For a word that’s thrown around a lot these days, passion seems to be largely misunderstood. As I reach a crossroads in my personal and professional life/development, I am in the process of discovering my true passion.
Notice I say “discovering” my passion, not learning my passion. Passion can’t be taught. You either have it or you don’t. You discover you have a passion for a skill or a profession, or you discover you don’t.
Just like you don’t “learn to love” someone, you don’t “learn to have passion.” Passion is like energy. You can’t teach energy. But you can cultivate and harness energy, just as you can do the same with passion.
You can’t force people to be passionate about something they aren’t, whether it’s your brand, or a sport, or technology, or whatever it is that’s your passion. They either are or not. On her blog, Amber Naslund touches on this point very well:
When you’re proud of the company you work for, you work harder without being asked. Your paycheck (so long as it takes care of the rent) isn’t nearly as much a point of contention. You don’t mind a few extra hours. You step outside your job description not as a renegade, but to be helpful and lend your skills where they might be useful.
You talk about your company not because it’s part of your job, but because you’re proud – even prone to bragging – about how much easier it is for you to go to work every day.
That’s nothing you can buy in a compensation and benefits package, nor something you can indoctrinate in an all-company meeting to recite the vision statement.
Pride is intrinsic, and it’s something you’d better be cultivating in your employees through building something worthwhile. They are your wealth, because the engine of business doesn’t chug forward on its own. And in a commoditized world and firehoses of information, the DNA of your business’ humanity can really make all the difference.
In my view, you can replace pride with passion. If you’re truly passionate about what you do (or who you work for), you don’t care about the paycheck (to a certain extent). You’re willing to drop everything and talk about it with other people–and willing to help at a moment’s notice with a problem involving that passion.
Questions for Businesses: Cultivating Passion, Breeding Linchpins
In his incredibly popular book, Linchpin
Awesome, right? Remember this: Passion begets art. Without passion, there is no art.
So if you’re a business, here are questions you should ask yourself:
- Do I want linchpins on my team? (The answer better be “Yes.” But then again, as Godin points out, lots of companies don’t care.)
- How do I cultivate the passion from my employees so they can become linchpins?
- How do I make sure I don’t squash someone’s passion from coming through?
- What do I do if I know that some of my employees don’t have the passion? Do I fire them? Even if they’re solid performers?
- How do my hiring practices ensure I get those who are passionate about my brand?
Taking these questions in mind, I have one more question — which I’d love an answer from you all on:
How do you cultivate passion and breed linchpins?
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