Passion and Persistence Drive Successful Entrepreneurship
Look at the most successful entrepreneurs you know and you’ll likely discover the overriding traits of passion and persistence. Winners have a deep passion for what they are doing and keep at it until they achieve their goals. This inner drive, rather than the desire to make money, is a critical component of their success. Think of Edison, Jobs, Dell, Hewlett and Packard, who all started out simply doing something they felt compelled to do. They persisted in looking everywhere for solutions to their challenges.
Love what you are doing or your mind will never be open to the connections you can make, and you will cut yourself off from simple solutions you might otherwise have uncovered. Passion helps nurture, strengthen, and grow what may have been gut instinct or “a hunch” into something powerful and profound. It is not blind allegiance to an idea. It’s the willingness to experiment, explore, invest energy, hit a dead end, and then chase a new direction that allows you to refine, revise, alter and grow good ideas. Doing interesting things requires effort. It’s no surprise that without passion, a drive connected to our heart, we often abandon something challenging for simpler, more predictable pursuits.
Success demands connecting to your personal motivations and desires to reach beyond your doubts and outside naysayers. You must recognize mistakes, make revisions, rethink and retool. Steve Jobs said, “About half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.” Passion motivates you and is essential for convincing others about your ideas. Persistence harnesses that passion into work and entrepreneurship.
People may think your new idea is crazy. You may not want to hear what they are saying, but some naysayers could be identifying real problems. You have to learn to listen, be willing to change, reinvent, revise and dig deeply into your idea. Without sustained passion, everything else fades away. You don’t want to end up kicking yourself when someone else devises something similar because they persevered to that one small breakthrough that made it all worthwhile.
Post-it Notes is a now legendary tale. Dr. Spence Silver at 3M unintentionally created weak glue, but he didn’t just throw it away. He wondered what it might be good for, and kept that glue around, periodically asking friends and colleagues whether it could be useful. Years later, his friend, Art Fry, imagined sticky paper for his music notations because his bookmarks kept falling out of the hymnal volumes, and Post-it Notes were born.
