Why is passion important?

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Posted in: Blog, Uncategorized by Brian Cauble on April 23, 2009

If you have heard it once, you have heard it a 100 times. You need to be passionate about your business to be successful. Do you really? Why? I guess it depends on your definition of success. You and I both know plenty of people that run fairly successful businesses that don’t love what they do. Their business has good growth and seems to be doing fine. When you talk to them, you can tell that they don’t love what they do.

So what gives? I believe that you can create a business in something you aren’t passionate about and you can be successful, but let me tell you why passion is important.

Starting a business is really, really difficult. It takes your constant time and attention. It will push you to wonder about your abilities and you will work harder and longer than you ever have before. If you truly care about and believe in what you do, you will still get tired. You will still have stress. But it’s different. When you love what you do, it is so much easier to work that late night or weekend. You find yourself constantly thinking about how to improve your marketing, sales, products, and services. You feel satisfied about what your doing. As a matter of fact, you would do it for free. Making money at it just gives you more time to spend doing it. It just makes everything you do a little easier.

There is a second reason that it makes such a difference to be passionate. Have you ever heard of the 10,000 hour rule? It is discussed heavily in many books such as Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers. The thought is that it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert in your field. This means it takes that many hours of pure programming to become an expert software developer. Since there are other things you do every day even when you are working, that is roughly seven years till you are an expert. Do you think that you will get to the expert level faster if you are passionate about what you do? Of course you will. If you don’t care for what you do, you spend as little time possible doing it so that you can do what you care about.

Finally, life is short. Spending your days doing something you care about is possible and achievable. You may have to spend quite a bit of time thinking about what you enjoy doing and how you can translate that into a business. It won’t be easy, but it is worth it. Millions of people do it. Everybody you read about or talk to that is extremely successful has figured out how to take their unique strengths and interests and turn it into their living.

You and I know both know in our heart that passion is important. Now you just have to believe that it is possible and worth it.

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