Tenacity – ElPropósito4 min de lectura

Passion + hard work

"To make the land produce, you have to leave the office, go out into the field, get your hands dirty and sweat. It is the only language the soil, the plants and the animals understand." Norman Borlaug. This line has hung in my father’s office for decades. My old man is a great agronomist who has taught many of us the value of work, and specifically of tenacious work (tenacity: the firmness, resolve and perseverance a person brings to getting something done). The field is a great teacher, perhaps one of the best at showing us how complex it is to put food on the table. The field is noble, and it teaches like few others the blend of passion and work. In the field you never get to choose between the two; it absolutely has to be both. Perhaps the main confusion in chasing our passion in life is forgetting that passion is an emotion, and it must go hand in hand with work, the tenacious, constant work Borlaug talks about.

Passion, as I said, is an intense emotion that drives and motivates us in all kinds of situations, especially the hardest ones. Doing things in line with our life purpose, for example, is a very strong source of passion. Yet we can achieve little or nothing on passion alone. Reaching our goals takes constant effort. It is the discipline of doing things even when laziness catches up with us that carries us to something greater than passion alone. The true essence of any objective lies in the blend of life purpose and action. God, for example, calls us to be more than spectators of life. He calls us to act and decide on many things, especially those that serve our neighbor.

So which comes first, work or passion? In my experience, I prefer to act and then assess and fine-tune the result as I go, especially when it is something that truly moves me toward my life purpose. I usually find the satisfaction of work done in small actions. However small the step, I feel the satisfaction of not stopping at the idea or the passion. That passion lives deep inside me, and on its own it does not give me the same feeling I get when passion and action come together. The fundamental mistake is thinking passion by itself brings results. It doesn’t, because passion involves no effort. It is one of the best emotions there is, but if we truly want that final feeling, we have to act.

Humanity’s greatest works are the fruit of passion, the desire to serve others without expecting anything in return, and constant, disciplined, tenacious action. Back to the example of the field: a crop holds every essential ingredient for teaching us how things get done. We know its timing, its water and nutrient needs, and the basic farm work needed to keep outside threats, such as weeds, from wiping it out. The most curious thing of all is that an agronomist knows that what he did not do today he cannot fix tomorrow. One of my father’s blunt sayings about agronomy is "doctors bury their mistakes; we agronomists have to live with ours." In the field we can see values like tenacious work, discipline, passion, focus and responsibility, among many others. Of course other industries offer many examples of how these values, put into action, lead to the best results. The field is simply the one I grew up with, the one I was trained in and the one I am still tied to, directly and indirectly.

Passion never spares us from putting all our effort and work into our objectives. Anyone who works with passion has probably noticed by now that they usually work more than eight hours a day and some three hundred hours a week 😉

Warm regards and all the best,

Rodrigo Baccaro

P.S. I dedicate this post to my dad, who has always squeezed a hundred hours out of every day and has been my example of perseverance, discipline and tenacious, constant work. I love you, Dad.

Author: Rodrigo Baccaro

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