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Passion = Profits

Submitted by Freaking Heck on 09/27/2014 11:29 -0400

By: Chris Tell at http://capitalistexploits.at/

Most of the really big returns made by investors and entrepreneurs come from companies which seem to have one unmistakable element.

We look at a mountain of deals and consequently the filtering process is very rapid. In fact over 90% of the deals that hit our respective desks are pre-filtered deals coming from our colleagues and internal networks. We look for some specifics in a deal; I've spoken repeatedly before about management, ideas, and execution. What I've not spoken about before, and for this I realise I should be chastised, beaten, ridiculed, and forced to watch an episode of the Kardashians, is PASSION.

Passion is the single fastest way to spur yourself to massive success. This is what makes it is possible to get up early, stay up late, remain inspired and engaged and to forgo other pleasures. It's what keeps you going when from the outside looking in, the decision appears foolish.

Founders who see a problem and then build a business to solve that problem are very different from founders who simply say to themselves, "Hey, I want to be an entrepreneur so I don't have to work for someone else." The former are likely entering an industry which they may know something about. The latter may do OK, they may even do well, but they will rarely build a legacy, a titan, a formidable company which changes the way things are done or the way people act.

In other words, typically the "Unicorns" come from passion. What are unicorns? They are the investments that run thousands or tens of thousands of percent... Companies like Uber, Facebook, LinkedIn, The Body Shop... They are investments where a $10,000 stake changes your life, and your kids, kids lives...

Most every entrepreneur finds out that creating something is hard. You'll work harder and longer than you've ever worked in your life.

Years ago when still in the corporate world, working for the man, I used to hate "mission statements". They were, or seemed like a complete bunch of baloney trumpeted by empty suits. I think for the most part that's still true in many large corporate organizations.

In a start-up or small company however that "vision", that "mission statement" can be much more powerful. The mission, not the mere statement of it, is what makes a company great. It may not be written on a wall or even on any corporate documents, websites or the like but it is known by the company and those running it.

This may all sound cliché but bear with me. Man's search for meaning and purpose is answered by a "mission". Passion is the accelerator to that mission.

Meaning is an incredibly powerful thing. Without it we die. Literally. Many people die at age 25 and simply inhabit their bodies until they're 80 or more at which point they slide into a box. It's no way to live. Persistence is the stepchild of passion. It requires persistence to become great at anything. Persistence in anything will make you good but persistence together with passion can make you great.

It's easy to see the start-ups where the founders are really passionate about what they're doing. The energy created inspires those around them to help them.

Passion

Have you ever been in a room where you felt inspired about someone or some idea and were willing to help?

This is it. This is where a “mission” is important. This is where passion is important. A mission is also important because it is the what keeps those involved, involved when they could easily be doing something else which will likely pay them more, cause less headaches and be more "comfortable".

Passion however is not enough. The idea needs to be sound, the team needs to be capable and the execution needs to be great. Put all of these factors together and you have a crack at a Unicorn.

Like him or loathe him Steve Jobs clearly had massive passion. His success is legendary. He was put up for adoption at an early age, dropped out of college after 6 months (something I recommended in these pages a few times), slept on friends floors, returned Coke bottles to collect the 5 cent deposits to buy food, then went on to start Apple Computers and Pixar Animation Studios.

"Find your true passion and do what you love to do," said Steve Jobs. "Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did.”

Another rouge... Tiger Woods success in golf is unparalleled. He calls his love for the game and "obsession, an addiction". Sounds like the words of passion to me.

In every successful business person, athlete or generally happy person you will find passion. What's your passion?

- Chris

“If you love what you do, there are no difficult tasks, only interesting ones.” - Adim Kotelnikov

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Sat, 09/27/2014 - 17:10 | 5263287 xizang777

Where certain groups and even entire nationalities of people love, even worship money and use people, there are others, such as Christians, who love people and only use money.

Looking back, I've been the most successful financially when doing the things I was most passionate about and loved doing the most. You're right:

Passion = Success = Profits.

Sat, 09/27/2014 - 16:32 | 5263227 trader1

jesus had a lot of passion

and it wasn't about capital accumulation

or was it?

Sat, 09/27/2014 - 17:15 | 5263299 Solarman

Good one, and he inherited the whole world.

Sun, 09/28/2014 - 04:40 | 5264289 trader1

or just a reincarnation of an old, universal mythology...

