The First Spark

"It's not the love of the thing, but the love of the mastery of the thing that sustains you." — George Leonard

30 second wall handstand hold, the whiteboard said.

I was living in New York City, and a friend had dragged me to my first CrossFit class. I had never done a handstand in my life. Weren’t handstands only for people who grew up in gymnastics? My older brother had spent our childhood calling me spaghetti arms; I had as much hope of holding one as I did of growing into his six-foot-seven frame.

When the time came, I kicked up into a handstand and didn’t fall down. It was not a pretty handstand. My arms shook so hard I thought I’d land on my head. But I held it until the timer went off, then collapsed into a smiling heap.

I never went back to CrossFit. But I couldn’t stop thinking about handstands. I found a gymnastics coach, then discovered the world of circus arts, and spent the next seven years upside down.

That was the spark. One day I didn’t know handstands were a possibility; the next, I couldn’t think about anything else.

Not all of my passions arrived this way. Writing was a slow burn — it was something I’d loved to do since I was a kid, but that I didn’t take seriously until my mid-thirties. Jiu-jitsu took nine months of stops and starts before I liked it at all. Even my passion for passion took years to come into focus. I thought I was interested in mastery, then in the spark itself, then in whatever keeps the thing burning after the spark is no longer new. It was all three.

How someone falls in love with their craft is the question I ask in every interview I do for On Fire. Was there an instant click, after which nothing looked the same? Did they know as a kid, lose the thread, and find it again thirty years later? Or did the love accumulate so slowly they can’t name a beginning?

Everyone’s story looks a little different. Underneath, the same patterns keep surfacing — and the most famous one is the least of it. In the roughly one hundred interviews I’ve done so far, the instant click is rarely the whole story. What comes after is murkier: boredom, aversion, years of not knowing what the thing was.

Here are five people looking back at the moment something caught.

It was just before dawn in Redondo Beach, California. Michael Gervais, a fifteen-year-old competitive surfer, was sitting on his board in perfect conditions — glass-clear water, waves a foot overhead — and could only think about everything that might go badly. An older surfer paddled over. “I surf with you every day,” he said. “You’ve got to stop worrying about all the things that could go wrong.” Then he paddled off.

He’d handed Michael half an idea. Michael supplied the rest himself, sitting there waiting for the next set. “I could think about all the things that could go wrong,” he told me, “or I could think about all the things that could go right.”

“If there was a lightning bolt moment, that was it,” he said. That morning he fell in love with what he calls the invisible side of being human.

But the spark didn’t come with instructions. He didn’t know sport and performance psychology was a thing, and it took him years of meandering to find out. When he did, he spent eighteen years in what he called his woodshed: Saturday evenings drilling six minutes of sports psychology into restless teenage basketball players before they were allowed on the court.

That was the apprenticeship. He’d go on to spend the better part of a decade with Pete Carroll’s Seahawks, host the Finding Mastery podcast, and work with Olympic athletes, executives, and astronauts — none of it visible from a gym in Redondo Beach on a Saturday night in 1995.

“Our human potential has not even begun to be expressed,” he told me, a big, boyish grin on his face.

At twenty-five, Dian Killian had no interest in visiting Ireland. Her only real exposure to Irish culture had been the Americanized St. Patrick’s Day: green bagels, green beer, and, as she described to me, less-than-pleasant interactions with celebrating Americans.

But while studying in France with an unused Eurail Pass, she booked a week in Ireland on a whim. The west coast of Ireland took her breath away, but it was the Irish language that captured her. Though she had studied language in college, she had never encountered anything like Irish.

“What I love about Irish is that it changes my way of looking at reality,” Dian said. “It challenges me… it’s this amazing, interconnected world where things are not so linear.”

The language, she learned, has no verb for to have: you do not own a book, a book is at you. Possession is treated as a location rather than a claim.

