Can Passion and Livelihood Coexist?

My friend Drew sent me a video that started the wheels turning.
The video was Rod Rakic presenting "Building a Social Media Utility and Living to Talk About It" at the Chicago New Media Summit 08. The basic premise is you shouldn't try to achieve a balance between life and work, you should strive for work/life integration. It's twenty minutes well spent and will help you to understand the rest of this post.

I have tried the balance approach and envisioned a group of rectangles within a square representing four aspects of my life and the time devoted to each. The goal would be to allocate my time so that the ratio matched the perfect balance I had set for myself.  The problem is that these are mutually exclusive so adding to one takes away from the others.

So the answer is not to separate the goals but attempt to combine them as circles that intersect instead of rectangles that don't overlap.

Enough about squares, rectangles and circles. It's bringing me back to high school Geometry class and my teacher asking if I was having a vision as I stared off into space.

A lot of imagery in this post but here's one more. Picture this, a man at a busy intersection holding a sign stating, "Will work for my passion" Now keep that image in your mind.

PS Note to brother. Notice no mention of the Tw or Fb word.