PASSION // FIND THAT FIRE WITHIN

“Passion is like a fuel, it makes you excited to work harder towards it, it kind of makes work not feel like work.”

Viktoria Sekrier

You know when you have that one thing that just gets you going? That spark that, as soon as you throw some gas its way it becomes this fiery ball of good times. That’s pretty much the way I look at passion. We all have something deep down we’re passionate about. And yes, if you are wondering who I stole that from above, it’s Victoria Sekrier.

That’s exactly it, if you find something you love it makes waking up every day all the better.

I’m sure you’ve seen this quote from Marc Anthony written across some Instagram image at some point in your life, “If you love what you’re doing, you’ll never work a day in your life.” Now as cheesy and cliché as it sounds, he does have a point. When I started at Nike, I ran our athlete program for snowboarding, a passion of mine for the last 15 years. There were a lot of long days, travel, pressure, building out presentations, but to go to work every day and talk about the thing I love made it a pretty easy routine. I fully understand how lucky I was to fall into that role, but even something as niche as snowboarding has opportunities and I know countless others who have made their lives out of a sport they love. There’s plenty of examples within this book.

My father who is now 78 has that passion for football and he shares it with a couple of good friends who have looked out for him since my mother passed away. Gwyn and Dale call him every day to chat football, to moan about the players, to gossip about who might be signing to our beloved club, Swansea City. Every two weeks when Swansea have a home game, they all meet before the game at Rossi’s fish and chip shop over the road from the stadium to set the world to rights, nice and early before going into the club shop and working for free selling programs. They have to go pick them up, get set up in the shop, drop off copies to the media and then have a good two hours of chatting with the rest of the fans about the day’s game. They don’t get paid for it, but they just love everything about it. It provides something to look forward to and for that I am forever indebted to football as a sport for what it does for my dad.

You’ll know you have a passion for something when you can’t stop daydreaming about it and can’t wait to spend your time doing it. For some people retirement is when you get to follow your passion, but why should we wait? There are so many more opportunities now to follow your passion into a full-time career.

Clinton Lofthouse, who was one of the most inspiring people I spoke to, really showed me how he turned his own passion into a very successful full time career, spurred by an interest in photography and creativity.

“To make the most of my free time, I built up little routines and systems to make myself more efficient. I would get up at 5am, do two hours of photography, then go to my factory job. Get home from work, play with my son, then once he went to bed, work until about 12 midnight.”

That level of commitment is sometimes what it takes to work on something you love. The time, energy, hard work and also leaps of blind faith are what it takes.

For my own path, when I started out snowboarding I sure as hell didn’t really realize there were whole industries based upon these fun activities. That goes for skateboarding, surfing, music, cliff diving, road bikes, motocross, cars, cooking, doing yoga, traveling, flying... the list goes
on. Whatever you love and no matter how weird and niche you might think it is, the chances are there is someone who is doing that for a living and loving their life. You don’t even need to know what it is you want to do. Tamika Abaka-Wood showed me that with her approach to the careers advisor at school:

“I would tell my careers advisor I’m going to create a role for myself. You can’t help me out. You have no idea what I’m talking about as I’ll create a job that probably didn’t exist 20 years ago.”

Me being very semi pro, but loving it.

In 2005 I had been snowboarding semi-professionally for three years and when I say ‘semi-pro- fessional,’ let’s be clear. There were only three cheques that came in the post for me in my entire career, so I wasn’t someone who did well as an athlete and transitioned out. Sure, I got the product I needed, whenever I needed it, which was a dream at the time. But in terms of cold, hard cash, well there was a cheque for $4,000 and two for $1,000 each. Now at the time I could live for five months on around $3,000, so believe me, I felt like I was killing it.

