We have said it over and over again: to be happy and to succeed, you have to find your passion. We have even talked about how to turn your passion into a business, but… what if this advice weren’t entirely right? Just this afternoon I was talking to a businessman who has owned all kinds of companies over his lifetime, and who thinks that following your passion in business means taking the long way round and twisting or misreading a piece of advice.
“Thirty years ago I could choose between being taken on as a permanent employee at Telefónica [Spain’s national telephone company] or following my passion,” this businessman told me. “My passion was being a businessman. That was my dream, to be a great businessman. As long as I’m doing business and making money, I don’t care whether I have to sell tracksuit bottoms or condoms (as long as it’s legal). I study the market and I sell the product or provide the service that’s in demand. That’s my passion: running a company, creating jobs and, after paying wages and suppliers, making a profit.”
This businessman, who owns a major transport company among others, joked that his passion is not mechanics, or trucks, let alone parcel deliveries, but he provides a service, creates hundreds of jobs and makes money from it, so he is living the dream he had when he was young. His dream was to be a great businessman, and right now his new passion is growing his company and diversifying into new sectors where there is demand.
Depending on your passion, it may be hard to make money from it.
When we published the article “how to work out what to do for a living“, we said in the first point that you should do something you are passionate about, that you are good at and that people will pay you for. But of course, as our colleague Victoria Bernal says:
“Supposing your passion is fashion, working as a sales assistant in the fashion department of El Corte Inglés [Spain’s biggest department store chain] is not the same as opening your own clothing company. It’s not even close. But there’s also the drawback that fashion may be your passion, yet you might hate everything that comes with setting up your own company.”
Victoria B. is clear that the question is not how to turn your passion into a business, but rather whether your passion really is business.
What they are telling us, and it’s a message I agree with completely, is that there are two kinds of work you can do in life:
1. Working as an employee, where…
- You can work as an employee for a company doing a job you don’t like.
- You can work for a company doing something you like, which is one way of working in your passion.
2. Working for yourself (being a businessperson), where…
- Being a businessperson means running a company, and that has to be your passion in itself if you are in business. If you don’t like business…
In short: when you are thinking about what product to sell, be guided more by the demand for the product and by what you know about it than by your passion.
That said, just as we shouldn’t twist the idea of following your passion, I wouldn’t want this article to be twisted now either, because it is obvious that great businesses have grown out of their founders’ great passions.
As a general rule, though, the most profitable businesses come from solving an existing problem or a gap in a market, regardless of whether the product we use to fill that gap has anything to do with our passion.
Further reading
- The secret price of starting your own business
- She believed so firmly in her business idea that she risked her whole family’s assets
- 10 brilliant business lessons from Ben Horowitz
Featured image: Guy Scott, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
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