Passion And Entrepreneurship
Passion And Entrepreneurship
by Curt Rosengren
When I think of successful entrepreneurship, the notion of passion inevitably comes to mind. The word immediately brings to mind people so over-the-moon on fire about what they’re doing that they can’t sit still.
In my work—helping people identify their passions and create careers that ignite them—I’ve seen again and again the incredible difference tapping into passion can make. For this essay, I wanted to take a look at how that same passion plays into entrepreneurship, so I started contacting successful entrepreneurs and posing the obvious question: “How important is passion to entrepreneurial success?”
I might as well have asked them, “How important is breathing to success in staying alive?” The unanimous answer was, “I don’t see how success is possible without passion.”
Passion is the essence of the entrepreneurial spirit. It is an entrepreneur’s fuel, providing the drive and inspiration to create something out of nothing while enduring all the risks, uncertainty, and bumps in the road that that entails.
Entrepreneurs’ lives consist of a nonstop mission to communicate their vision and inspire others to support their efforts. As evangelists, salespeople, fundraisers, and cheerleaders they need to breathe life into their vision while enlisting others in their dream. From creating a vision for the future to selling the idea to investors, from attracting high-quality employees to inspiring them to do what nobody thought possible, that passion is a key ingredient.
Passion also plays a key role in their belief that they can achieve the so-called impossible, bouncing back from failure and ignoring the chorus of No that is inevitably part of the entrepreneurial experience.
Robin Wolaner, founder of Parenting magazine and author of Naked In The Boardroom: A Ceo Bares Her Secrets So You Can Transform Your Career, put it succinctly when she said, “To succeed in starting a business you have to suspend disbelief, because the odds are against you. Logic is going to stop you.” Passion, on the other hand, will help you fly.
What Is Passion?
Before I go any further, I want to clarify what I’m talking about when I say passion.
Because it’s not something that is easy to put a finger on, passion often gets cast in a mysterious light. In reality, it’s a very simple concept:
Passion is the energy that comes from bringing more of YOU into what you do.
Simply put, it’s being who you are. It’s taking off the mask and doing what comes naturally. It’s following the flow of what you’re drawn to, what energizes you, and what makes you come alive.
Think of your work as water moving from one place to another. The difference that passion brings to the picture is like the difference between trying to get water up and over a mountain and allowing that water to flow along its natural path in a riverbed.
Can you get the water up and over the mountain? You bet. You can design the pipeline, build the pipeline, and put constant energy into powering the pump that will push the water up and over the mountain. That takes a lot of effort, and when you run out of energy to power the pump, the water stops.
Contrast that with allowing the water to run its natural course. Rather than requiring outside energy for its movement, the water actually gets energy from the fact that it is following that course.
It’s the same thing with passion. By tapping into what comes naturally, what lights you up at a core level, you are tapping into an abundant, renewable source of energy that you can aim at creating success. On top of that, you aren’t wasting energy by focusing on things that drain you.
Harnessing The Power Of Passion
Strangely, in spite of its clear importance, very few entrepreneurs consciously incorporate passion into their decisions, ultimately leaving one of their most valuable assets on their path to success largely to chance. Why don’t more people consciously tap into its power and potential? Partly because there is no clear, commonly defined way to do so.
The approach outlined in this essay has its roots in the nature of each entrepreneur as a unique individual. Few people would argue with the idea that entrepreneurship and passion go hand in hand, but where does it come from? What does it look like? The stereotypical view of what entrepreneurial passion looks like has a lot of basis in reality—the juice that comes from seeing something take shape out of nothing, for example. And yet for each entrepreneur there is room for an individual twist.
Each individual entrepreneur also derives that feeling of passion from different things, and has the potential both to sculpt what the business looks like and to shape a personal role in building and running that business so as to mirror the things that provide energy and excitement. No single job description covers the title of entrepreneur. That’s the great thing about running the show—you get to decide what it looks like. That doesn’t mean that an entrepreneur doesn’t need to do what it takes just to get the job done. It means that all entrepreneurs are presented with scores of choices over the course of developing their businesses, and with an awareness of what lights them up, they can make some of those choices based on what will move them in the direction of passion.
The key question for any entrepreneur shouldn’t be just “Do I have passion?”—it should be “How can I develop my passion even further?”
Topical Passion And Elemental Passion
When most people think of passion, they think in terms of what I call topical passion—being passionate about a specific subject like technology, empowering children, or baseball. For entrepreneurs, it might also be vision behind the company they are building, whether that’s the problem they are solving or the revolution they want to start.
