine the maker’s name in the books of history.

Temporal pleasures and petty rewards do not satisfy someone working at this level. His or her passion seeks loftier goals. The greater the goal, the more fervent the passion. Revolutionaries and freedom fighters like Mahatma Gandhi and Che Guevara struggled all their lives for the liberation of their countries.

Their ambitions encompassed the lives of millions of their countrymen. The sheer magnitude of their legacy consumed their entire lifetime, but it was a passionate lifetime, with every day spent in pursuit of that goal. 

How do you set about leaving behind your legacy? What is it that you feel strongly about? Write down your strongest emotions and issues. They may even lie outside your present work area. Start working on those issues.

Educate yourself and acquire new skills if you have to, and get to work. It may be a simple project like improving your community, or a major reform of state laws.

Remember that all the great men and women who have brought about change were ordinary men like you and me, but they had the power of conviction and passionate belief in their dreams.

  Without challenge in your life, you could hardly make the most of what you are passionate about. Infuse your passion with the right quest and you will do much better at it.

Our search for the sources of passion brings us to yet powerful factor – Challenge.

A challenge can be posed by a person upon himself or by external forces. A personal challenge can arise from adverse circumstances of poverty or deprivation. Rags-to-riches stories have been told for hundreds of years now. Even Presidents of countries have arisen from humble beginnings and risen to their positions of power by the sheer force of their passion.

Family prestige and a desire to prove one’s mettle to one’s elders and t society can also act as a challenging force. When a son inherits a business built by his father, he is propelled to expand that enterprise and thus demonstrate his own prowess.

While most companies have boards of directors and public equity, in many traditional societies, it is the family-driven businesses that persevere, even over the centuries.

Targets set by corporate leadership also act as challenged to work teams. A keen competitive spirit between rival groups can set off a passionate chase of the markets. Pepsi and Coca Cola, Nike and Adidas, are a couple of examples of passionate rivalry, with each seeking to outdo each other in the pursuit of a better product and more sales.

In these mega rivalries, passionate employees move quickly up the corporate ladder. Belief in the company’s goals and ideals is essential to engender passion in employees.

Sometimes the source of the challenge may lie closer to home. The love of a woman or one’s children can drive a man to succeed with the intent of providing better care and education for them. We are motivated to buy a larger and better house, a bigger and faster car, the latest cell phones and clothes.

All these must-haves also act as challenges and rewards for our work.

It is upto each individual to determine what challenges him or her and then as Nike’s motto says – Just do it! Your natural challenge instinct will push you through.

When a mountaineer was asked why he climbed a mountain, he answered – Because it is there! Its very existence as an insurmountable peak was a challenge to him!