Passion – The Missing Ingredient

It’s been said that you need to have lots of passion for entrepreneurship. Recently in the Money section in The Straits Times, I read Michael Ma, the owner of IndoChine restaurants in Singapore, that you have to have passion or else “you might as well retire”.

I think that’s fine and dandy for someone to say that. It gives a lot of hope and forward promise. Unfortunately, that’s not really a solution. Let’s back up a bit and talk a little about passion and where it comes from.

In my line of work, I see people who have passion and those who have none. It is my job to bring out the passion in these people. It’s a tiring job sometimes, but it also brings out the best in me. Now, I see a pattern here not just in the line of work that I do. There are others who focus on giving and contributing and therefore end up feeling passionate about what they do.

In one of my trainings of teachers, I asked a group of highly enthusiastic and participative primary school teachers why they joined. Most of them said that they had the passion for it except for two teachers. The first was a mild mannered senior teacher, about 60, and another was a younger physical education teacher, who slouched to a 45-degree incline on his chair and quite honestly would have beat any child at lousy attitude and poor behavior.

I asked the PE teacher why he joined the teaching profession if he was so lackadaisical why did he join? Basically, he said he joined because he was unable to find any other job, and the room was silently disappointed.

I turned my attention to the senior teacher, and asked why he became a teacher. He said he lost his job in his late twenties, and had no choice but to find a teaching career. He was an engineer, and was pretty well suited to teach mathematics. However, because he was new to teaching, he was apprehensive about his anticipated experience.

Soon, however, he discovered an amazing thing – that by helping his students, his students provided him the one thing that he was missing in his previous job – recognition. This fueled the passion that gave him a reason to do more than was expected of him in his job. And now, almost 30 years later, he would walk past students on the streets and they would still remember him.

One by one, some of the younger teachers stood up and acknowledged him as an inspiration and a mentor, much to the surprise of that gentleman, who was close to tears when his younger wards told him how much his mentorship and sharing had enabled them in their darkest moments.

I think the essence of passion does not come from being paranoid or being a high achiever. I believe that it is the way in which you affect people. I believe it is the way in which you believe so much in what you do, that you know that others will see you as a role model, that your purpose goes far beyond just the immediate gains of money and wealth.

Entrepreneurs will need to be clear about their purpose and passion. Being passionate also means they have to have dedication and commitment to what they do, but more importantly it is about the dedication and commitment to something that they stand for. Most people spend a lifetime finding their purpose, but that is mainly because they don’t have a properly established method of understanding themselves and reflecting on what they have done and discovering who they are.

The elusive ingredient of passion needs a few things.

• Meaning. Without having some meaning, dedication and desire is nothing more than an agreement.
• Depth. If the meaning doesn’t touch you emotionally in some way, then it won’t translate into actions that are congruent with those emotions. A lot  of people are missing this depth of meaning because they don’t know why they do what they do.
• Impact. I think it follows that when people affect other people positively, there is an experience that resonates beyond the current act. You remember someone who went out of their way to do something for you not for any gain or “key performance indicator”, but because it was intrinsically a win-win

What are you passionate about? Does it have Meaning? Does it have Depth of emotion? Does it Impact others? These questions not only verify the passion you have for what you do, it also reminds those of us who have a waning passion to focus on the reasons why we did what we did in the first place. So, whatever your job is, seek passion. Find in it a reason to love and continue to grow yourself so that your impact can be far greater than where it is, every time.