Is building a business based on a topic you feel passionate about a good source of passion? You bet! If you’re on fire about the basic focus of what you are trying to achieve, it can’t help but create positive energy. But it’s not the whole answer. If you are working with subject matter you’re passionate about, but the day-to-day routine consists of activity you loathe, it’s going to lose its luster.
Topical passion can come into play when deciding what kind of company to found, but once that is set in motion it becomes a static piece of the landscape. The real opportunity to tap into your own unique and individual passion on an ongoing basis comes from another source: what I call elemental passion.
Elemental passion comes when the fundamental elements of what lights you up at a core level are present in the work you do. To consciously incorporate elemental passion into your work, all you need to do is dig in to the things you love (work or play!) and ask yourself why you love them.
Passion And The Bottom Line
It’s worth noting that passion doesn’t just have benefits for the individual entrepreneur, it can help the whole business thrive. Studies clearly show that fostering passion and engagement in employees has a significant impact on the corporate bottom line.
Gallup has been on the forefront of measuring the impact of what it calls employee engagement. Engaged employees are those who are performing at the top of their abilities and happy about it. According to statistics that Gallup has drawn from 300,000 companies in its database, 75–80 percent of employees are either “disengaged” or “actively disengaged.”
That’s an enormous waste of potential. Consider Gallup’s estimation of the impact if 100 percent of your employees were fully engaged:
• Your customers would be 70 percent more loyal.
• Your turnover would drop by 70 percent.
• Your profits would jump by 40 percent.
Job satisfaction studies in the United States routinely show job satisfaction ratings of 50–60 percent. But one recent study by Harris Interactive of nearly eight thousand American workers went a step further. What did the researchers find?
• Only 20 percent feel very passionate about their jobs.
• Less than 15 percent agree that they feel strongly energized by their work.
• Only 31 percent (strongly or moderately) believe that their employer inspires the best in them.
Consciously creating an environment where passion is both encouraged and actively developed can yield an enormous competitive advantage. That environment starts at the top.
The Personal Impact Of Passion
Being an entrepreneur is inherently about taking the road less traveled and venturing into the unknown. The biggest sales job in any entrepreneur’s path isn’t selling to customers or investors; it’s internal. Entrepreneurs have to believe in what they are doing—and in their ability to make it happen.
Richard Tait, one of the most passionate people I have ever met, is a great example of the power of that belief. When Richard founded the Seattle-based game company Cranium with Whit Alexander, conventional wisdom would have told them not to do it.
Looking at his decision to defy that conventional wisdom, Richard points to passion as a driving force. “This sense of passion has led me to have the confidence that you just don’t have to take no for an answer. I constantly change the rules. I love to tackle big problems and figure out how to solve them. The game industry is dominated by two massive companies. If you go down the checklist of businesses that a pioneer should try to go into, games—especially my kinds of games—is not one that you would say, ‘Yeah, that’s a great idea. Put everything at risk to go and do that.’ And it takes a lot of confidence and conviction to say, ‘OK, yeah, I’m going to do that.’ Passion gives me the confidence to be a pioneer.”
Richard notes that it wasn’t as easy as it might sound. “When we started the company,” he remembers, “no one but our wives gave us the support to follow our dreams. It was the darkest and bleakest moment of my life in terms of emotional support, just needing someone to give us a thumbs-up and say go for it. Everyone, including the guys from Pictionary, told us we would be crazy to get into this business. But somehow we took the leap, we trusted every bone in our body, and clung on tight. To this day I still look at Whit and know that we took the equivalent of a business free fall and jumped off when everyone told us it could not be done. Passion was our parachute.”
Since Cranium was founded in 1998, the company has met with consistent large-scale success, making history by winning the Toy Industry Association’s Game of the Year award three years running.
There’s something to be said for flying in the face of conventional wisdom.
Overcoming Fear, Uncertainty, And Doubt
When we see people who have accomplished great things, it’s easy to put them on a pedestal and imagine they must have gotten there on a magic carpet ride, with no fears or doubts along the way. The reality is that I’ve never met anyone who did anything great without encountering fear. Erik Weihenmayer, the blind climber who reached the summit of Mount Everest in 2001, puts it this way, “If you think you’re going to do something big and exciting without fear and doubt, and without worrying that you’re making the wrong decision about a hundred times a day, you’re being unrealistic.”
When you’re truly on fire about what you are doing, it overpowers the voices of doubt, both the ones inside your head and the ones belonging to others. Your passion drowns all the voices out so they don’t distract you.
