Don't Follow Your Passion!
You’ve probably heard the phrase “follow your passion and you won’t have to work a day in your life”. If you’re thinking about founding or getting aboard a startup, we think that blithely following this conventional wisdom is not likely to lead to success, but rather, unhappiness.
On the surface, the notion of aligning your work to your interests seems to make sense, but there are 2 problems:
First, as an entrepreneur, you’ll have to cover a lot of ground beyond your core idea. You’ll need to learn about, and spend time, on sales, marketing, finance, taxation, insurance, labor law, planning, management, quality control, etc. So while you might be excited about the product or service you want to develop, you may be frustrated by the lack of time you actually get to spend working in it.
Second, You could spend many years trying to find your passion, never getting around to starting start and growing your business. Many businesses start from a discovered need, a lucky break, an area you dabbled in, or an early job or project. If you’ve identified an unserved market need, we say “run with it”; you can cultivate your passion as you go.
Your passion is only one factor in starting a successful enterprise, alongside identifying a market niche and coping with the breadth of responsibilities every entrepreneur faces. “Follow your passion ONLY” is a recipe for failure and misery. Aligning your passion with available opportunities, and developing the resilience and discipline needed to deal with expected and unexpected challenges is a much better strategy.
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