“When I first put pen to paper to write The Golden Bough I had no conception of the magnitude of the voyage on which I was embarking; I thought only to explain a single rule of an ancient Italian priesthood”, Frazer wrote. The seed from which 12 volumes grew was a single line of Virgil, and the commentary on it by Servius. At Lake Nemi in Italy, a priest-king waited in a sacred oak grove. A freed slave would eventually come there as well, take a bough from the tree, kill the old priest-king and become the new priest-king. Frazer ransacked world culture finding parallels – the Norse god Baldur, the Egyptian god Osiris, the Greek myth of Attis – and posited an idea of early fertility cults where the dying god-king replenished the earth to bring about spring after winter. The King is dead, long live the King. Frazer brought in everything from Fijian rat-gods to Vietnamese legends about snakes, to analyses of the scapegoat in various cultures and – although he hinted at it at first, then made it explicit, then purged it from the popular version – New Testament stories. Jesus, like Attis, died staked to wood; like Osiris he was resurrected and then became the judge of the “quick and the dead”. The “Lamb of God” and the sacrificial lambs of countless European mythologies were subtly placed next to each other, like a stony-silent poker-player laying down a royal flush. All myths were one myth, modulated by circumstance. In all this, he never failed to remember his Scottish roots: who else would write “if the prototype of Demeter is the Corn-Mother of Germany, the prototype of Persephone is the Harvest-Maiden which, autumn after autumn, is still made from the last sheaf in the braes of Balquhidder”?

Frazer also set out an evolutionary theory of belief. Humanity first had magic, then religion, then science, all seeking to explain the same thing: the world. Darwin may have rocked beliefs with evolutionary theory, but Frazer did something more radical: he suggested that beliefs themselves have an evolutionary history. It was shocking then that religion was just a “stepping-stone” towards truth. What is more shocking now is how clearly Frazer – ever the scholar – refused to endorse that position. At the end of The Golden Bough he imagined that even science might have to yield, and be revealed as another noble attempt at understanding the incomprehensible.

The effect of the publication was double. On one hand there was outrage, on the other, a strange sense of confirmation. As his biographer says: “Frazer’s importance to those seeking a diagnosis for the malaise of the West amounted to little more than a statement of the obvious. The war has exposed the savagery that lay beneath the veneer of civilization, and the hollowness of every belief and institution that had been assumed to rein in humanity’s baser urges. In his analysis of religion… as the institutional incarnation of a mistaken and outworn mode of understanding the world, Frazer was thoroughly in tune.”

But that is not the whole story. There is a very odd little book, called Men Of Turmoil: Biographies By Leading Authorities Of The Dominating Personalities Of Our Day, published in 1935. After learning about Stalin, Roosevelt, Hitler, Gandhi, Picasso, Einstein, Trotsky, George Bernard Shaw and Lawrence of Arabia, the reader comes to Sir James Frazer. The author of that piece, Theodore Besterman, was eloquent: “It is undoubtedly true that The Golden Bough … has made an impression chiefly on the general educated public. It was The Golden Bough … that first opened their eyes to the unity of mankind; showed them something of the brotherhood of humanity, united by its folly and superstition as well as by its endurance and heroic qualities; gave them a glimpse of the lowly birth of even their loftiest religions; and instilled in them something of his own impartial tolerance and comprehensive sympathy.”

Frazer was, as his biographer says, the “last representative of… a tradition that dates back to the Scottish Enlightenment”. With a watercolour life and an oil-painting intellect, now might be the time to resurrect Frazer as an architect of possible modernity.

http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/books/sir-james-george-frazer-an-autho...

Comments

Sat, 09/27/2014 - 14:12 | 5262910 cheech_wizard

>They are investments where a $10,000 stake changes your life, and your kids, kids lives...

Seems a bit on the low side...

First Round Capital was the first institutional investor in Uber. It committed about half-a-million dollars; other investors included Napster co-founder Shawn Fanning and Mitch Kapor.
In the summer of 2004, Peter Thiel made a $500,000 angel investment in the social network Facebook for 10.2% of the company and joined Facebook's board. This was the first outside investment in Facebook.

LinkedIn is a horrible example to use, considering Reid Garrett Hoffman was already a VP at Paypal.

The very first The Body Shop store opens on 26th March 1976 in Brighton, on the south coast of England. A franchise today cost $775,000. Didn't find much information on how much it took the company to get off the ground.

Next time provide us with real world examples of how $10,000 built a billion dollar company. Otherwise don't use bad examples, it really takes away your credibility as an author and tells me your research was not thorough.

A far better article or articles would be to tell everyone how to attract an angel investor that would be willing to put down the kind of money it really takes to get a company off the ground.

Sat, 09/27/2014 - 13:33 | 5262830 disabledvet