Author: Lydia Amuge
Title: Profit From Your Passion: Proven Strategies To Build a Successful Business From What You Love
Pages: 197
Price: Shs50,000
Availability: www.lydiaamuge.com/book-lydia
Published: 2023
All the time, people use the word passion as if it were an open sesame to Nirvana. But how many of us truly understand what passion is?
It is many things, no doubt.
However, “Kevin Hall in his books Aspire says that passion originally meant a willingness to suffer for what you love,” Lydia Amuge reveals in her book Profit From Your Passion, which is armed to the aspirational teeth with sound advice along with worksheets.
Are you still with us?
One can certainly imagine a number of toughs getting going after that quote summons their toughness to do more than posture.
If you are still with us, the author shares a variety of examples gleaned from hers and other peoples’ experiences in order to give the reader a fix on the passion which lies within us all.
Here, she takes us back to her childhood.
That’s because passion is at its clearest, purest form when we are young and unspoiled by life’s sobering lessons.
“At the age of eight, my ambitions soared like an eagle; I wanted to be a doctor and the President of my Country Uganda. Crazy, right! This dream was inspired and fanned by my admiration of the then Vice-President, Dr Wandera Kazibwe (sic), who was our neighbour before she moved into politics,” the author says.
What I like about this anecdote is that it has my twists and turns.
Sure, you know the author is not president of Uganda. That position has been temporarily placed out of our collective reach.
Still, you feel the prospect of her achieving her dream of becoming a doctor dangling tantalisingly before our eyes.
We turn each page, rooting for the author to succeed in her dream.
All the stars seem align to reflect the gleam in the author’s eye.
She attends an elite secondary school, her sister becomes a doctor, and she then works in a hospital and even enrols at a university that doubles as a shoe-in to her waiting ambition.
Then, the road turns.
She finds herself in fourth year at Mbarara University of Science of Technology after having had second thoughts about becoming a doctor whereby she shifts from studying human medicine to medical laboratory school.
This is where serendipity happens.
Her lecturer in Laboratory Management and Ethics asks the class: “What is the one thing you can do so well whether you are paid for it or not?”
They say the longest journey is the journey within.
Undaunted, the author embarks on this journey of a thousand leagues and finds that her passion lies in the love of words and the ability to relate to people with a story that successfully reaches out to hearts, inspires minds and transforms lives.
Doffing her now feathered cap to the career path of creative communication, she helps the reader reach a similarly desired destination.
“Pay attention to what is consuming your time…whatever you are spending a significant amount of your time on consciously or subconsciously is a clue to what you are truly passionate about,” she writes.
