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Passion, Drive, and Persistence

A reasonable approach to three of the most important aspects of training

📖 4-minute Read

Passion, Drive, and Persistence play an extremely important role in sports, I think this we can all agree on. However, today we want to find a more reasonable approach to each of the three. But what do I mean by reasonable? By that, I mean to find actual conclusive and argument-based points of view for each’s necessity instead of just saying it is important because that, we already know. With that being said, here’s my take on this!

Let’s kick it off with passion. Passion to me is difficult to categorize because it kind of affects performance from every point of view. Here’s what I mean by that. On one hand, it is objectively seen as the least important for progress itself, because if you still have the drive to become better and remain persistent you are still in training, therefore you have progress.
On the other hand, long-term performance, I believe, highly depends on whether you like the thing or not and passion is obviously the most important thing for your mental health regarding what you do. I think you see where I am going with this… Yes theoretically you can make progress in a thing you don’t have passion for and don’t actually want to do, but if you don’t have some sort of motivation it definitely won’t make sense to pursue the thing. For all the unhappiness one can get from that alone it won’t be worth it. Also at some point that takes over and no drive or persistence can and really shouldn’t keep you going.

In my mind, Drive is this always present longing for more, wanting to reach new heights, and improving at faster rates. All in all, the need to just get better! Now, I believe this is a cornerstone of my and everybody’s work ethic. There’s this saying that “if you truly want something you’ll get it”. Usually, if the thing you want is a hard thing to get or achieve, you need a strong work ethic in order to reach it, and your desire and drive then build the foundation for that.
Work ethic is what builds self-discipline, reliability, productivity, etc. which are all detrimental aspects of performance themselves, thereby impacting it. So, to round this off, not having a drive for something is like sailing a boat, without a clear destination, while having a drive would be like driving a speedboat to a determined place with maximum effort. Instead of swirling around, moving in a straight and directed line!

We’ve touched on persistence earlier when stated that you can still improve or progress, even if you don’t have passion. We’ve solved the passion problem, that you probably shouldn’t pursue something you’re not passionate about.
Now, it doesn’t have to be not being passionate but everybody knows, sports isn’t great all the time. Those times are when someone who has this persistence separates from those who don’t. Because think about it, the person who is persistent with his goals and does something regardless of how he feels will improve over the guy who simply doesn’t. Especially if that compounds over a longer timespan, the persistent person has more hours of work and thereby most likely more progress.

I hope this summed it up nicely and gave you a good impression of how (and not that) the three serve you as a sportsperson or athlete. As always, you know best what you need and have to dial in! See you next Monday!

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