Pursuing passion, doing what you love, and swinging for the fences

1: Michael Jordan on choosing his passion

“My father wanted me to be able to work with my hands, to be mechanical, able to work with tools. He thought that if you could work with your hands, then there would always be a job somewhere. I didn’t have passion for that kind of work. That drove him nuts.

He didn’t think I’d amount to anything because I had no hand skills, no mechanical skills.

The way my father looked at it, there was no guarantee I’d be able to make a living. But I never thought about that. All my energy was focused on getting where I had to go.

My focus was to be the best player in whatever sport I played. That was all I ever thought about.”

Source: Driven from Within by Michael Jordan

2: Paul Graham on doing what you love

“If you choose a kind of work mainly for how well it pays, you'll be surrounded by other people who chose it for the same reason, and that will make it even more soul-sucking than it seems from the outside. Whereas if you choose work you're genuinely interested in, you'll be surrounded mostly by other people who are genuinely interested in it, and that will make it extra inspiring.

There's one case, though, where it's easy to say whether you should work on what interests you the most: if you want to do great work. This is not a sufficient condition for doing great work, but it is a necessary one.”

Source: When To Do What You Love by Paul Graham

3: Jeff Bezos on big business risks

"Given a 10 percent chance of a 100 times payoff, you should take that bet every time. But you're still going to be wrong nine times out of ten . . . We all know that if you swing for the fences, you're going to strike out a lot, but you're also going to hit some home runs.

The difference between baseball and business, however, is that baseball has a truncated outcome distribution. When you swing, no matter how well you connect with the ball, the most runs you can get is four.

In business, every once in a while, when you step up to the plate, you can score 1,000 runs. This long-tailed distribution of returns is why it's important to be bold. Big winners pay for so many experiments."

Source: Jeff Bezos' 2015 Letter to Amazon Shareholders