*Words of Wisdom From The Elder

Passion's still important, but *evidence* of the passion will be shown in whatever initiatives people take up. Most people don't initiate much when they're not passionate. You can still look for passion, but it's gotta be backed up with something else.

There is a correllation of passion and initiative. I didn't feel like putting all of that in the artcle and getting all long winded. I'll just let you the reader come up with all of those and discuss.

Indeed, I was about to reply that one does not have initiative if one is not passionate. Passion is the heart and soul, Initiative is the body. Passion controls and drives Initiative, not the other way around.

Passion doesn't always control initiative. We'd like it to though, that's the point. I want someone to be so passionate they have no choice but o respond physically. But I can think of a lot of instances where initiative is or can be invoked without passion. Example.

Let's say your boss says. "We need this thing built to solve problem X. We know everyone is busy so the first developer that gets it built on their own time, gets a free iPod, or Zune, or $100."

If I am the developer that does that task do I have passion? No, I have motivation that was inspired by someone else. I did take the initiative to do the task though. The key difference about the type of initiative we are looking for is initiative driven from within through passion.

I agree completely. But I would have to wrap initiative in the cloak of either teachability or action to pursue knowledge.

There are many people that are passionate and have initiative, but their initiative stops beyond what they are currently working on at the moment (whether on or off the job).

Their skills are limited to what experience can teach, and we know that experience is a very poor teacher (as it only tells you what is painful--not what is best).

Asking a developer how they acquire new knowlege reveals quite a bit about them.

I'm always amazed at the people that spend the first 10 years of their career learning the how/why of OOP from experience when they could have picked up the condensed expertise of an expert (aka a book) and made the same transition in 6 months.

Of course, I use OOP as an example, you could apply the same logic to any other core topic of our industry (design, process, technology, etc).

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-expert-mind