Passionate people make great entrepreneurs while hard working people make great employees.
If you were asked today, which is better, a hard work ethic or passion? What would your response be?
I am not going to assume your answer, but I'll tell you this, it was only this year that I understood the advantages of passion over a hard work ethic. Obviously, I needn't reiterate that a hard work ethic
is absolutely important in life. However when it comes to success passion is key.
If you plan to be successful at anything, you have to be passionate about whatever that thing is. Just working hard without passion will be an exercise in futility. Eventually you will give out... the human body can only take so much abuse.
Case in point, back in my undergrad years, my buddy and I decided to create a website that would allow students to trade used textbooks with other students, thereby avoiding reselling back to bookstores at a massive loss. The idea was pretty solid in my opinion. The fact that every student was aware that the bookstores were ripping them off, made a strong case for the need of our website. Anyway, being two inexperienced creatures, we decided to pick up PHP coding books and figure out what we needed to create a site of this nature. We managed to crank out a site in about a month or two. Then came the difficult part. Getting people to use the site. I gotta tell ya, marketing is really difficult. We had a hard time getting these skeptical students to join our site and list their used items for sales. We did manage to get some people using them. Only 400+ students out of 24,000 :( .
It became pretty obvious that coding the site wasn't going to be the most challenging stage of the pipeline. Unfortunately my buddy/partner in crime was starting to lose steam. I remember the exact words he used when he bailed out; "I feel like I am beating a dead horse. I am done with this crap. You can continue if you want. I am out. See ya.". I did the best I could on my own till I succumbed to the discouraging lack of progress in adoption.
Moral of that story is my friend and I lacked the passion for that project. We were both very hard workers that's for sure. We literally learned a new language just to create the site. However we were very interested in the superficial reward of the project. The lack of passion made us very vulnerable to the usual obstacles that one encounters when trying to start a modest venture. Strong cases for passion leading to success can be found in many success stories. Consider the clothing line Ugmonk by Jeff Sheldon. Jeff Sheldon, always had a love for typography and minimal design. Overtime what was more of an exercise in passion, gradually became a full-blown business. Now Ugmonk is a well-known clothing line that's has made cameos in shows and movies. Jeff's success was all based on his strong passion in typography. This passion definitely provided him with the stamina he needed to push past the inevitable obstacles that faces all startups.
When someone is passionate about what they do, they do things without the notion of reward. They do it purely for the enjoyment. As a result, profit or no profit, they are happy. And that's really imperative. Hard workers will always do things with a linear attitude. Most hard workers will work under the philosophy that their hard work will be rewarded. Passionate people on the hand will engage in their passion because they already feel rewarded. Passionate people will always have a stronger fortitude for hardship since they are immune to the obstacles that will eventually conquer reward seeking hard workers. And this is why passionate people always make great entrepreneurs while hard workers make great employees.
