Two friends reached important milestones in their lives recently: Bea gets her second food article published on the Boston Globe and David discusses his thesis and finished graduate school at MIT.

The two events seem highly uncorrelated (even more so since Bea and David actually never met), but there is something deep the links their work and their success: passion.

Bea started to do her food blog as a way to express herself, when unemployed and bored. Didn’t know much about photography and turned to me (that’s how little she knew about photography) for help. “how do you do those blurry effects in the background?” - she asked me one day. A few years after that (and a few new lenses) and she goes on to win the award for best food photography in a blog… and gets published in a serious magazine.

While Bea cooks, photographs and writes about it in that lovely mix of French and English, David expresses himself by writing software. Beautiful and clever software. He’s a prototype machine, a fearless coder with a serious eye on visual balance and interaction usability.

There is one thing about Bea’s and David’s work that simply you can’t miss: the passion that their work emanates.

Passion is rare, passion is hard to transmit and it’s impossible to fake.

Passion is not hard work and it’s not focus (although both help in getting stuff done), passion is not faith or egocentrism, it’s not confidence and it’s not humility (although both help in getting things done and learning from one’s mistakes).

Passion is a catalyst, it’s the thing that makes hard things seem easier for them, it’s the flavor we taste on this side, the ‘je ne sais quoi’ that we envy from outside looking in, the distillate of sweat, tears, pain, joy, suffering, mistakes, frustrations, cleverness and enlightenment… all mixed with a little childish nonchalance and a little tiny desire to joke, to surprise.

In a word, passion.

Apple vs. Microsoft? passion. Google vs. Yahoo? passion. Ruby vs. Java? passion.

Passion is not everything and it’s not even enough, but for sure I’ve always been drawn to things that emanate a distinctive scent of passion from within, even if these passionate exercises have no reason to exist or are simply an act of creation love, a form of art.

We are emotional beings in every aspect of our lives, no matter how much we want to pretend otherwise.

And passion is a magnet, a catalyst, a distillate of everything positive that we value, that we care for and that we want more of.

So this post is for Bea and for David, a toast to their wonderful achievements and to their bright futures. But it’s also a wake up call for those who might decide to put passion a little lower on their priority scale, as it’s rarely considered important or valuable, or it simply requires a lot of energy and the ability to continue to play and to accept risks.

It’s also a toast to those who supported them (financially and emotionally), their decisions and their ways of doing things, even when they looked weird or felt wrong or sounded empty.

Passion cannot exist without an healthy, loving and trusting ecosystem around it.

Chapeau, my friends.