I’ve been running my own business for 5 years now (wow how time flies) and I’ve been speaking to audiences for 10 years.
One of the things that I realized over the past 5 years is the importance of passion. Having a passion for what you do is in my opinion one of the most important things for any business professional (or really anyone).
I’ve recently become slightly obsessed with Kitchen Nightmares, where Gordon Ramsey goes into different restaurants and tells them why they are failing, and shows them what they need to do differently.
He often uses the phrase “You have no passion for what you’re doing” when talking to owners and chefs.
He is right – they usually have no passion, and it shows. Passion is what drives high standards. Passion is what drives you to work late. Again, and again. Passion is what gets other people excited about something.
Passion is that thing inside us that makes us really deeply want to do something, and do the best job possible at it.
It is the thing that prevents us from sending out a less-than-perfect meal at a restaurant, or keeps us working late as entrepreneurs, or drives our enthusiasm on-stage as a speaker.
The thing about passion is that it is obvious whether or not you have it.
As a professional speaker, I spend a lot of time evaluating other speakers. One of the things that separates the good from the great speakers is personal passion. People can see, feel and hear passion. It shows. If you don’t have it, get it back. Get inspired because it is requited for your success.
Life is too short to do something that you aren’t passionate about, or to let your passion wither and die because of stress, your work environment or your coworkers.
I read a blog post many years ago by Seth Godin. He was on a vacation and was in the lobby catching up on work. He overheard someone passing by saying “look at that guy – he is chained to his work and he can’t even enjoy a vacation.” Seth thought to himself “how unfortunate that most people hate their work so much that they can’t imagine that I enjoy doing some while I’m on a vacation.”
Live your career with passion, and everything will work out.
Just fortunate to stumbled upon this blog after reading some interesting tweets from valuable people and yes I follow her on Twitter couple minutes ago. The thing that kept me reading up to the last word of this post is because I love the topic being discussed here. Passion is truly a must to have by every individual so as to give relevance and effectiveness to work being delivered by such person. Whenever any task carried-out with “passion”, it undoubtedly can affect lives of so many…. those that are being target of such work, or being recipient of it. Moreover, the quality of an outcome to any work done with passion certainly will have a much higher standard, besides a well satisfying fulfillment on the part of the doer of such work. Becoming passionate enough with what we do tremendously lighten a workload in a sense that “love of doing it, is present”… the doers’ dedication, his/her passion.