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The answer is passion.

Passion is the innate and  internal motivation to learn and create.  Passion is transformative; it is the drive that connects us to our purpose.  It is the internal compass that helps us discover the gifts that lie within and shows us the path to develop and use those gifts in the world to create.

With passion driving us, we are no longer floating in an unanchored state of happenstance.  We find our direction and our place in this world, connected to something greater than an isolated little life.  We find our calling.  When passion drives us, we find answers to the three questions embedded deeply in our being:

Who am I?

Why am I here?

What is my relationship with others?

The innate search for authentic identity, “who am I really?,”  is present since birth.  These are not abstract concepts; you can see the drive to search for these answers clearly in our infants, toddlers and young children.

From the time they are born, our children have within them the drive to discover who they are, what they can do and how they fit into this world.  What we call ‘development’ is actually our children actively working hard to uncover those truths.  You can watch the extraordinary drive and persistence, the internal motivation and passion our children exhibit, to find and use all of their gifts to interact with the world as they grow.  You can see the amount of effort it takes them to crawl, stand, walk, talk, feed and dress themselves, learn a language and assimilate a culture.  Just watch the way they explore, tinker with, take apart and find out the many ways they can use and interact with the objects around them.

Our infants, toddlers and young children are passionate.  You can’t stop them from exploring and discovering the capacities that are already within them.  You can’t keep them from creating.

So, if all children are born with the seeds of their own brilliance,  why do we not see a world full of people living their brilliance?

The answer is we are not looking for it.  We do not see it, we do not look for it, and we do not find it.  So we do not develop it.  We largely miss the signs that brilliance leaves beginning with individual creativity.  We miss these things because we do not believe all human beings are either brilliant or creative.  Our culture assigns these qualities only to certain people, at certain ages, in a certain manner.  So we miss the musician in the playpen, bopping to the beat of nursery-rhyme songs.  We miss the naturalist, not yet ten, who has grafted all the plants in the yard with band aids in the hopes of creating something new.  We miss the journalist, who has an incredibly rich perspective on life, people and interactions, but can’t write an academic five paragraph essay.  We miss the builder, the craftsman, the inventor tinkering with left-over scraps of what everyone else sees as discarded junk.  For every child, there is a story and a hidden gift.  Mostly, we miss bringing their gifts into this world because we don’t know how to look.

Paradigms are the filters through which we see.  A paradigm is a set of basic assumptions, ideas and beliefs through which we look at life.  Paradigms are collective.  They belong to a culture whose implicit messages are taught and reinforced through the way it structures, and we experience, our educational systems, institutions, organizations and their corresponding processes.  A paradigm is the underlying set of cultural beliefs that tell us who we are and what we can do.

The term ‘paradigm’ was first created by Thomas Kuhn in his famous dissertation Structure of Scientific Revolutions.  Award-winning physicist Dr. Fritjof Capra reapplied Kuhn’s original definition to the way we structure our organizations.  He wrote, “A paradigm is a constellation of concepts, values, perceptions and practices shared by a community, which forms a particular vision of reality that is the basis of the way a community organizes itself.”

The paradigm under which we currently operate has never organized anything that looks for individual brilliance and real creativity in all people—not in our schools, our businesses, our communities.  If anything, it limits our concept of what it means to be human.  Looking for and trying to develop these attributes, in general, is not inside our culture, because it is not inside our collective paradigm.  And if it is not in our paradigm, then for all practical purposes, it does not exist.

Instead, the prevailing paradigm tells us intelligence and real creativity, the kind that is valuable, is an asset of the limited few.  It structures the worth of the human being in a hierarchy of intelligence, just like a bell curve on a test and creates hurdles to success that limit and narrow the possibilities; we are told only the top ten percent or less will make the cut.  Then we structure our educational systems, our institutions, our communities to support that world view.  But what if we are wrong?

If we use our imaginations and apply the magic what if? can we picture a world where everyone is successfully using their gifts?  Can we imagine a world where we honor each other for the contributions we so diversely make…a world driven by communities of passionate beings, each with extraordinarily well-developed talents, exquisitely living their calling.  We would end up in a much better place and have a much more individually rewarding, meaningful journey getting there.  Then we could restructure our businesses, organizations, institutions so that everyone’s gifts are employed, appreciated, rewarded, and above all, respected and honored for the whole souls they truly are.

We would create better relationships, stronger families, more functional organizations built by people driven by the passion to connect to and develop their gifts.  We would help each child find their gifts.  We would do it through helping them connect to the passion within and the direction that passion naturally brings.  And we would honor that calling.

If we followed this vision, we would have a world where every individual matters, not as a group or as individually identifiable data, not as statistics, scores and test ratings, not as social-emotional profiles, but as human beings with a soul.  That would be a shift!  Souls here on a greater mission—one created by a Greater Source, a bigger system, a more benevolent counsel than that engineered by flawed governments, politicians, corporations and purported benefactors with significant personal agendas.

If we change the prevailing paradigm, and make this shift in both perception and intent, we would have extraordinary results.  We would abandon an attitude of ‘grit, tenacity and perseverance’ and replace it with passionate and internally-driven human beings creating through joy and exuberance.  We would come to understand, and experience first-hand, that the human being who is driven by passion will succeed in a much grander way by all measures than those who were trained to an agenda.  Passion, exuberance, purpose and meaning, these are the attitudes that honor life—not ‘grit, tenacity and perseverance’ (something that sounds like you are getting your teeth pulled.)

If we executed this vision individually, we would bring abundance, contentment and peace into this world.  We would bring abundance because every person would do the thing they love extraordinarily well, raising the quality of life for the people they touch.  We would be content.  Waking up every morning, excited about doing the thing we love, can only bring contentment.  And when we are content, we are at peace…both on the inside and in our interactions with others.

If we helped every child, every person, find their passion and personal brilliance, we would probably introduce another element to our culture—gratitude.   Passion, fulfillment, contentment and peace pave the way for soul-felt gratitude.  This is the kind of gratitude that springs from our being every morning when we rise up, and reminds us every evening when we lie down of our connection to something bigger, more purposeful, more magnificent.  With gratitude comes humility and openness to unlimited possibilities.  This is how we build a better world.

Now, imagine, what if your little one, your child, your teenager, your young adult had within them the capacity to make this vision come true?  Pretend your child is here to invent the one thing that will change the lives of thousands of people, or identify and come up with a solution that will provide food and water for millions, or create great beauty in the lives of the people who encounter their handiwork and vision.  Take a moment to reflect on those thoughts and what that might mean to the future mental, emotional and spiritual health of our families, our communities, our world.

Now here’s the challenging part…what if…this were all true?  Want to find out?

Come join us.

Resa Steindel Brown

Passion Oriented Education ™