In How To Temper Entrepreneur Passion With Reality, Martin Zwilling talks about how entrepreneurs get blinders on without testing their belief and conviction against reality. Passion is bad, he says. I read his article without much passion. It is far too common to see would-be entrepreneurs in love with their ideas and their dreams. For me, it’s the occupational hazard of hanging out in the start-up community. The folklore is brimming with “follow your passion” talk and every narcissist recites it, myself included.
Jonathan Franken, in Liking Is for Cowards. Go for What Hurts, talks about losing yourself in what moves you. Passion is good but obsession is even better! Is he trying to drag us into the world of passion? Why do we advise in one direction for entrepreneurs and a different direction for life?
As if entrepreneurship is separated from life!
In It’s Not About You, David Brooks reconciles the two strands. Indeed, it’s not about you. It’s not about the millions you will make. It’s not about how your family and friends will respect you more. It’s not about what a great idea you have. It’s about passion OK, but not your passion. It’s about the passion you generate outside of you. It’s about the passion you generate in your employees and your customers.
It’s not about you. It’s about how much passion you can generate in your ecosystem. And whether you can be obsessed with creating it. Only one problem remains.
Does anyone know of a way to will oneself into an obsession?
My pennyworth!
I have never been a great one for passion. Never quite understood what it means!
This has not stopped me from acting in ways that I believe Messrs. Zwilling, Frank & Brooks (Sound like a Wall Street firm! beware!) would not have disapproved off.
To me the key word has been ‘commitment’. The trouble with words like passion and belief is that it locates itself entirely in an emotional space – hardly the position from which one can work at things.
I believe that if one is committed to what one is doing – here I use the word committed as a way of working that precludes alternates – then one does the best that we can. This non-emotional position allows you to see what works – and what does not. It allows you to stay in the present moment and do whatever is appropriate at that instant.
Obsession, beliefs and convictions are either rooted in the past or hanging on to the future.
This allowed me to move through an entrepreneurial phase lasting 15 + years and then allowed me to abandon it when it no longer made sense to continue. it allowed me to move on to other professions and abandon them or continue with them.
I go back to your note on your Grandfather back in July 2008. It had stuck in my mind and I went back to it now. I quote
“I knew my Grandfather as one of the most loving and inspirational human beings, and successful. On the success question, family legend was different: he had started a number of businesses in his youth that had all failed. After all those failures in the late-30s and 40s, he got a series of jobs and paid off his debts. Then in the late 50s he struck out on his own again. I guess he was wired for Growth.
He dusted off his educational certifications and opened his Architecture practice in Chandigarh. Chandigarh was just starting to come into its own and he did well.
I won’t dwell on the parallels between his practice and my new thing — it is still evolving and who knows what shape it will take. My key take-away from the article is that after years of avoiding failure, I feel prepared to embrace it.”
I think your grandfather was wired for change and living in the present!
Krishnan
Comment by NJK — June 1, 2011 @ 3:38 am |