What does it mean to be passionate? If you’ve spent enough time looking for a job, or you’re on the other side trying to hire the right person, one quality you hear coming up over and over again is the desire to find someone who is PASSIONATE. As I began doing research on software developer jobs and companies, I expected that companies would be looking for someone who had “X amount” of skill, knew “x number” of technologies, and could solve a coding problem in minutes. It made sense as someone who is trying to break in to the industry, the one area I saw myself lacking the most was in my knowledge/experience. Instead what I’ve discovered in my couple months of scouring the internet, listening to podcasts, and talking to people in tech, what they really want is someone who has a passion for learning, a passion for software development. Obviously having skills and knowledge is important, but what people expressed as having even more value was that passion.

The question then is, how do you define “passion”? What makes someone passionate about something versus not? Of course if you put it out there on the internet, people will come up with a number of great explanations and definitions. I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts this morning on my way to work, and I heard it expressed in a simple, yet perfect way. The podcast was “How I Built This” which is an NPR podcast hosted by Guy Raz where every week he interviews an entrepreneur and gets the background story on how he/she created and built the company and what it is today. It’s fascinating to hear these people who have become incredibly successful describe the challenges they faced to get to where they are today. It’s not all happy-go-lucky though, often times they’ve gone through many failures before they finally got their breakthrough, but the underlying quality that they’ve all had in common is the passion for what they do.

In this episode, a woman named Lisa Price who founded Carol’s Daughter, one of the leading beauty brands that cater to African-American women, was asked, “so that summer of 93 when you were like selling body butter in baby [food] jars at church flea markets, did you think of this as your future or did you think ‘oh this is kind of a fun side project that I’m doing and I get to hang out with people that I know and I’m just having fun’?” She replied that she did think of it that way initially but one summer day she was watching an episode of the Oprah Winfrey Show, and she was talking to people who had started businesses with little or no money, and one person said, “Well, you have to know that you’re passionate about what you do. You can’t start a business just because you want to make a bunch of money because it’s going to take too long for you to make any money. And if you’re not passionate about it, you will quit before you make any money.” Lisa heard this and thought to herself, “I’m really passionate about this stuff, I like doing this.”

A second interviewee defined passion as “if someone woke you up out of bed in the middle of the night, would you go do this thing?” This is what clicked for Lisa, and as I heard this in the car it resonated with me. Lately, I had been trying to put into words the feelings I had towards programming. I’ve been spending late nights working on projects and not realizing that time had flown by, hacking away to add features or struggling with an error. But it all felt worth it because I loved doing it! If someone (aka my toddler) dragged me out of bed in the middle of the night, I would want to be programming (after putting him back to bed of course!).