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.

Over the years we’ve been exposed to Six Sigma, Juran, Deming PDCA, 8D, Dale Carnegie, A3, Shainin, and more. Each technique works pretty well, and has been demonstrated many times in a wide variety of industries and circumstances. At the core they are all essentially the same!
Each approach relies on an underlying logical flow that goes like this: [a] make sure the problem is clearly defined; [b] be open to all sources of information; [c] vet the information for relevance and accuracy; [d] use the process of elimination to narrow down all possible causes to the most likely few; [e] prove which of the suspects is really the cause of the issue; [f] generate a number of potential solutions; [g] evaluate the effectiveness, feasibility and risk of the potential solutions; [h] implement the winning solution(s); and [i] take steps to make sure your solution(s) don’t unravel in the future.
The differences between the paradigms resides in supplementary steps and toolkits. For example, 8D contains the important “In

Your primary role as a manager is to ensure your team’s success. Internalize this. Make sure your team members know this. Build an environment of trust and collaboration. A direct report of mine would frequently leave me out of the loop as problems escalated, preferring instead to “work harder”. It was clear that he felt uncomfortable delivering bad news to me (his boss) when things were not going according to plan. Let me tell you the rest of the story.