F The Word “Passion”
It all started when I realized that I have so much interest in different subjects that maybe you’ll think they don’t relate to each other (at all). When I was a child, I loved to solve math and logic problems other than any subjects. I just feel it’s the most interesting and exciting to understand, I don’t know why. This kinda feeling makes me understand much better and learn more beyond what is taught at school. As time went by, to improve my interest in it more because I felt more confident in math, I started to join some math competitions and I think these results were awesome. I didn’t know exactly but I’m pretty sure at least I passed the first and second round of the majority of it, even though mostly I didn’t make it as a champ (as I remember).
Besides doing math, I also love to play and listen to music. It actually began when I was in elementary school that my parents registered me for keyboard lessons at a music school, once a week and just 30 minutes. Actually, at that time I’m not that interested first because I remember that I was too lazy to come in time, and my mom always woke me up early to do the lesson. Maybe because I have such that routine even though it is just 30 minutes per week and I really didn’t wanna make my teacher feel bad for me because I didn’t make progress each week, I started to do some practice. Practice, after practice, after practice makes me do well at music too, and I began to love it more. For the past 2 years, I started to write some songs that you could listen to on my Soundcloud or my second Instagram account (@masakmusikbyakmal)!
What about cooking? You might think about it right now and I’ll tell you the story. If you haven’t read my previous writing about why I love food so much, check it out first because this time I’ll go deeper about it. Ok, let’s get back to the topic. In my previous blog about my interest in food, it began when I was searching for what I’m gonna do in my freetime. Then it follows the same rule as I mentioned before, practice, practice and practice (also watching soo much food content (: ) makes me understand and learn more about food and cooking. But this time, the motivation is kinda different, I learn more because I just wanna feel and taste such different food in a simple and cheap way. Like almost every time I watched a video about how to make a dish, I just thought that it actually looks simple and easy to make, so I don’t have to go to some restaurants to eat that food. I just can do it and make it at home, customize with what my pantry has and just enjoy it in the best possible way I can eat at home. After I had some confidence to make some specific recipes, I started to make it not just for me, but for my family and my friends. I realized at that time that I felt something I’ve never felt before (like in music and math), that great feeling about serving and hospitality. It just feels so good to serve food to people you love, and they like it! (at least based on what I hear from them). Moreover, I think it just blows my mind that every activity they’ll do after eating our food is influenced by that food! Maybe their mood, work spirit or other factors will be influenced by it (directly or indirectly). If you don’t believe in me, and yeah actually I didn’t believe it at first, take a look at your last lunch or dinner. When you’re doing some work, and you feel so sleepy, sometimes we take a look at what have I eaten before? Is it because I ate too much rice or carbs that I’m sleepy now? (I’m not a nutritionist, just based on what I read, CMIIW)
With soo much interest, I’ve been in a situation where I think I should pick one of them and focus on it. It means I have to leave behind all of my dreams in other interests that I didn’t pick. It just makes me feel frustrated sometimes to think who am I gonna be in the next 5 or 10 years? Like I really wanna combine all of my interests and make something wonderful from it. Until I found 2 TED talks that changed my mind about all of these things. One about passion and another titled “why some of us don’t have one true calling” (just search it on youtube and you’ll get it). On the first talk, she said that passion just exists for middle and upper economy citizens, why? Because with their needs that have been fulfilled, they could start searching for what they love to do at such a young age. On the other hand, in lower economy citizens, how could they find “passion” or something that they really enjoy and love to do if they must fulfill their belly on that day? They couldn’t even guarantee that they would have enough food for tomorrow. This is one of the main reasons that I didn’t like to use “passion” to describe what I enjoy and love to do. I prefer just on point to say that I love or enjoy doing something, and I wanna take that seriously not just for my hobby or freetime activities.
In the second talk, I love that she opened her talk by describing that when we were children, we were often asked a question “what do you wanna be when you grow up?” and the answer is frequently just one. With that culture since we were kids, directly or indirectly we invest this behavior in our mind to think that it should have one answer. But probably, that’s not your fault if in the end you couldn’t answer it just with one answer, but with two, three or even four answers that really didn’t seem to have any correlation one to another. She’s one of them that couldn’t answer it with just one answer, and at the same time, I just thought maybe I’m the same as her? This feeling of similarity with the other person does really bring me up because I often think I was soo different from my friends in college.
After so many times rethinking and recalculating all of the pros and cons of being a person in that spectrum (up until now), I still decided to go serious with all of my interests, and really wanna combine them as an interesting work to do. Have you ever heard of food experience designer jobs? Or maybe a creative developer? Or maybe someone who’s still working in tech domains but has private dining you could attend? (hehee) Or what about content creator, food photographer, developer and singer-songwriter as well? HAHAAA. It sounds freakin interesting but I really have no clue at all about myself. Maybe those terms could give you some clue about what I wanna do for the next 5 or 10 years, but let’s be honest, I’m (and will always) still thinking about it. I hope you’re still thinking about yours, too! And in the end, feel free to contact me if you have something to discuss about these things, byee and F the word “Passion”!