Gary Erickson is the poster child for how passion can trump fear and doubt. In 2000, Erickson was set to become rich with his half of a $120 million sale of the company he founded and co-owned, Clif Bar, (maker of one of the most successful energy bar brands on the market). There was just one problem—he couldn’t do it. It didn’t feel right. He had too much passion for the company, the people, and the product. In a last minute decision Gary walked away from the sale. Not only that, he financed an additional $80 million (including interest) to buy his partner out.
Industry experts predicted failure. Clif Bar’s competitors had been bought by deep-pocketed mega-corporations. Few people thought the company had a chance standing on its own.
Looking back, Gary compares the fear he felt in the months that followed to climbing experiences he’s had that scare him more now in retrospect than when he was climbing. “When I was on that rock, I was so in love with the moment and the passion of being in the mountains. And the passion of that moment outweighed the risk and the fear.” His love for what he was doing at Clif Bar had the same effect. Five years after the almost sale, Clif Bar has grown from a $40 million company to $110 million today.
With passion as your driving force, you find a motivation and drive that helps you make your way over or around fear and doubt. The energy that comes just from doing the work propels you past obstacles, and fears often dwindle in the light of passion.
Tolerating Risk
Risk averse? Forget being an entrepreneur. Risk is an inherent part of the game. The ability to accept it is a key ingredient. Luckily, feeling on fire about what you’re doing makes the risk involved in any new venture easier to tolerate.
Risk is a vital piece of the entrepreneurial equation, not just because of the risk-reward factor but because risk (and failure) brings with it a greater potential for learning. Tahl Raz has a bird’s-eye view of the entrepreneur’s world as a writer for such publications as Fortune, Small Business, and Inc. magazine. He suggests that the knowledge needed for success has less to do with learning a specific set of instructions (the well-documented mechanics of operating a business) and more to do with the subtle insights one gains through experience. Tahl calls this knowledge gained by experience tacit knowledge.
“Tacit knowledge, as opposed to the formal knowledge obtained from books, is the unarticulated rules and information of how to get things done that can only come from doing,” Tahl notes. “And because entrepreneurs don’t work within any preordained systems—they are creating and manifesting an idea within their own heads—that’s precisely the knowledge that proves most important. And the most profound lessons in tacit knowledge, says Tahl, are learned through failures, big and small.
“Entrepreneurs have to have a good relationship with risk, and be willing to engage it.” With risk inevitably comes some failure, and with it learning. “But all that newfound knowledge means little if it is not utilized, which is where passion comes in. It allows entrepreneurs to recover from failure.”
Interestingly, a recent study by Wharton doctoral student Brian Wu asserts that entrepreneurs aren’t actually more tolerant of risk than the rest of the population—they simply have an inflated belief in themselves. They believe that they have a greater chance than most of succeeding. Thinking back to the discussion about the impact of passion on confidence, that makes a lot of sense. Of course, that also means entrepreneurs face a danger of deluding themselves and taking foolish risks, so passion must be balanced with logic and good judgment.
Persistence And Perseverance
The road to success in the business world is littered with the wreckage of failures whose sponsors simply gave up too soon. An entrepreneur’s path is almost guaranteed to be bumpy—even hair-raising at times. It’s easy to get disheartened when things get challenging. It’s easy to give up when things don’t unfold as planned or grow as quickly as anticipated.
Passion can bring a relentless stubbornness to the picture that won’t let you quit. It can be the driving force of dogged determination, encouraging you to grab hold and not let go until you’ve succeeded.
It is a source of motivation for the long term, a vital element in persistence. Passion generates an intrinsic motivation that can’t be duplicated by external rewards alone. As Gary Erickson puts it, “If all we were trying to do was make a buck here, I wouldn’t be very passionate about that. And I don’t think our people would. That story gets old really fast. In every company I’ve seen that’s chasing the dollar, at some point people just lose their passion for it. Life is more than just money. We all have to have money to live. We all need to pay our bills and eat. But at some point the excessive drive for more and more becomes a dead end, and people lose passion if that’s all they’re chasing.”
Selling The Dream
Entrepreneurs may be at the helm, but they don’t travel alone. Their fire for what they are setting out to do is vital for enlisting others in supporting the dream. As Alex Knight, a management consultant who spent many years as a venture capitalist, puts it, “Passion’s important—particularly the ability to infect others with the entrepreneur’s passion. Building something new and great is a difficult, irrational task. Passion is what gets people over the irrationality of what they’re trying to do.”
Entrepreneurs need to communicate an intangible energy as much as the actual substance of what they have to say. Their words can be eloquent, polished, and refined, but without energy your impact is lost.
For all the care we put into choosing just the right words to convince others, in reality they are only part of the package. Both body language and how we say those words play a large role in how they will be received. With passion as the driving force, your message naturally shines through in a much bigger way.
