Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos say you don't get to pick your passions.
Passions, "they pick you," Bezos says in a Blue Origin video recently posted on YouTube.
"I think we all have passions, and you don't get to choose them. But you have to be alert to them," explains Bezos. "You have to be looking for them."
Bezos says his passion is space: "Ever since I was 5 years old — that's when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the moon — I've been passionate about space, rockets, rocket engines, space travel."
Back then, says Bezos, "The idea of going to the moon was so impossible that people actually used it as a metaphor for impossibility. What I would hope you would take away from that is that anything you set your mind to, you can do."
Bezos then quotes Wernher von Braun, a leading and pioneering rocket scientist: "Von Braun said, after the lunar landing, 'I have learned to use the word "impossible" with great caution.' And I hope you guys take that attitude about your lives."