This year at SXSWi, I was invited to take part in 20×2, an event where 20 people are given 2 minutes each to answer an “open-ended question”. The question this year was “What is the difference?”

I was blown away by the range and quality of the other participants’ answers. This was my humble effort, delivered as a straight-up talk.

The difference, in a word, is passion.

In all our pursuits and endeavours, it is passion which leads to the creation of the genuinely great, or the superlative experience.

Thank about it – who do you most associate with passion; Steve Jobs and his irritatingly exquisite products, painstakingly put together by folks who care about the minutest details or… well… Bill Gates?

I’ve seen the effects of passion in the panels I’ve attended here at South by Southwest. All of the best panels have been hosted by people with a genuine passion for what they’re talking about.

In all honesty, some of them have had so little real content that they’ve actually subtracted from the sum of human knowledge.

But when that nebulous non-content is delivered with infectious passion, it still has value. The raw emotion itself inspires, leading us to new insights and ideas.

The greatest music ever produced, from the snarl of the Sex Pistols to the intricate scales of Rachmaninov, is fired through with deep, passionate enthusiasm and dedication. And the same is true for every other creative field:

The writing of Dickens or Ginsberg or Phillip Pullman; the art of Rothko or Monet; superlative graphic design or exquisitely prepared food by chefs like Thomas Keller – passion informs all of these things.

Life… is better with passion. It crackles with electricity a little more; sings a little more.

So my plea to all of you is this: let go of all those other influences on the things you do. Shut out the shareholders, investors, editors or producers; ignore the spreadsheets, monthly growth charts and budgets. Whatever it is you do in life; however you do it, feed your creativity with your passions, be they kittens or cushions, candles or cattle-prods, cocktails or cave-paintings.

Channel that energy into everything you do. It’s the easiest, most fulfilling way to truly make a difference.

This article first arrived on the interwebnet on Tuesday, March 25th, 2008 at 7:41 pm .
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There are thousands of articles on this very subject all over the internet. 39% of them are cleverly-disguised attempts to sell you little blue pills, 26% of them lead inevitably to a badly-researched, logically inconsistent Wikipedia article and 5% are written in an ancient Navajo dialect which is only spoken by 2 professors. The remaining 30% are, like this one, of very little interest to anyone besides their original author (and even he's a bit bored by it).