May 2007 Passion, Perseverance, and a Limitless Future
We’ve been discussing passion as it relates to success in business in the last few months. How would you define passion and how does passion relate to the persevering attitude necessary for lasting success?
The key question: What motivates us as businesspeople? If we are working only for money, we are working for the wrong reason. Money may flow and it should be the result of our work, but our motivation has to be other than money, or we are not really passionate. My experience has been that money does not by itself bring on a passionate devotion to work. And money, in and of itself, will not provide the staying power needed to develop a persevering attitude.
True passion is found in those businesspeople who are motivated by the inner satisfaction that they get from their work.
Earlier in our discussion, we might have given the impression that work is always about money. To clarify, money plays a huge part in the description of success, but success is not really about money. Success is about self-satisfaction.
If it were only about money, then when the money is in short supply (as it inevitably is at one time or another on everyone’s path), a businessperson will lose momentum. However, a businessperson who works for inner satisfaction will have the staying power to sustain the effort even when the financial rewards are not forthcoming.
Some passionate entrepreneurs grow their business, gain lots of positive peer recognition, and work hard, but don’t attain the significant success that I am promoting because they don’t add the planning, measuring and adjustments necessary. For sure, proper motivation, passion, and a persevering attitude are prerequisites, but so are an attention to the details, intelligent selection of metrics, and diligence in measuring results and making adjustments.
Everyone runs into roadblocks. Everyone bumps into surprises. Everyone has difficulty. Everyone in the position of ownership runs low on revenue at one time or another. It’s having a persevering attitude that pulls businesspeople through.
A persevering attitude comes from the combination of loving our work and having the will to sacrifice and work harder than most of our employees and all of our competitors.
One of my competitors, Walter Williams, shed light on this one day when he said, “Ron, the reason you are successful is because you keep shooting the gun. Everybody else shoots the gun and then they lay it down and take off for a month or two.” He was alluding to the fact that I work as if there are no limits to what I can do in my business. My motivation comes from the inner satisfaction I get from a job well done. The choice to be an entrepreneur can be a lonely one, but it is also one where we choose to see the world as having no limits and to work at what we are most passionate about.
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Remember, only you can make BUSINESS GREAT!
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