Passion And Investors
Passion is a must when pitching to investors. Yes, you need a great idea with a substantial upside and great people to make it happen, but it’s passion that sucks them into the excitement of what you’re doing.
Janis Machala, a management consultant who focuses on early stage ventures, has seen dozens of companies go through both successful and unsuccessful fundraising efforts. In her view, passion plays an enormous role, especially in the early stages of a company’s life. “Investors are sharing in a dream,” says Janis. “They have to believe the money will be well used against insurmountable odds—and there are always insurmountable odds. In the early stage it really is the dream you’re selling.”
She has seen an entrepreneur’s passion (or lack of it) be the key to getting funding or not. “I’ve seen so many companies with a great story struggle to get funding because their founder doesn’t communicate that willingness to walk over hot coals to make the dream happen.”
Janis points out that emotions play a role in investment decisions, particularly with angel investors. “Especially if they have been entrepreneurs,” she says, “they get caught up in the emotional component. They want to be part of that dream.”
She also highlights how passion indirectly paves the way for funding success. “Passion can attract others to the dream. Advisers, board members, co-founders. People you look at and say, ‘How did they get that person involved with them?!’ Part of an investor’s decision is based on who else is involved.”
Mike O’Donnell, president of StartUPbiz and founder of several start up companies that were successfully grown and sold, relates his own experience with looking for funding. “I’ve raised a lot of money, both for my own ventures and other people’s,” says Mike, “and I can tell you, passion is the single most crucial attribute the entrepreneur can have. In every instance, the investor said, ‘I was moved by your enthusiasm. I was moved by your conviction. You made a believer out of me.’ And that’s what gets them to want to be involved in the deal. It’s not necessarily the plan, or the size of the opportunity. They all justify it based on those other factors, but the thing that hooks them is the entrepreneur’s passion, or conviction, or enthusiasm. That’s what moves people. Money does not move people. It just doesn’t.”
Mike stresses that passion can’t be manufactured, it has to be authentic. “It can’t be hyped,” he says. “People spot hype like crazy. They can spot false passion. They know when it’s B.S., and they know when it’s real.” But if it’s real, he says, “it moves through the room. It’s contagious. It’s exciting to see.”
Potential Partners
As an entrepreneur, your odds of having ready access to everything you need to make it happen are next to nil. Partnerships with larger, established companies can be a great way to get access to what you need to make the dream a reality. Whether it is for access to a distribution network, expertise, manufacturing abilities, marketing clout, or even simple credibility, smart partnering can help take the dream to the next level.
For the little guy just starting out, getting the attention of established companies and finding a reason for them to partner with you can seem like an insurmountable obstacle. One of the factors that can work in the upstart’s favor is passion.
When Kevin Salwen and Anita Sharpe, both Wall Street Journal veterans, started the new magazine Worthwhile, they knew that distribution was going to be a vital part of making it fly. “If you don’t have good distribution,” says Kevin, “you’re not going to get the circulation you need.” They also knew what the Big Four newsstand distributors were likely to tell them: “We don’t do launches.” Still, they were determined to try.
They went to each of the Big Four, fully expecting that none of them would say yes, and made impassioned pitches. Three of them did say no, telling them to come back when they were bigger, but one, Warner Publishing, said yes. Kevin recalls, “They said, ‘The concept is good, and the passion is great. We’re going to take a risk with you.’” That risk started to pay off right from the beginning. The first issue of Worthwhile had a higher national sell-through than the average of the top twenty-five magazines.
Rajesh Jain founded India’s first Internet portal, IndiaWorld, and sold it for US$115 million. On his blog, he looks back at the early days and reminisces, “As I went and met various content providers, it was this passion which helped me make them see the future of the Internet and see me as someone who was just the perfect partner. For those brief moments size mattered little. It was one person to another person. It was one entrepreneur to another entrepreneur. Making people feel that they can make a bet on the person across the table, however audacious the idea, is what passion can do.”
Passion alone won’t do the trick, of course. But it will definitely work in the entrepreneur’s favor.
Employees
Most entrepreneurs don’t start with a bankroll to dangle in front of prospective employees, but that electric vibe—what people feel when they see entrepreneurs on fire about an idea and what they’re doing to make that idea a reality—inspires a strong desire to be part of that dream.
