Passion of the Work

Blogger and entrepreneur expert Ben Cansocha posted a great feature earlier this month on the fallacies of working with passion. He cited a seemingly contradictory excerpt from Steve Jobs' now famous commencement speech first given at Stanford University and now passed along on the Internet like a prosperity gospel. Here is Ben's post followed by an updated POV:
http://ben.casnocha.com/2010/01/the-contradiction-in-steve-jobs-famous-commencement-speech.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ItsLikeBensBlog+%28Ben+Casnocha%27s+Blog%29

Let's try a long winded question that cuts to the chase: How many people do you know who both love what they do, make lots of money, lead a balanced life and view their work as the primary channel of their "passion?" Is that your final answer?

Here's an updated view on the work with passion adage. Take it from someone who has now seen it from all sides: Personal experience, professionally helping others with similar issues and seeing through the views of everyone else inside the career complex.

Passion only takes things so far in the marketplace. You can be really good at something that you love to do and not receive adequate compensation due to factors out of your control. That's generally when the tough get going and find ways to adapt to meet need, which is always easier said than done. Some suspend passion and find ways to get through the lows of not being able to apply it as fully as originally intended. Consider Walt Disney and his many mini-foibles with animation and theater decades before Disney World ever existed. Others simply re-channel passions in other areas, such as hobbies, causes or ministries. Steve and Jean Case, Bill and Melinda Gates leap to mind here although admittedly those are some real stratospheric surface-oriented examples where passions follow great fortune.

Despite great commercial success, Goliaths such as Jobs have had to toil hard in the lab at times. Most business artisans view working with passion as a continuous series of experiments that may or may not have million dollar outcomes such as IPods or IPads. Taken in this context, maybe working with passion is a lifelong endeavor similar to faith? Who knows. What we do know is that the professional career complex latched onto this one during the go-go days of the Dot Com era. Those days are gone, yet the "work with passion" mystery remains. Beware of anyone who says they have this one figured out. Because they don't. It's simply not a black and white issue as painful as it is to admit.

I once posed the Passion question over a lunch with a prospective client who happened to be a mini-Hollywood mogul at the time. "So what's your passion?" He looked at me like I was crazy. Rephrasing the question, I tried another approach, "what gets you up in the morning?" His response, "I don't know. I've never had trouble getting up in the morning." Sold! Once he gave that response, we knew we had him on the hook.

If anyone would care to debunk this mystery further, please be my guest. Just please leave a few dollars on the blogging pillow.

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