Fall in love. It’s easy to fall in love with people. I suggest falling in love with anything and everything, every chance you get. Fall in love with your coffee, your sneakers, your blue zone parking space. I’ve had a lot of fun in life falling in love with stupid, meaningless physical objects.
–Jerry Seinfeld
I played in a baseball game yesterday. First time in at least 17 years. I was rusty, I was hot, and today, I’m sore. And I loved it. A long time ago I fell in love with baseball. After that, I fell in love with rugby. But the baseball love will always be first.
Falling in love with something is very different than Cal Newport’s passion hypothesis. If you take a more careful approach to life, and consider things such as (as Newport enumerates) authenticity, autonomy, and mission, you can identify things to fall in love with. Even if you don’t start from a place of passion, that doesn’t preclude you from falling in love with what you do, who you’re with, and how you spend your time. This holds across the types of love.