Gary Erickson looks back at the early days of Clif Bar and shakes his head in wonder that great people were drawn to work there. Thinking of one of the earliest employees, he reminisces:
Our desks were in a cold warehouse where, when it rained in the winter, the water would flood in and we would have to move things around. We had these little heaters that you’d plug in that you’d electrocute yourself if you weren’t careful. Thinking back, why would he want to work for us? What was it? I think there was this grassroots connection with what we were doing. He got it. He saw something. He saw that it was different. That we were scrappy. That there was some energy going on in that warehouse, that little 1500-foot-square warehouse, that was electric.
It wasn’t the reality that engaged people, it was the energy and the possibility that people saw.
There was definitely a passionate draw toward the company, and when they walked into the little office, they were like, “Whoa, this is happening! This is going somewhere!” It’s like a van of hippies coming by, and going, “I don’t know where you’re going, but I want to get in there.” That’s what it felt like in the early days.
Not only does passion draw employees in, it also has the potential to inspire them to go above and beyond. That intense belief coming from the leadership is contagious; it can ignite a similar belief and commitment in employees working toward that vision.
Gary Erickson’s experience at Clif Bar is a great example. In 2000, when Gary pulled out of selling the company and took the helm of the demoralized, faltering company, industry experts were skeptical about the company’s chances for success. And, at first, so were Clif Bar’s employees. Gary describes the scenario:
I walk in and I’m on fire, and these guys are in a lifeboat trying to paddle to shore. And the thing that saved us was passion. It wasn’t, “Here, I’m going to give you a list of how we’re going to make it. If we do this and this . . . “ Because they didn’t believe it. They didn’t think we could make it without either selling to a company or getting some capital. Now I’m telling them not only are we going to make it, we have this big debt to pay off too, and I’m not taking any investors to pay off the debt. We’re going to make the money to pay this debt off.
I think people saw it in my eyes. I said, “If you want to be on this ship, let’s go. If you don’t, get off. I’ll find people that want to give this a shot.” And everybody stayed.
Five years later, we grew from $40 million to $110 million now. We’re more than halfway to paying off the debt. People were telling me in the days and weeks after I took the company off the market that they didn’t know if they could rally again. And I was incredibly passionate about this company. I was putting it all on the line, and they knew it. I find it amazing how much that emotion, and that drive, and that passion turned people around, and we rocked!
Remember the statistics I talked about under “Passion and the Bottom Line”? It’s all about creating a culture where passion can take root and grow, and any company’s culture starts at the top.
The Balancing Act
Don’t get me wrong. Passion isn’t an entrepreneurial panacea. Not only does passion need to be coupled with a good idea, it also needs to be coupled with business acumen and the ability to implement. Without that, passion is like a fire hose with nobody holding on to direct the flow—blasting water in all directions with lots of energy but no real results.
At the end of the day, either the people with fire and vision need to possess that business orientation, or they need to bring others in who do—and then be willing to share the power and control.
Ideally, the keepers of the passion and the keepers of the logic have a symbiotic relationship that allows a company to thrive. As Lee Travis points out, “It’s good to have a balance. You get too many entrepreneurs together and you’ll probably save the world in twenty minutes. And then you need a bunch of logic-minded people to tell you how it can’t be done. Somewhere in the middle lies the truth.”
One way to make sure those blue-sky tendencies don’t get out of control is to make a conscious habit of doing a reality check with the people around you. Mike Apgar, founder and CEO of the broadband Internet company Speakeasy, describes his approach. “I have a lot of ideas. And they’re not always good,” he says with a chuckle. “There are people I use as a litmus test. Because of who they are and how they look at the world, I might trust their reaction to a given perspective of my idea, not necessarily the whole idea. Sometimes it’s a room of eight people and I’ve got my full crew there vetting an idea. I’ll look at each one for a response. I don’t need everybody to agree, I just need certain individuals to give me a positive response on the aspect I trust them to understand and judge.”
Mike also turns to the light of reality that numbers can give. “I tend to be an idea person. I like creative thinking. But then my very next thing I do is to apply a rigorous process to run those ideas through business modeling. And the most effective tool for me is to put the numbers into an Excel spreadsheet and be extremely conservative.”
Finally, you need an ability to focus on the right things. Looking back on her entrepreneurial experience, Robin Wolaner of Parenting magazine talks about the endless possibilities an entrepreneur encounters. “Focus is absolutely important. I don’t think you get it done without it. There’s never enough time to focus on everything in a start up, so you need a way to focus on what’s really important and not get distracted by the stuff that isn’t.”
Identify Your Passion Core
Earlier in this essay, I defined passion as the energy that comes from bringing more of YOU into what you do. So what exactly does that mean? How do you bring “more of you” into what you do? This is where the idea of elemental passion comes into play.
