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Follow your passion
March 07, 2018
What do you love? And what are you good at? Are they one and the same? Somebody asked me recently if I love giving jokes. I said ''not really'', and the person was genuinely perplexed. ''How come yuh nuh love it and yuh so good at it?'' was the bewildered reply.
But that is how life is, nuh true? It can be great if our passions and our abilities have a happy meeting. But people don't have to necessarily love what they're good at. Similarly, simply loving something does not guarantee that one will be good at doing it. That's something I really wish some people in various segments of the entertainment industry would realise.
I work as a comedian because I accidentally discovered years ago that I'm actually good at making people laugh. In fact, my work in comedy started out more as a defence mechanism and personal therapy, instead of as a deliberate and conscious process.
In turn, the field of comedy has been very good to me, and I have to give thanks. Yes, comedy has taken me all over the world and provided me with some really good earnings, so I definitely respect it as a field of professional endeavour and continue to work at it. But I wouldn't honestly say I love it.
Teaching is my real passion. Yes, peeps, I absolutely love the opportunity teaching offers me to influence the future by impacting lives in the present. That is where my true passion lies, so I truly hope and pray that my abilities as a teacher totally match and even exceeds my love for the work of teaching. And talking 'bout teaching, look here nuh, our people can be brutally blunt with their frankness yuh know.
So, I'm currently a part-time lecturer at the Trench Town Polytechnic College, and the other day somebody asked me what subject I teach there. When I told her 'voice and speech', the woman buss out inna one big dutty laugh and replied, "And yuh chat lacka seh yuh tongue tie? How yuh fi train people inna voice and speech?"
Happily, my feelings are not easily hurt. I quietly and humbly informed the nice lady that the legendary Glen Mills doesn't have to be a great sprinter himself for him to be able to train the world's fastest man, and she stopped laughing. I think she got the point. What you think?
