Editor’s note: This article was first published in March 2011. The Nueva Rumasa example refers to the group’s crisis in early 2011 and the promissory notes it had sold to the public.
Yes, I know: after telling you so many times that whatever you do in life, you should do it with passion (even Donald Trump advises us to follow our passion), it turns out that passion can be one of the causes of business failure if you don’t manage to control it, or at least keep it separate from common sense.
We’ve said before that businesses should be seen for what they are, not as something emotional. Passion can steer you towards a business that gives you no return at all. You may love paper books, but you need to analyse the market coldly to see whether, now that the internet has arrived, paper books will still have a broad market. Apply that to any product and any situation.
On the other hand, passion makes us ignore some advice. I’m the first to say that nobody should steal your dreams, and that if you have a dream you shouldn’t give up on it just because someone tells you it can’t be done, simply because they weren’t able to do it themselves. But it’s also true that sometimes those people see what you can’t, because you’re blinded by passion.
It’s like when someone tells you that a certain man or woman isn’t right for you, but you’re so in love that you don’t even hear the advice. In the end, you realise those people were right and you refused to listen. Well, exactly the same can happen in business.
That’s why I always recommend listening to everyone. Even if you’re not going to base your decision on other people’s advice and opinions, at least take careful note of them and study them closely.
Sometimes entrepreneurs only realise they were blinded by passion when they go looking for funding and are shown, with numbers, that their business plan isn’t viable.
If I had to give you one piece of advice, it would be this:
Always listen to what your family has to say. It doesn’t matter whether your father is an economist or a farmer: you’ll always find the most valuable advice in them, because they are probably the only people who gain nothing from advising you and do it purely to protect you. That doesn’t mean they’re always right, but we should always take them into account.
I’ll use myself as an example of what happens when you get carried away by passion. In my case it was with Nueva Rumasa (the Spanish business group run by the Ruiz-Mateos family), as many of you will know. I’ve always had enormous respect for Ruiz-Mateos as an entrepreneur, and that personal admiration led me to invest in the famous promissory notes, turning a deaf ear to the comments that were going around. In my case it worked out fine, because I’m one of the lucky ones who sold their holdings before the company collapsed. I was lucky: the coin came up heads, but it could just as easily have come up tails.
So by all means let your passion guide you, but never forget that you have a brain as well as a heart.
Further reading
- You can be a successful businessperson
- The secret of business success
- The entrepreneur’s 15 commandments
Featured image: N i c o l a, CC BY 2.0, via Flickr.