By distilling your passion into basic elements, you can consciously and systematically make choices which will bring that feeling of passion into what you do and keep it there. The concept is simple; if the elements you have identified are present in the work you do, you will likely feel on fire. If they’re not, you will likely feel disconnected and unmotivated.
In my work of helping people identify and create careers that light them up, I have developed a model I call the Occupational Adventure Guide to help simplify the process. The model is based on the paradigm that your career is a journey. At the heart of that model is the passion core, the internal compass that points the way toward a passion
rich career path.
Because our culture focuses so heavily on action and results, most people don’t have a very well developed internal compass. They don’t know what lights them up at a core level, what feels truly meaningful and gives them energy. So they turn to an externally generated compass to tell them what direction to go. Unfortunately, that external compass often has nothing to do with what makes them feel energized and engaged.
Elemental passion is the passion that comes from doing something that is rich in the elements that form your unique passion core.
Identifying your passion core gives you a way to consciously bring elemental passion into the picture. It takes a distinctly heart-focused concept—passion—and puts it into a format the brain can wrap itself around and understand.
Again, the idea is simple. It’s about going beyond an awareness of the things you love doing and identifying the underlying characteristics of why you love doing them. You and I can both say, “I love [something]”—I love travel, for example—and odds are good we’re speaking two completely different languages. You might love travel because of X, Y, and Z, while I might love it because of A, B, and C.
Make a list of things you love doing. When you’ve made the list, pick one and start asking, “Why?” Why do I enjoy this so much? Why is it so much fun, so meaningful and so fulfilling? Typically you will come up with a handful of reasons. For each of those reasons, ask why again. Think of it as a reverse engineering process, peeling back the layers and identifying underlying characteristics. Inevitably, as you continue doing that for multiple things from your list, similar characteristics keep bubbling to the surface.
For example, I love travel photography. Why? Well, part of it is because it’s about seeing new things. Why is that so appealing? Because there’s an element of exploration and discovery to it. And why is that so much fun? Because something new is always just around the corner. And why is that important? It’s the stimulation of the new. Truth be told, I have the attention span of a gnat, and the things that keep me interested and engaged tend to have frequent little discoveries along the way. When I look back on what I have really loved doing over the course of my life, work or play, 95 percent of it has had a strong element of exploration and discovery to it.
One word of caution, it’s easy to stop too soon and miss out on many of the insights you could get if you kept digging. Challenge yourself to go down four or five layers of asking, “Why?”
Remember that the items on the list of things you love don’t need to be work related, just things that light you up. The very first time I did this exercise with a client, the first thing he wanted to explore was the Skip Barber Racing School, which is one of those programs where you spend a weekend learning how to drive really fast around a track. My immediate reaction was, “Oh no! Shot down in flames right out of the gate! What are we possibly going to get that’s relevant to his career out of looking at a racing school?” We ended up digging into that for a good hour, and there was an incredible amount of information there that applied to what lit him up in his professional career.
Putting It to Use
No single definition covers what it means to be an entrepreneur, and no single path presents itself for an entrepreneur to take. When you understand your passion core—those characteristics that are the underlying pieces of the things that light you up—you have a tool you can use to make decisions that consciously bring passion into the picture. If you haven’t yet started a business, you can use it to help you identify both the business that’s right for you and the way you want to approach it. You can tailor your approach to the company and your role in it.
Decide What Kind Of Entrepreneur You Are
When you have a better understanding of what lights you up at a core level, you can better evaluate what kind of entrepreneurship is right for you. Entrepreneurship can take a variety of shapes and forms, but to make it easy, I’ll break it into two main categories, high growth and lifestyle.
We live in a culture where the focus is on betterbiggerfaster. As a result, we tend to think of an entrepreneurial venture in terms of creating a company that will grow and keep on growing. Scalable is the buzzword those in the know like to use. From the slick pages of business magazines to the costly seats in business school classrooms, high growth entrepreneurship is what we are taught to pursue if we want to be entrepreneurs.
But is that for you? Maybe, maybe not. Do you get a charge out of building something out of nothing? Tackling the impossible? Watching something grow (and grow, and grow)? Maybe the high growth version is for you.
On the other hand, if your interest lies purely in creating a business to suit yourself, you could be lifestyle entrepreneur material. This kind of entrepreneurship is focused less on maximizing revenue and more on creating the life the entrepreneur wants to live. Such entrepreneurs generally have few employees—and no designs on building an empire (I fall into this category). They can certainly be financially successful, but they typically aren’t in it for the money.
