In Business, Work, and Life: Passion Drives Everything
Do it no matter what. If you believe in it, it is something very honorable. If somebody around you or your family does not understand it, then that’s their problem. But if you do have a passion, an honest passion, just do it.
— Mario Andretti
Passion inspires you, it captivates you, it is what life is about. Passion to develop, to build, to pursue a dream, to create, to prove something — it drives everything. Nothing happens without passion, passion to help, passion to succeed, passion to impress, passion to make a difference. All success is informed by passion. If you’re not passionate about your work, your goals, your tasks — you will not be fulfilled and you will not do great work. No one knows how to get passion, there’s no secret sauce regardless of what anyone says. The best you can do is recognize it and grab it when it is present and rethink everything when it is not. When you find it you’ll know, and you must pursue it. Passion is fleeting, grab it, use it, love it, and when it ends, move on.
No start-up in the history of business ever started without passion. Passion drives vision, inspiration, and motivation in all things, business, work, and life.
It was probably around August of 1995 that I started to play around with one of the early versions of Visual Basic, Microsoft’s tool for building software. I had no programming experience whatsoever, so I went to the local independent bookstore and bought a book on how to program. Tim Berners-Lee had invented the World Wide Web just 6 years earlier, and after 1992 the Web took off. It seemed like everybody, including myself, was ready to jump on the digital bandwagon to find our fortunes in computing and software. I remember buying the programming book, buying a new computer, and setting up space in my basement from where I would re-invent myself as a tech prophet from the midwest. I had taken one or two early programming classes in my undergraduate career after all. Since I was too young to be a pessimist, I set out to be the next Bill Gates.
I really didn’t know what I was doing at the time, but the book took me through the building of some basic software programs. Whether it was fate, luck, or some kind of karma, I happened into the idea of coding a niche software product — which is still being sold — and I plunged into it headfirst. For whatever reason, the trial and error of programming captivated me at the time. I knew what the software needed to do and I would code, fail, code, succeed, move on to the next needed function and code, fail, code, succeed, and repeat. Coding was all I thought about. I’d go to bed thinking about what didn’t work in my software, wake up and code before work. After work, I’d come home and code. It wasn’t that I liked writing software — far from it — but I was passionate about completing the product, shipping it, and being able to quit my job. While I have been passionate about other projects and causes since then, I’ll never forget the passion I had to succeed at the time. I’d work for hours with my eyes in the monitor, and every time I would get a component to work, I was elated. It’s all I thought about.
Every day I coded, learned, coded, failed, and eventually had a piece of software that worked. I printed up mailers (which I’m sure were awful) and sent them to prospective customers. I really had no idea what I was doing, but I did it anyway. I was exhilarated.
It was impossible for a person like myself (a humanities major) to learn to code, set up a website, take credit cards, and start a tech business, a fact I was reminded of by the practical people in my life, but I didn’t know it wasn’t possible — I was blinded by passion, the fairy-dust of entrepreneurs.
I’d check my email and go to the post office every day to check for mailer response cards. For a long time, there were none, then one day, I opened the box, and there was an order! Back then, there was no Google, it was a process of mailers and submitting to search engines such as Yahoo, Alta Vista, and Lycos. Eventually, there was an inquiry here, a response there, and I began selling enough copies to trick myself into believing that I could quit my day job, which I happily did. Although I was barely making enough money to survive — I had passion and believed in what I was doing, so I kept at it as long as I could stay afloat. I never did become the next Bill Gates. Although I continued to make some money on my software, it was too much of a niche industry to survive, and my passion for technology started to wane.
No one knows why passion comes or goes, but you have to grab it and use it when its present and recognize when it’s gone.
As my passion for software faded, I eventually went back to work. I pursued my graduate degree, which I was also passionate about for quite some time. I amassed a mountain of student loan debt, and I knew I would have difficulty finding a well-paying job, but passion once again won over pragmatism, so I kept at it until I had completed my degree. As I entered into higher education, I became passionate about teaching and trying to help others become better informed on how to recognize and pursue their passions. I’ve not yet developed a magic formula for creating passion — nor has anyone else that I have seen.
Self-help resources either provide you with ideas to find your passion or encourage you to pursue your passion, but none of them can create passion — it only comes from within.
At the beginning of every semester, I tell my software story to the students in my business history class and try to get across ideas on how to recognize and leverage their passions. I’m just one story, but when we extrapolate the same idea about passion or being in the zone or finding your flow, it goes farther. In class, I tell the stories of Marie Curie, who was so focused on her studies in 1891 that she often forgot to eat, or of Thomas Edison, who would regularly put in shifts of 60 straight hours on a project he was trying to complete. The story repeats itself again and again.
Steve Jobs said, “You’ve got to find what you love. The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.” What Jobs was saying was that you can’t fake it, you have to feel it. If you don’t have it, you need to rethink what you’re doing.
You cannot be great at anything unless you love what you are doing. Put your time into your passions. Anytime you have to force yourself to do something, it’s time to rethink what you are doing.
Learning about passion has value. When we have to force ourselves to do something, or we can’t get into the flow, or just aren’t enthused about what we are doing, we need to recognize the lack of passion and rethink what we are doing. When you have passion over an idea, you can write a vision statement in 5 minutes, when you’re forced to write, and you’re not feeling it can take weeks to write the same thing. We’ve all been there. Passion drives the speed at which you work and think; it also is a primary ingredient in communications. If you’re not passionate about your idea or cause, it’s impossible to communicate your ideas or vision to others. If you just want to get rich quick without passion for the goal — give up now. Your heart must be the driver, you must be passionate about your ideas, your work, the possibilities, and the results.
Ironically, now my passion is teaching about the importance of passion. College students don’t often have opportunities to think about their own meta-cognition and what makes them whole, school is about getting through the courses needed to get the degree. To many of us in school or in life, labor away without passion for what we do. Yes, it is important to understand that we do have tasks to complete that we don’t enjoy, but it is essential to have a passion in your life as well. Society has taught us that following our dreams is less important than “getting a good job” or acquiring money, but there is emptiness without passion. We learn that passion is risky and impractical, but it is at the same time the most important component to a life well-lived.