However, the income was also dependent on my ability to generate coverage and take part in some competitions. I had just managed to break my neck inbetween C5 and C6 and so that opportunity was dwindling with this new injury. Luckily, that summer I got asked if I wanted to intern at Bur- ton Snowboards in Innsbruck, the company I was riding for at the time. Now the pay was $600 a month and whilst most internships were a few months, six at max, but mine seemed to be open ended. It eventually lasted a year, so I earnt $7,200 that year. Not much and not even really enough to pay rent, but I have always believed in the bigger picture. That one year on my resume at the best company in the business would help me out long term. I also had that passion where I was thinking, ‘hell, $7,200 to work in snowboarding, for sure!!’ - so I gave it my best.

That led to a full time role, which eventually set me up to make the jump to Nike four years later. If I had let myself get worried about the short-term gain, I wouldn’t have made it where I am today. As I say, it does require a leap of faith and real hard work, but how else would you want to do it?

In discussing this book with Jackie Beale she told me a similar story some her early assignments and not receiving her usual day rate, which is quite hard for an established photographer. Jackie said to herself, “don’t let your ego get in the way,” and sure enough after that trip she has been getting loads of work from that client. Also, the assignment was to shoot cliff diving in Portugal. I mean, it’s not exactly a bad way to spend a week. The thing with passion is it almost picks us. When we’re born there isn’t much chance of us knowing what will resonate with us, what will set us off. However, when you pick up that paint brush or guitar, you just know.

Theo Broma is someone who I’ve met on this journey and his way of describing it just blew me away:

Theo Bromer

“Your heart tells you everything, your brain works out the analytics. Your heart is your first brain, use it!”

Sometimes it does feel like you just need to give in to where your heart is. If you do surrender to that input, your output will be exponentially higher than anything else you could achieve. This is because every single piece of you will be invested in what you’re doing.

It’s interesting now, trying lots of different activities, instruments & pursuits with my son and daughter, to see which ones stick and which ones we’re selling down at the second hand store in the village.

One thing I’ve heard from some people is that they don’t have any passions and whilst for some that maybe true, I often won- der if they’re just not looking in the right places. I feel that pas- sion is something that isn’t just inside of us. Maybe it requires us to listen to ourselves more when we try things, but passion needs to be found, felt and lived. That can only be done by just getting out and trying as many things as possible.

When I think of my mother, I always think of the passion she had. She loved sewing and so she would make the pantomime costumes for the local village every year along with raising money for the Women’s Institute. She couldn’t be not busy, and always had a project going.

One thing she did when I was young, which I’m eternally grateful to her for, was her insistence that I try a lot of things. Maybe it was because she knew I would need a passion.

Every summer I tried something new; one year it was sailing, one year it was climbing, one year we tried bodyboarding, one year it was skiing on the weird plastic English dry slopes we had. That was the one that stuck. I can’t tell you why, it just grabbed me and excited me. Sailing was kind of, ‘meh,’ although capsizing was fun. Climbing was ok. Bodyboarding was fun and something I knew I would come back to later, but in the UK, it is cold and so I didn’t develop that same passion until later in life.

That passion for skiing that she helped me unlock turned into snowboarding, which became going to live in France, Finland and then Austria, learning new languages along the way. It led me to meeting my wife, moving to the US with Nike, having two kids over here, all because of that one hour lesson she got me to try when I was 14.

It came full circle, as after she passed away we went to the beach to celebrate what would have been her birthday for a fire, BBQ and a couple of drinks. As we were setting up, we decided to go for a surf and a good friend, Sani Alibabic paddled out just ahead of me, so me and my son took photos from the parking lot. As we looked down to the surf, we saw these plumes of water shooting up and then a few seconds later a whale breached as it swam north up the Oregon coast on its way to Alaska for summer. It was such a surreal moment and for someone who isn’t especially religious (but I hope there is something after life) it felt like she was watching our new passion of surfing, especially as it’s something I can enjoy with my young family. My mum was extremely passionate about the ocean having been raised in South Wales, so to have this happen on her birthday, to me just felt like a sign. A sign of what having passion central to your life can do for you.

Below is the photo, May 17th 2016, year my mother passed away on what would have been her birthday. I know she’s with us somewhere.