Professional Passion
June 17, 2010 · Print This Article
No one likes robots. Sure they may be efficient and they don’t talk back or chuck a duvet day to watch the world cup, but they are just machines. All a machine can do is what it programmed for and once a better machine comes along, it will be replaced. Machines cannot improve themselves (at least not yet). Every leader needs to look at himself once in while and see if he has become a machine – one that does a great job and stops there; with no ability to develop and grow. If you, on objective analysis, find that is happening to you, something is missing in your life. And that is passion.
Let’s not confuse doing well with success. Doing well is meeting expectations. Success is growth. To grow you need a passion to go beyond what is expected of you. An executive without a passion for his job comes across as dull, no matter how efficient he may be. And this concept of being dull is reflected back to you and feeds upon itself until the dullness becomes part of your personality. This personality will impact how well you perform. And worse, it will become part of how others treat you. You do not work in isolation. How you are perceived by others is an important of how successful you are. Not only will you not receive the respect you are due from your peers, you will become an uninspiring leader. The words boring and leader cannot coexist. A manager needs to inspire others to follow and work with him. If you are not inspired yourself, how do you expect to inspire others? No matter how boring and uninspiring your work is, your passion can turn that around, and the way you do it will be an example to others, allowing them to enable their passion. And that will earn you their respect.
Every job has it boring and frustrating moments – its when these get to be a major part of the job that passion dies. Do not accept boredom. Focus on the big picture. If you know where you are going, the boredom and frustration become only hurdles to be overcome, and not the race itself. If your target is not something that inspires you, your target is too easy and you are lazy. Just like a muscle, if your ambition is not exercised and pushed to do more, it will become weak. In fact, it may become so weak that you become incapable of even doing today’s job. If you are 40 today, you will not have the energy you had when you were 20. But that’s not important if your passion for your job pushes you to keep doing better. The passion in the mind and heart will more than compensate for the slowing of the body. If you allow your passion to carry your forward, you will be respected. And once you have respect, you will have opportunities to do more. And as you do and contribute more, you so will your need to continue on this path. And that need is passion.
What do you want in life? Once you know that, focus on how you will achieve your goal. Not if, but how. The “if” will be taken care of by your passion.
Very interesting thoughts – i’m surprised to see that there are no comments.
I think that we don’t like robots because they show us our limits – after all, we created them and if they only can do this or that, it’s because we weren’t capable of making them better.
As for success, i agree that it’s about growth, but i see it more as self development and not so much the traditional meaning of growth (increased sales, profit, etc.)
Finally, passion is probably a term as vague as common sense – we all probably see it in a different way and we rarely agree on what it means. Nowadays, many successful people are not so much passionate about what they do, but rather efficient (which means that they have the ability to get what they want faster and cheaper than others).