In this video I discuss the practical reason for PASSION!
VIDEO SUMMARY
The reason I’m making this video, is I have noticed a disturbing trend lately. There have been a number of business gurus out there who have been giving talks on Passion. And in these talks their overall message is “Stop looking for your passion.” I find this very disturbing and I wanted to share my perspective on this. If you want to be successful in business, passion really does matter, and there is a very practical reason why.
What these business gurus are saying is that the idea of searching for your passion, is such a hard and stressful demand, that you should give yourself a break and let life work itself out. So I agree with part of this… it is hard. It is stressful. But you need to find your passion. So you should not give yourself a break. You need to go to work and figure out what you want to do with your life.
So here is the practical reason why it is important to find your passion. Once you have identified your passion, it allows you to start saying NO to things. Your life is full of choices. Every day you make a ton of choices. You are making these choices on what to spend your time on. And there is a lot of different things you are going to want to pursue. Part of the problem is we as humans find a lot of different things interesting. Most people end up pursuing all these different areas, but if you know your passion, and you know your life purpose, you can set all those different things aside and focus on your passion. This is why it is so difficult for young people to choose a career. You might find a lot of different subjects interesting: medicine, law, politics, business. But if you split your time between all of them, you will not become skilled at any of them. The goal is to decide what you want your life to be about. So you have to pick one thing , and set everything else aside. And to make that choice, you need to find your passion.
Finding your passion is less about what you are saying YES to, and more about what you are saying NO to. You have to be able to start saying NO to everything in your life besides your passion. Now you don’t have to go to extremes here, but most people don’t cut out anything. They try to do everything and end up doing nothing well. This is really about time management. We all have the same amount of time every day. And you may have heard about the 10,000 hr rule. This is an idea popularized by Malcom Gladwell. This rule says that in order to become a master at something you need to spend 10,000 hrs doing it. You basically need to spend a lot of hours practicing. Well you need to open up a lot of time in order to do that. So if you can say NO to all this other stuff, you suddenly open up all this time where you can master your craft. Since most people don’t do this, you will notice over time, that you will become stronger than your peers in whatever area you’re working towards.
Let’s talk for a moment about why it is so difficult to say NO to things. The whole reason this is even an issue is because people have a really hard time saying NO to things. There are three reasons for this:
- Opportunity cost. When you say NO to growing in a particular area, you are giving up the possibility of receiving benefits from that area. So when you are choosing between two careers, say Accounting and Law, the one you say NO to, you are giving up that earning potential. My point is if you don’t choose one, and master that skill, you won’t make much money in either of them. But it is still difficult to turn away a revenue opportunity.
- Trust. When you say NO to growing in a particular area, that means you are trusting that someone else in your community is going to pick up that skill set. It is always hard to trust other people, especially when you don’t know them. So if you are choosing between accounting and law and you choose accounting, you have to trust that there is a good lawyer out there somewhere when you need a law expert.
- Faith. This takes faith in yourself that you will achieve your dreams. This of course means you are making major life decisions based on things you don’t know. This is also scary. But you need to have faith in order to realize your passion.
The main point is that YES passion is important for the very practical reason that you are making decisions every day on how to spend your time. If you spend more time focusing on your passion and saying NO to other things, you will become more successful.
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Neither Zach De Gregorio or Wolves and Finance Inc. shall be liable for any damages related to information in this video. It is recommended you contact a CPA in your area for business advice.