One thing about me that not too many people are aware of is that I totally love reading books! I love reading biographies. My passion about biographies comes back from the days when I used to play basketball. I remember being somewhere around fourteen dreaming of playing in WNBA and becoming the best basketball player on Earth. I used to spend a lot of time daydreaming about it and I found inspiration reading about other athlete's success stories.
Later on when a bad injury put the end of my teenage dreams of being an all star basketball player I needed a different kind of inspiration. Back then there weren't a lot of people that had the faith in me. Not a lot of people trusted me that I could ever play another sport and all of them were trying to convince me how I should get rid of that passion about sports and just live a normal life-study, then find the regular job, sit on a desk for 8 hours, then go home sit some more and repeat all of this till I retire.
But that wasn't even close to what I was dreaming of! I decided that eventhough most of the people that surrounded me did not approve what I was striving for I was determined to fight for what I wanted. So I found inspiration in biography books. I read tons of biographies of athletes that overcame great obstacles and injuries. Athletes that deep in their hearts knew what they wanted and never lost sight of their goal even if they lost track of the path they were walking!
So as my life progresses I find it hard to keep living if I do not read a book like this every now and then. Today I finished reading "The Element" by Ken Robinson. It is not exactly a biograpy book, not even close. What captured me about the book is the second caption- " How finding your passion changes everything". That is simply the sentence that describes part of my philosophy about life.
The main point of the book is that the Element is the place where passion and skill meet. People find the Element when they engage in the thing that they love that they are also especially good at doing. This leads to more than just a sense of personal satisfaction. Being in the Element insulates people against unpredictable changes and leads to a more flexible and productive society.
The book illustrates the stories of celebrities, entrepreneurs, scientists,athletes and other highly accomplished people who have found The Element. It illustrates some of the struggles they faced and the never ending commitment to strive for what they truely believed they were born to do. The book shows how you have to find your passion, and then follow it in order to find your purpose.
I totally liked the book because it is not that kind of recepie books, that teach you five steps that will turn your life from disaster to triumph. It is just a book that has true stroies about truely great people some of them famous, some of them not. They are all so different but they have one thing in common- they are truely happy because they found their passion and followed it.
I reccomend everybody reading it! It is pretty inspirational and makes you want to follow your own passion no matter what the obstacles.
