Why Passion Equals Success

What kinds of people do we most envy? I'm not talking about envy in the negative, covetous sense of desiring someone else’s luxurious car or palatial home. This isn’t about yearning for material wealth. This is a more positive envy, about admiring the people who are doing what they want, whose profession is their passion.

Think of it another way. What are the qualities of your ideal manager, someone you’d be eager to work for and with?

A friend of mine, who I'll call Tim, is such a person, someone I’ve long admired. Early in his career, he aimed high. He chose his path, the business he wanted to be in, and identified the appropriate milestones he needed to hit along the way to reach his goal. It was never easy. He built his company from scratch, putting in long hours for many years, while taking a lot of risks along the way to achieve it. But he has arrived.

The business Tim owns is thriving today. Over the years, he hired and cultivated competent managers, which ultimately freed him from much of the day-to-day hassles of running the business, while giving him more free time. He has assumed a senior advisory role in his company, which allows him time to travel extensively and play lots of golf. Once, I asked him what exactly it is that he does, now that he has achieved his intended goal.

“I manage the life of Tim,” he replied.

What a perfect reply. While on its face it seems self-centered, in fact, it says in six simple words what we all crave at our core… the sense of “I’m in control of my life.”

In the end, that's what we envy most about the people we deem worthy of our respect: they are in control of their lives. How they spend their time and what they choose to do with it is not dictated every day by the ebb and flow of the business, or by the whims of the marketplace. They worked hard to lift themselves above the daily fray. They were able to do so because they were (and still are) driven by their passions to be their best and achieve their goals.

Consider a different example. Think about certain sports stars in the limelight, those whose energy and dedication to excellence are so intense that it fairly oozes from their pores. The one that pops into my head is Dustin Pedroia, the Boston Red Sox’s All-Star second baseman. Pedroia is so plugged into the game, so excited to play baseball, it seems as though he would play for no salary.

Sidelined for much of the 2010 season with a broken foot, he nevertheless was in the dugout for every game, on crutches. You could sense his frustration at being sidelined, yet you could also see on his face the same eagerness and engagement that he has when he’s on the field. He was champing at the bit to be back playing the game he loves and excels at, the game for which he won Rookie of the Year and Most Valuable Player awards in consecutive years (2007 and 2008, respectively).

What goes into that attitude? What shapes that approach to our chosen field? What makes people like Dustin Pedroia and Tim excel while another guy in the same field just plugs along, not deriving a lot of joy from his workaday life? The core driver may seem ineffable. But I think it’s essentially a positive attitude toward life, an innate optimism, and a passion at one’s core that makes it unthinkable to do anything halfway.

Ian Bostridge, the English tenor, opera star, and lieder singer, perhaps said it best when explaining to an interviewer how he approaches his art: “You can't stand there singing prettily. You have to seize the audience and not let go until you leave the stage. You have to burn. If you don't, it's a waste of time. Why bother?”

Exactly.

What kind of people do you want to associate with? What kind of people do you want to work for, to have on your team? Don’t you want a guy like Dustin Pedroia, Ian Bostridge or my friend Tim? Absolutely.

You do because you connect to and want to share in their passion, enthusiasm, and optimism. And frankly, that enthusiasm, that passion for doing what they love, and their optimism are contagious. Imagine being part of a team led by a guy like one of them, aiming for perfection in everything they do.

They don’t strive for perfection for its own sake, but rather because they know they’re always capable of doing something better – with perfection as the ultimate aim. They go all out for that new level of excellence the next time they try. So even when they fall short in their own eyes, you know the result is going to be pretty damn good.

Does Pedroia bat 1.000? No. Does he ever make an error in the infield? Sure he does. Does Bostridge ever miss a note or fail to satisfy himself with a given performance? Of course. But the energy each expends in striving for his own version of perfection is, for them, a reward in itself.

It’s also a beacon for their future journeys toward perfection, a baseline on which to build their next quest for success. Fueling that effort, always, is their optimism, their enthusiasm, and their passion for doing what they love. I say, God bless them.

