I have heard this saying over and over again, "Have you found your passion?" or "when you find your passion, the money will come" really? It seems to me that being passionate about something is all well and good, but the reality is that I don't hire people because they claim to be passionate about what they do. I hire them because I want them to be amazing at what they do and I want them to work hard the job and on themselves.
Google "finding your passion" and you should get about 8,6000,000 results. Apparently, this seems to be the catch phrase of the decade. Go to Amazon.com and look up books on" finding your passion" you should get about 656 results. So what does this prove? That there are a lot of people out there chasing their tails looking for their passion when what they should invest their time in, is working hard at developing themselves.
Now I know what you must be thinking, if you're passionate about what you do, then you are amazing at it... NOT TRUE! I know a lot of people who are passionate about what they do and their performance is dismal! They are just not good at what they do! I've also heard the saying "I'd rather fail at something I love than succeed at something I hate!" this is total B.S.! Loving what you do has no qualitative or quantitative value in the workplace and neither does passion. I don't know anybody who truly cares if their employees love their jobs! I also don't know of anybody who would prefer to fail at anything! The reality is that your customers don't care if you're passionate about your job - so long as you give them amazing service and go above and beyond to help them.
I am amazing at my job and that's why my employers pay me. I've done some consulting jobs over the years, and no one has ever hired me because of my passion! I recently facilitated a workshop on Leadership and a participant said to me during the lunch break, "I really enjoyed your workshop, your words were so inspiring, I can tell how passionate you are about this subject." I politely thanked her but then told her that what she saw up there was the result of years of research, hard work and practice. I am good at what I do, because I work hard at it. That's how you achieve excellence, that's how you become amazing at what you do. She said, "but you make it seem so effortless" I told that's why I work hard to prepare... so that when I'm up there it appears to be effortless. True excellence is always the result of hard work.
I know many of you who are reading this blog totally disagree with me, and that's fine. If you would prefer to continue to believe that finding your passion will somehow lead you to success then go ahead. I certainly won't stop you, I would imagine it's because passion requires very little effort from us and let's face it, mention the word "work" to most people and they go running for the hills. The truth is, hard work and excellence requires almost everything from us and that's why so few of us are amazing at what we do...