Open just about any business magazine, and you will find plenty of examples of the up-and-coming high growth entrepreneur. The concept needs no further elaboration. Lifestyle entrepreneurship, on the other hand, has until recently gotten little attention. I’d like to point to a great example of a lifestyle entrepreneur, and how she used her awareness of what lights her up at a core level to envision and create her business.
Suzie Goldsher found herself feeling burned-out and depleted after leaving a successful marketing career with a regional grocery store chain. In the process of trying to regain her energy and figure out where to go next, Suzie hired a personal coach and worked with a variety of alternative healers. The change that the healing work has brought to her life is having a profound impact. “For the first time in my life, I feel like I’m thriving,” she says. “There’s a sense of joy, comfort, and peace.” She looked around and, realizing that the people who had helped her so much were in dire need of marketing help—which just happened to be her area of expertise—she began to see a glimmer of opportunity.
At the same time, her work with a coach gave her focus on what she really wanted. “It was absolutely critical because of the clarity it gave me. Once I had that clarity, I carefully sculpted a business that would express my values and be a place where I could work with like-minded people.” She saw the opportunity to blend her marketing knowledge, a lifelong gift for building community, and her desire to support the growth of alternative healers. The result is her company, Best Life Services.
Focus On What Brings You Passion
Everyone I talked to as I researched this essay agreed on the importance of focusing on what lights you up. Some gravitated to it intuitively; others learned it the hard way.
Over the course of his career, Dave Herbig, CEO of the Seattle-based start-up Badge Magic, has taken on a variety of entrepreneurial ventures. After a stint as the COO of a company that he helped go public, Dave left to look for new opportunities. He started looking at entrepreneurial possibilities, but somehow the fire had dwindled.
As he tried to figure out where the fire had gone, Dave looked back at how things had unfolded in the past and realized that he had taken too much responsibility for everything. He began exploring where his elemental passion came from and, as he did, saw how activities that he disliked and that drained his energy had taken up far too much of his time.
At the same time as he was taking steps to identify the parts of being an entrepreneur that really lit him up, Dave identified an opportunity and launched his new company. Badge Magic offers a product for easily fastening cloth badges to clothing. The company started with the Boy Scouts and has been expanding steadily ever since.
Dave was able to put his finger on the things that energized him and those that sucked him dry. Then he started building his business while maximizing the activities that energized him and minimizing those that left him feeling fustrated and drained. In this way, he has been able to focus on what comes most naturally to him.
“If you’re doing what you love, you’re you, and that’s where flow happens,” says Dave. “I think about that all the time. There’s a constant awareness of where the fuel comes from. I focus on the parts that I do best, and look for ways to get rid of the things that get in the way. I’ve been able to tailor my entrepreneurial experience to how I function best.” The result is more productive, high-energy time spent on building the business.
Mike O’Donnell of StartUPbiz regrets not having made his decisions from the core earlier. He ultimately realized that “the title on my business card was wrong,” an affliction he sees affecting many young entrepreneurs.
Early on, I misread myself and my motivation because I was buying into the popular culture about what an entrepreneur is and what an entrepreneur does. And I find this in a lot of young entrepreneurs—“I’m starting this thing. I’ve got to be CEO.” As I matured and really thought about what energizes me, I realized I hate being CEO.
If you just check your ego, about this title and what society puts on it, if you take that out of the equation, you can get to the essence of where you live. Where your center is. And my center is not in being CEO. I thought it was, because that’s what I was taught it was. But my center is really in being the Chief Evangelist, and pulling all the pieces together and lighting everybody else up. I’m really good at raising the money, firing up the investors. I’m really good at bringing in the people who are going to build certain pieces and maintain them. I’m really good at turning on the first customers because I’m passionate about it, but I’m not really good about being the guy who’s having to manage everybody and write the checks every month.
Had he known what he knows now, Mike would have done things differently. “I probably would have tried to identify the maintainer,” he says. “The Harvard MBA guy or woman who is really good and gets off on that part of the business. But at the time my ego wouldn’t let me be called anything except for CEO.”
His advice to other entrepreneurs? “Stick to what you’re good at and what you love, even though society and ego and expectations and investors and all those other things revolving around are telling you you’ve got to do these other things as well, you don’t necessarily have to buy into that.”
Sculpt Your Existing Entrepreneurial Role
You can use your understanding of your passion core to bring more passion into the picture to ensure that you stay energized and engaged for the long term. Nothing is static. Things always have room to shift and change. Once you can put your finger on the source of your elemental passion, you can consciously begin to make decisions that will lead you in that direction.
Take a look at each of the passion elements you have identified in creating your passion core. Where does it match up with what you are doing in your day-to-day role with the company? What can you do to bring more of that into what you do? Where is your day-to-day activity out of alignment? What can you do to change that?
