Why you Should Follow Your Passion
Why you should build your business around your passion.
Should I follow my passion to start a business? That is the question from one of the visitors to this website. If he had sent the question as a comment, I would have approved it and responded on the website so that other people can read.
Having sent it as a mail, I Felt I have the responsibility to reply him via this article. While I may not be able to reply all the mails I receive individually, what I do is to look for common questions and try as much as possible to publish an article that answers the question. This particular question of whether one needs to follow his passion when starting a business actually caught my attention. Therefore, I will like to give my own opinion below.
Before answering the question, I will like to ask this question first: Why do you want to start a business? People start a business for different reasons. Some of the reasons people start a business are:
- To make money
- To leave legacy for children
- To enjoy freedom
- To live a fulfilled life
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The list can go on and on. But I like to focus on the first point. If your main objective for starting a business is to make money, I will say you may not need to follow your passion. You can decide to do things that are not comfortable for you as a person to make money. Please, I am only talking about legitimate ventures. After all, following your passion is not a guaranty that you will make money. There are situations where your passion may not be marketable. If there is no enough market for what you have passion for, there will be no justification for starting a business that focuses on the passion. That is when the sole objective for starting the business is to make money. Personally, I will advise anybody considering starting a business to follow his passion for the following reasons:
Fulfilment: I don’t know what success may mean to you. One thing I know is that money does not bring fulfilment. If it does, you will not hear about millionaires committing suicide. Amassing wealth without sense of fulfilment will lead to more frustration. It is not worth it to labour and labour doing what you don’t enjoy, all in the name of money. Eventually when the money comes, you will still realise there is a vacuum. It will be like the Preacher who said that vanity upon vanity, all is vanity. If you pursue the business you are passionate about, there is greater probability that such business will give you fulfilment.
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Productivity: I wonder how one can be very productive doing what he does not have passion for. You may be forcing yourself to do the work; the work will not be as natural to you as someone doing what he likes. I have shared my experience about when I was still working as an employee. I realised that my productivity level was dwindling gradually. Naturally, I am not lazy. But it doesn’t matter how I tried to force myself doing the job, I was not making head way as I expected. It got to the point that I realised that I was not helping myself by holding on to the job. That was how I decided to quit so that I could follow my passion. Though it was very challenging, the truth is that I enjoy what I do now.
Boredom: Have you ever get bored before? How did you feel then? Can you afford to continue living such a bored life? If you choose to start a business you are not passionate about, you may be signing up to a life full of boredom unknowingly. Of course, you may not know this initially but a time will come that the business will become so boring to you that you will wish you did not start it at all.
Obstacles: The path to entrepreneurship is full of obstacles. You will experience bumps such as rejections, failures, disappointments etc. There will be a lot of ups and downs. When the chips are down, it takes passion for one to be able to summon courage and continue with the business. If you do the business you don’t have passion for, you can easily give up in moments like this.
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In conclusion, I still encourage budding entrepreneurs to start a business that they have passion for. It may seem that there is no enough market for it. But if you are truly passionate about the business idea, you will be creative. You can easily find a way of making the business profitable. It may requires that you bring in more features to the ideas in order to widen the market. Money is not enough motivation to start a business, you need passion When other things fail, it is the passion you have for the business that will keep you going.