Are You Following Your Passion Part 2

Last week’s post began addressing the topic of passion and being able to cultivate that passion into a successful business. This week, I have three more tips for you on how entrepreneurs succeed in making their passions a reality.

1. Maintain the passion – Once you get into the daily aspects required for running a successful business, you will find that your time for recreational fun will dwindle, leaving you little room to encourage that corner of creativity in your brain. The best way to avoid this burn out is to stay involved with the activities that ignite the most passion for you. The founders of Warrior Dash keep their passion alive by making a point to continue to run in various races throughout the year. This helps them remember why they love to compete, and forces them to continually delegate tasks to their employees since they are on the field.

2. Make fun a priority – “There’s a palpable difference between companies that have a culture led by a truly passionate entrepreneur and those that use passion and fun as sales and recruiting gimmicks,” he says. “In the authentically passionate companies, everything grows from that passion, including the people, policies, branding and community relations. That obsessive focus on whatever it is that gets you out of bed can’t be faked, but it takes work to create the circumstances under which it can thrive. Maintaining primacy of mission and having the strength to stay on course and avoid distractions is critical”, says Torrens of Syracuse University. [source]

Creating a positive culture for your employees can mean providing amazing benefits, having alternative workplace solutions, providing free lunches and having new business idea contests with prizes.

3. Expand your passion – Just because your business starts with one goal or purpose doesn’t mean that you always have to stick hard and fast to that one purpose. As an entrepreneur, it’s important to remain flexible and understand that change is a good thing and there are various roads to success.

Take Reynolds and Kunkel for example. They started Red Frog Events based on their love of running and competition. But they have realized that their love isn’t just limited to competitive runs – they want to produce a variety of recreational activities. Starting this year, they plan on hosting their own music festival which they hope will compete with some of the world’s largest in the industry. “Every decision we make isn’t for this week or next week or next year, but for 20 years down the road,” Kunkel says. “Building a sustainable company requires ongoing reinvention and new development.” [source]

Being able to stretch into new opportunities, and allowing your business to expand is one of the greatest ways to grow into success. What do you think of this list, and the one from last week? Do you have anything you want to add? We’d love to hear your feedback!

tags: Articles,alternative workplace solutions,entrepreneur,passion,warrior dash