Passion is a powerful force, especially when it comes to pursuing your dreams.

Passion drives us to love and to defend, to hone our crafts and pursue what’s most important to us. The English word passion comes from the Latin word passio, which means suffering. Passio finds its roots in the earlier Latin word pati, meaning “to suffer,” the same word that we use as the base for patience.

Being patient can be painful. Pursuing your dreams demands a lot of patience and a lot of “suffering” along the way. For every door of opportunity standing wide open, there are the slams of ten doors of rejection still ringing in your fragile ears. Dream-chasing requires passion, a drive to pursue your God-given potential with full knowledge that this may be the toughest road you’ll ever travel.

Passion is the suffering of your dreams - writetojoncook Jon Cook

My own dreams have a history of bumps, bruises, and brick wall moments. I worked for four years to develop my writing with more than my share of setbacks and rejections. I’m published two short books (<100 pages) and know I have so much more to learn about writing. It’s why I get up every day and write for 3-4 hours because I know I need to pound out a million words to make 50,000 worth my future reader’s time.

Passion for your dreams means you’ll face opposition. People won’t always understand your dreams. It’s okay, it’s not their dreams to understand; these are your dreams for a reason. You’ll question your sanity as you fill out that application, make that phone call, sit in the pre-interview room, or make that demo. You’ll suffer as you share your dreams that come straight from your gut, only to see people start shooting holes in your dreams’ potential, or worse still, shrug indifferently.

What it takes to pursue your dreams

Chasing your dreams will take longer than you want, but not as long as you expect to become reality. For every time you experience rejection or setbacks, just think, “I’m closer now than I used to be.” Keep pushing forward. Keep chasing your dreams. Keep making the most of the network connections, coffee conversations, and new opportunities that can push your dreams further down the road.

It’s when our dreams suffer patiently that they can age and mature into reality. The struggle makes us more grateful for the success. The sequence of rejections makes us cherish the instance of acceptance. This is why our passion drives our dreams, because we know that a dream without blood, sweat, and tears is not a dream worth pursuing. Without passion, without the work, the time, the practice, the intense attention, and the “suffering,” a dream simply stays a dream.

May your dreams gloriously “suffer” today because your passion is working for their success. May your passion finds its place in building for your better tomorrow.