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Comment by lo_zamoyski | Hacker News Reader

I really did wish we'd stop using the word "passionate". The passions are a matter of affect and therefore variable and changing. No mature, responsible adult grounds his life or his actions in his passions. You don't run a multibillion dollar company on passion. This is exactly the opposite of what you should be doing. Follow your reason, not your passions. The worst thing a person can do is to be led by his passions, to have them direct his life.

It is better to say "dedicated to the company and its mission". Dedication is a matter of reasoned decision and consistent activity for the good of something. How you feel is irrelevant. If you wake up cranky one day, you still go do what you need to do. You don't wait until you "feel" like it.

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When I was learning to read French, I discovered La Rochefoucauld, an epigrammatist and cynic.

>> Les passions sont les seuls orateurs qui persuadent toujours. Elles sont comme un art de la nature dont les règles sont infaillibles; et l'homme le plus simple qui a de la passion persuade mieux que le plus éloquent qui n'en a point.

>> The passions are the only advocates which always persuade. They are a natural art, the rules of which are infallible; and the simplest man with passion will be more persuasive than the most eloquent without.[0]

If we agree our age is dominated by marketing and propaganda, and if La Rochefoucauld was right that the passions never fail to persuade, I think we've found our age's totemic god: the passions.

[0] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/9105/9105-h/9105-h.htm

La Rochefoucauld was a genius... His "Maximes" are definitely worth reading.

>No mature, responsible adult grounds his life or his actions in his passions.

I somehow keep it together, as a sample size of one.

Don't see much point in playing word games. You can call it "obsession" or "investment" or simply "greed". The point is they have a strong intrinsic factor that keeps them around and makes them strongly opinionated on how to best make money.

>It is better to say "dedicated to the company and its mission".

that implies they won't take the next golden parachute 12 months out if they fail, as opposed to trying their best to keep the company they "are dedicated to" afloat. I think that gives too much credit. Wheras like you say, passion can quickly burn out.

And their feelings on the company is very relevant to how much of a damn they give. They can say "I quit" and never work a day in their lives again, they don't have any "dedication" to working. You can very much tell in many cases when leadership stopped caring about the company and are looking out the door.

Ok pretend I used the word "dedicated". Does it make what I said less valid?

They’re arguing it would become more valid.

You might enjoy The Passions and the Interests by Irving Hirschman, which gives a history of how the concept of "material interest" was introduced as a kind of intermediary state between reason and passion, partly to justify an emergent set of capitalist ideologies.

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