Passion

What excites you? What keeps you awake at night? What do you spend a lot of your time doing? What do like to find out about, experiment with and do?

Passion is the driving force of your success. It helps to outline Your Vision and guides you towards that success. Passion is also the *perfect* antidote to procrastination.

Its really important you have a business that excites you, because when the doing gets tough (and it will), things go wrong and it becomes all-too tempting to pack up shop and quit - passion is the fire that keeps you going to fulfill your vision.

Gary Vaynerchuk talks here about passion (colourfully sometimes...), how it shapes his life and decisions, and how it should influence you too.

Why is Passion So Effective?

Dan Pink wrote a book called "Drive" about the surprising science of motivation. Here he pins down three distinctive characteristics of highly-motivated people, and all of them stem from passion.

Money ≠ Passion

Its a myth. Money is not exciting. What’s exciting is having spent money on cool stuff and having fun with that. As Tim Ferris points out in 4-Hour Work Week, we don’t want to be millionaires - we want to live like millionaires.

Sure, we need to be paid enough to make work worthwhile, but more money does NOT equal more passion. The carrot-and-stick idea goes straight out the window when its your own spare time, your own meager amounts of money and your own risk.

In 4-Hour Work Week, there's a fantastic story of a Mexican fisherman and an American businessman arguing about more money.

The Mexican is already in his paradise - and money can't buy more of that...!

Its rewarding yes, but it won’t make you get off your backside, turn off the TV and go and make something remarkable. Its more of a nice little bi-product. Don’t think of “money” as your primary motivation, or even secondary. Its just not fulfilling day to day. Promise!

What the hell is passion?

Passion is not a question of what you do. “I swim every day.” “I sell used TVs on ebay.” “I spend 5 hours practising singing every single day.”

So what?

The real question we want to know is why. What you’re passionate about is the driving force behind Your Vision, how you try to be successful, and what you do to get there. You need to watch this talk to understand how this becomes so, so important:

So What’s My ‘Passion’?

Identifying your passion, why you are what you are, will empower you to go and achieve the goals you’ve mapped out.

Take a look at this awesome guide on Zen Habits: The Short but Powerful Guide to Finding Your Passion. Its like a checklist - a workbook even - to guide you through figuring out what really makes you tick. Use it. Do the exercises.

Before You Move On, Identify Your Passion

(Or passions) Because without your passion at the forefront of your business, you’re going to forever lack the real motivation, the real drive that you need to make your dreams come true. Without your passion, you’ll never be truly successful.

Simon Sinek and Sunny Bates both talk again about finding your passion and what to do with it.

Love the Process, Or Else...

Be careful though... being passionate about something isn't enough on its own. Love selling cakes, but can't cooking and moving stock around? You're destined for failure; you've got to love the process too.

With no tools, training and startup money, your big dreams are going nowhere. Here, you'll learn how to bring everything all together to make your business happen.

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