You can take the blue pill or the red pill. And if you take the blue pill, you can tell yourself whatever you like about anything you like. But there’s a cost. Because the market won’t care. It doesn’t care how great you think you are at something. It cares how great it thinks you are at something.
And it’s much the same with passion and purpose. Too often, they’re blue pills for a red pill world. Not to say they don’t matter. But that if you want your business to be more than a blip on a radar a football field wide, they’re not enough.
If you’re Dell, you have a passion and purpose problem. If you’re Sears, you have a passion and purpose problem. These are business in need of direction with little to go on. But if you’re the person who opened your doors a couple years back and picked up a camera a year before that, you don’t have a passion or purpose problem. You have a solution problem.
Most businesses don’t fail because they lacked passion and lost direction. They fail because they were bad ideas. They fail because they were poorly executed.
The trick isn’t finding passion. It’s harnessing it.
Ask yourself this: Am I solving a problem? If there’s no need out there, then it’s not a problem. If there are a million other people out there doing the same, it’s not much of a need.
The second thing to ask is whether you’re really solving a problem. Lip service is easy. Real service is not.
It’s always tempting to live a blue pill life. The world is full of implied rules that we follow from day to day that tell us what we’re supposed to do and how it all works. We do this, we try that, because we’re supposed to. Except the this and that we try are shorthand we borrow from the next guy, who never really got it to work either. Pretty soon, we have a bunch of assumptions built on a bunch of assumptions, and we think we’re doing it all the best way possible, when we’re really not doing anything at all.
If you strip out the words and you strip out the marketing, a lot of us are doing pretty much the same thing. And not always a same thing that works. Which is the big question: How do I make this work?
Things like passion, purpose, and belief are great and wonderful things. But they’re not guides. They are raw fuel. Unprocessed and unrefined, they won’t take you where you need to go. Fully utilized, they are unstoppable. But you can’t just throw more passion at a problem. The goal isn’t to break through walls. It’s to go around them. Passion fuels progress. But progress fuels passion. So swallow the red pill, look around, and do just what your parents told you. Find a way to do what you do the best you can do it, and be sure to make yourself useful.
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