Avoid Burnout
No doubt about it, being an entrepreneur is hard work. It takes time and commitment to achieve success. The last thing you want is a feeling of burnout getting in your way.
Passion is a kind of renewable resource. Doing the work gives you passion, which in turn gives you more energy to do the work. It creates a positive cycle. By consciously integrating passion into your approach to entrepreneurship—and your life in general—you can tap into a renewable resource that keeps you energized and engaged.
That idea is as applicable to your life outside work as it is at the office. The decisions you make about how you spend your time outside the office can either energize or drain you as well.
Dave Herbig came up with a great approach to make sure he was getting energy from all corners of his life. At one point, he realized that he had been so focused on his entrepreneurial efforts that he had stopped doing things in his outside life that energized him. He was no longer doing anything that made him feel “juiced.” To counter that, and be sure that he was building the energy of passion into his life as much as possible, Dave created what he calls a “juice menu.” He made a list of activities that he really loves doing and made a commitment to pick one thing from the juice menu each day and do it.
Make A Habit Of Listening To Yourself
If there is one thing you can do to tap into the full potential of passion, it’s making a habit of actively listening to yourself and acting on what you hear. You are the single best expert in what energizes you and leaves you feeling engaged. The minute you start making decisions based on anything other than what lights you up at a core level, you risk veering off the path.
In this culture, we’re not conditioned to listen to our gut, our intuition, but time and again I’ve seen people hurl themselves headlong down the wrong path by basing their decisions on external considerations rather than on what was right for them at the heart of the matter.
Robin Wolaner found that out the hard way. The founder of Parenting magazine says that the worst decision in her career came when she let ego rule her decision to accept an opportunity as CEO of Sunset magazine after Time Inc. bought Parenting. She grappled with the decision and ultimately took the job. Looking back now, she realizes that if she had made a list of pros and cons when considering the choice, even the items in the positive column would all have been externally based and ego driven (things like higher visibility, bigger company to run), having nothing to do with what really made her happy. She ended up being miserable in the job. Had she consciously asked herself, “Will this make me happy, or am I making this decision based on external factors,” she would have avoided that.
Find a way to listen to yourself. Journal. Find someone who will really listen and not just spout their own vision of what you “should” do. Meditate. Hire a coach. The more you can slow down and listen to yourself, the better your decisions are going to be.
Reality Check
In an ideal world, the work we do would be all passion, all the time. But the reality is that there will always be parts of our work that we don’t enjoy. As Lee Travis says, “There’s probably 20–30 percent of my time that gets dragged into stuff I don’t like, and that’s just part of being the CEO of the company. But the fact that I get 70 percent of my time doing the stuff I really like, that’s what makes me get out of bed and run in here first thing and get crankin’.”
The key is to consciously make decisions to maximize what lights you up and minimize what doesn’t. Lee observes, “If you’re an entrepreneur and you’re a Type A control freak, then you have a tendency to micromanage and want to control the details yourself. But then you have an internal conflict going on between what you want to do and what you are doing. You want to do all these passionate things, but you keep doing all these things you don’t like to do because you have to be the control freak. I hear a lot of entrepreneurs complain about the stuff they don’t want to do, but then they won’t let go of it. And so it creates an internal conflict.”
Here’s a simple idea that can pay off in spades. Take a look at your role as an entrepreneur and ask yourself two questions. “What do I love about what I do?” and, “What do I dislike?” Keep it somewhere that you will see it regularly. Make it a habit to look for ways you can do more of the former and less of the latter. Slowly, over time, the percentage of your day dedicated to what you love will increase, and the percentage spent on what you don’t will be whittled away.
To both succeed as a business and keep that passion alive, you may need to give up some of the pie. Lee Travis looks at it this way. “A lot of entrepreneurs go out of business because they ignore the necessary but boring things, and that’s where things like partnerships make sense, or key employees, or stocks. Because as an entrepreneur I would rather give up something, not have to do the part I don’t want to do, and grow the company to be that much bigger. Meaning,” he adds with a laugh, “I’d rather own a smaller piece of a bigger pie than 100 percent of the small pie and have to do accounting.”
Next Steps
Ultimately, passion comes from you, and no one else. At the end of the day, tapping into its potential is about answering the question, “What is going to make me feel energized, alive, and engaged?” By understanding that, and making your decisions and choosing your path accordingly, you can consciously tap into that energy to fuel your entrepreneurial success.
So what now? Here are some steps to get you going:
These are just a few of the next steps you should take. For a complete list visit www.astroprojects.com/morespace/curt.