“I get chills talking about this,” she said. That accidental week became a thirty-year obsession with the Irish language. Today, Dian teaches it and writes about it on her beautiful Substack, The Gaelic Effect: How Irish Language Can Save the World.

Dion Campbell was an artist and bartender in San Francisco who traveled constantly. She loved animals but had never imagined dedicating her life to them. Then, in the early days of the pandemic, she was walking with her family and spotted a sick pigeon huddled on the sidewalk.

She couldn’t walk away. She scooped him up, named him Pete, and found a local wildlife rescue. Pete got the care he needed. Dion got something she hadn’t gone looking for: an entire subculture of pigeon rescue she hadn’t known existed, and the conviction that she belonged in it.

“I can’t just do something a little bit,” she told me, laughing. “I have to do things too much.”

Dion has rescued and placed hundreds of pigeons since she found Pete. The rest of her energy goes to the reputation problem. Pigeons have been “rats with wings” since a 1966 New York parks commissioner said so, a line Woody Allen later made famous. They were also blamed for a meningitis outbreak they didn't cause. She started Be Nice to Pigeons to help change people’s minds about them.

“Now I can’t imagine not doing it,” she said. “Once you know something, you can’t unknow it. It would be like turning a pickle back into a cucumber.”

David Easterbrook was nineteen and living in Montreal when his mother went to visit his aunt in California. The two of them wandered into a bonsai exhibition in San Francisco, and his mother came home with a book by bonsai master Kenji Murata.

“It just totally fascinated me,” David said. He went straight into the woods, dug up a few wild saplings, wrapped them in wire, and drilled drainage holes in clay saucers because there were no bonsai pots to buy in Canada yet.

He’s still at it fifty years later. David spent much of his life as curator of the Montreal Botanical Garden’s legendary bonsai collection, and now runs an Instagram account with more than a million followers.

“Bonsai is like an onion,” he said. “You learn bonsai superficially and you think, ‘Oh, I know a lot about it.’ And then you find out there’s a whole other layer underneath that, where you realize that you haven’t really understood anything. And then when you peel that back, there’s another layer of bonsai that’s even deeper and more profound. There’s no end to bonsai.”

Megan Vaughan Giesbrecht was three when she watched the Magnificent Seven win gold in Atlanta and told her mother, “I want to do that.” By five, she was competing and training up to seven hours a day. She quit at thirteen. Elite gymnastics meant moving away from home, and her family couldn’t afford it. “I never thought I would do gymnastics or handstands ever again,” she told me.

She went to college for exercise biology, got married, and had a daughter. She taught kids acrobatics on the side and sometimes did a handstand with them, but it never occurred to her to dedicate more of her life to it. “It was just a fun memory,” she said.

Years later, in what she describes as “a really not awesome place,” a therapist asked when she’d last been happy. The answer surprised her: when she was a kid, running around the gym doing handstands. His prescription for her depression was to go back to the gym and get upside down.

“I felt stuck for so long,” she said. “And then I thought, ‘You know what? I can do that.’”

The gym she found also happened to host a circus troupe. She trained with them just for fun, then not just for fun, and when they invited her to Paris for a cabaret show, she went. She’s been upside down ever since — performing all over the world in acrobatics shows and teaching handstands to students until one in the morning.

(And yes, I’m one of those students — she’s spent hours teaching me the nerdy, micro details of handstand lines too!)

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The prevailing myth about passion is that it will happen like a lightning bolt. One day, you don’t know something exists. The next, your life is never the same.

Sometimes, it does happen like that. All of these stories have a moment — Michael flipping the question on his surfboard, Megan at three watching the Olympics. The whiteboard did it for me. I didn’t know handstands were a possibility, then I did.

What the myth leaves out is the following week. Michael spent eighteen years in a gym where nobody wanted to hear it. Megan spent thirteen years calling hers a fun memory. I spent years falling on my head.

I've asked a hundred people. Nobody has ever told me that part was a lightning bolt.