How Important Is It To Follow Your Passion When Creating A Business?
Do what you love . . .
. . . And as Marsha Sinetar says, “the money will follow.”
Her book is a classic on finding what floats your boat and making a living from that. What if you don’t know what you love? That’s a problem. But not an insurmountable one.
In a story called “The Kiss of Death Marketing” in an issue of an affiliate marketing magazine, the number 1 “kiss of death” is, “Assuming that if you do what you love, the money will follow.” It goes on to say, “Steer clear of gurus who tell you to follow your passions.”
Good thing I’m not a guru, because if there’s no passion driving us toward our goals, what’s the point?
Fredric Lehrman, a prosperity guru, addresses this question in a unique and playful way with what he calls Prosperity Scrabble. To explain it, I’ll give you my own experience.
In 1997, when I was at a career crossroads, I wanted to identify my “right livelihood.” What was in me that would feed my soul? After listening to Prosperity Consciousness, I found a tool to figure it out.
Lehrman recommends doing this as a game with other people. We used this as an assignment in our guy group to report on our experience.
Here are the steps:
- Cut up pieces of paper into approximately one-inch squares
- Write down something you really enjoy doing on each one. This could include mundane things like watching TV. But be thorough and don’t censor your thoughts
- Turn them over so you can’t read them, mix them up and pull out two
- Take item 1 and item 2, seemingly unrelated, and try to envision a business from combining them
If you find a combination that clicks, he says, ask yourself if you’re willing to do it until you make $100. When I was doing this process, two items came to the top:
- Motorcycle riding
- Travel journalism – writing and photography
Pondering those items, and a life-long desire to travel the U.S. by motorcycle, I came up with my all-time favorite business plan. I shopped it all over Atlanta for a year and came very close to getting a major corporation to fund the entire year of travel. Now, years later, because of technology improvements and because of what I’ve learned about doing business online, I don’t need a corporate sponsor.
It’s still a major goal of creating a successful business on the Internet is to take this trip and make the project a reality.
We haven’t yet taken the trip, but we’re getting closer. Prosperity scrabble helped me realize what was important and how to feed my soul.
The rest of this module is about choosing niches in your passion areas (or otherwise) that are worth doing. Pay close attention to these technques.
About David Perdew