‘Passion’ cannot be certificated, hence our dilemma

  SHARE BOOKMARKPRINTEMAILRATING

By PHILIP OCHIENG
Posted  Saturday, December 24  2011 at  17:29

In our division of labour, if you do not have a passion for your work, you are wasting the nation’s time and money.

To be fully productive, you must try hard to be slotted into a career pigeonhole in which you can enjoy yourself fully.

Yes, education and training are a necessary condition for an effective career. But they are not a sufficient condition.

If you do not also enjoy your daily assignments — often dreaming about them in your sleep — you just will not apply yourself to them to the maximum.

Such personal dedication to an assignment — your own volition and self-drive in terms of ideas and skill without waiting for the coercive voice of the nyapara and without worrying too much about how much cash it will bring you in the short run — that is what I call passion.

Enjoyment is the mother of that self-initiative which is what alone can add the necessary salt and pepper to your work to invigorate and make it fully productive.

Yet we cannot dichotomise too rigidly between knowledge and skill, on the one hand, and dedication and enjoyment, on the other.

They delicately need each other. You just will never enjoy yourself even a tad in a profession where you have no knowledge and skill.

Share This Story

3Share 

Though it never made me rich, I enjoyed myself thoroughly in newspaper work. But this was only because I tried hard to become a dab hand in many areas of newspaper production.

But the opposite is also true. It was because I was so passionate about my work that I was able to constantly improve my writing, sub-editing, design and management.

Why, then, did certain MPs raise so many eyebrows by demanding “passion” from individuals nominated for certain public offices?

The answer is that the House deals only with forensic commodities, and passion is not a legal category.

My dictionary defines passion as “a very strong feeling ...” But, clearly, there is nothing necessarily positive about such a definition.

Yes, despite its tragic ending, Romeo’s love for Juliet, though strong and tragic, can be seen as a positive feeling.

That was what probably misled Robinson Githae, the minister for Nairobi Metropolitan, into confining “passion” to erotic or romantic love.

But strong feelings include also hatred, anger and the enthusiasm of both the Muslim suicide bomber and the rampageous Christian Fundamentalist of America’s infamy.

As sardonic MP thus demanded “passionometers” for interviewing candidates for public offices.

Yet, despite a pseudo-science called phrenology — spearheaded by a Khazari Jew called Cesare Lombroso and promoted by Agatha Christie in whodunit fiction — Shakespeare reminds us (in Macbeth) that we have no way “… to find the mind’s construction in the face”.

Advertisers are, therefore, wise not to cite “passion” among the qualifications a candidate must have.

They seem to take it that the successful candidate will acquire the necessary passion only on the job, with the guidance of good management.

But, according to the law of averages, almost every interview panel denies a job to a potential Einstein just by asking the wrong questions.

Frequently, interview criteria are so faulty that even Joe Wanjui, Evanson Mwaniki and Nick Muriuki might have flunked them. Thus they would never have become corporate management whiz kids.

The MPs were, therefore, right to demand “passion” for certain offices.

It is a dilemma because, although, clearly, passion must be demanded, it cannot be certificated. It can only be inculcated through education, training and on the job.For our dilemma is that productivity is taking a nosedive nationwide simply because most of our top production, governance and education managers are individuals with no passion at all for their work.

That this is not taking place is the crisis facing our whole process of tuition and upbringing. It is only in this light that the MPs were unjust to the nominees.

ochiengotani@ke.nationmedia.com