Let me pose a question: Are you passionate about your practice?

I don’t mean “Do you enjoy your job?” I’m not talking about the mere absence of hate, nor even the genuine if all too brief moments of pleasure that we all get from time to time, some more sporadically than others. I mean “Do you feel true passion for what you do?”

Grant Achatz is passionate about cooking, and it shows: a few years back, his Chicago restaurant Alinea was named by Gourmet magazine as the best restaurant in America. The 34-year-old was at the forefront of a new movement in cooking, based on a fusion of chemistry and performance art, and thought nothing of those 17-hour-days he put in.

And then, irony of ironies, he discovered he had cancer. Not just any cancer, mind you: in a sickening display of the cruel random chaos life can bring, Grant found out he had stage 4 tongue cancer.

The treatment ultimately took away his sense of taste. That might be fatal for some chefs, but Grant found a way.

You can read more about Grant’s amazing story here at MSNBC.

But what I want to know now is this: Are you just cooking? Or are you creating legal masterpieces?

I think the key difference is passion.