Modern Day Pen Pals

As a member of Miss Beyers’ sixth grade class at Proctor Terrace Elementary School in Santa Rosa, Calif., I became part of a project in which she engaged the class in a pen pal effort to connect us all with kids our age from around the world.

My pen pal was a girl from Adelaide, Australia. I’ve forgotten her name but remember the thrust of our correspondence: comparing and contrasting our schoolwork, what we were studying, how we spent our free time, what it was like living in Santa Rosa versus Adelaide, what we aspired to, and the like. We exchanged photos of one another and wrote about our pets and friends. I eagerly looked forward to each of her letters and enjoyed the correspondence, as long it lasted – about a year – tailing off when we’d exhausted our troves of cultural idiosyncrasies from our respective countries.

This recollection came back to me recently when I found myself engaged in an online discussion on the topic of the relative differences between internal and external communications. In such instances, I “converse” with strangers around the world – like modern day pen pals.

In this particular discussion, I am arguing a point with a fellow from Mumbai, India, about a topic started by a woman in Moscow, who works for a company headquartered in Norwich, UK. Others involved in the discussion include people from Ottawa and Rochester, UK. So far, I’m the only American.

And all this is done in real time. What would Miss Beyers think? It’s not like my pen pal days when letters would take up to two weeks to traverse the Pacific. These are instantaneous communications. (Does anyone even have “pen pals” anymore? I guess that’s what Facebook is for.)

How far we’ve come – in just my lifetime. It makes me wonder what’s next. What further technological advancements can we expect in communications? And, more important, what will be their impact on our ability to expand our knowledge, to engage other people in topics of interest to ourselves? What will be their impact on improving cross-cultural understanding?

Meanwhile, my college-age son has made lasting friendships via real-time, on-line video games with people from around the world: France, Germany, Israel, Japan, and Russia, as well as Massachusetts. No doubt he has learned far more about those people’s personalities and interests than I did in the entire year of my pen pal correspondence.

In making my point with the gentleman from Mumbai, I was able to look him up on Linked Up and learn that he is head of corporate communications with a software company there. So I was able to make my comments more relevant than they might otherwise have been.

These new social media are having profound effects on the way we do business today, both inside and outside our companies. The wiser companies are tapping into “the conversation” that is occurring out there about them. An Oct. 26, 2010 article in The Wall Street Journal told how Delta Air Lines has begun eavesdropping on Twitter conversations when the topic is Delta. 

The effort has proved fruitful and enabled the company to short-circuit a number of negative discussions, and correct gross inaccuracies about Delta. At the same time, Delta has developed greater loyalty and understanding among its customers by responding directly and promptly to their very real complaints about service.

At the annual “Best Practices in Change and Employee Engagement Summit” last month, co-sponsors Edelman Change & Employee Engagement, and Edelman Digital brought together a number of senior communications professionals in their New York City offices to discuss both the implications of social media like Twitter and Facebook on corporate communications, and their potential. In addition to the 100 guests present in New York, some 1000 people participated via webcast.

One of the 10 speakers, the former head of communications for Comcast, explained how the company successfully put the web site “ComcastMustDie.com” out of business by responding proactively to contributors’ actual complaints about shoddy service.

According to the Edelman web site, “While a number of valuable experiences and lessons came from the 10 presenters, the over-arching and recurring theme centered on the opportunities that lie in mining and translating the rich information embedded in various social media into organizational knowledge, action, innovation and development.”

I would urge you to take the time to visit the Summit web pages. In addition to a full report, it includes complete videos of each of the presentations.

Venues such as Edelman’s Summit web pages magnify the capabilities of the worldwide web, which today is limitless. I would expect ever-greater synergies and spread of advanced ideas about social media to continue in that manner as people leverage such events and web sites to share and spread new ideas and new thinking on a range of topics. 

You, too, can become part of that conversation, or any conversation, if you wish, no matter where you are: New York, Mumbai, Ottawa, Santa Rosa or Adelaide.