The challenges never end. As an entrepreneur you fight them every day. In order to keep your business afloat, you must be engaged, effective, and intentional. Over and over again, you hear how important it is to be passionate about your business in order to succeed. But how do you develop the right kind of passion for your business if you are overworked and exhausted?
Take a minute to think over the various things that you have passion for. Is there any common link between them? Most people tend to be passionate about those things that they are the best at. There is an innate value in having the skill to do something well. Because you like being successful, you may enjoy doing certain things that you can do well more than something that you are likely to fail at.
But in business, you are always going to encounter certain things that you haven’t done before. Being an entrepreneur comes with unique challenges and it can be hard to be perfectly prepared for them before they happen. Whether you are working on product development, how to effectively sell them, how to convince investors to invest in your business, or another aspect of running your company, you will probably face some things that you’ve never done before.
The key to staying successful and passionate through these obstacles is to recognize when you have done something well, no matter how small that thing may be, Then, celebrate it. When you take the time to acknowledge that you’ve learned a new skill, you start to build passion for your accomplishments. By focusing on smaller steps, you gain the passion to help you through the larger obstacles that you face.
There is a difference, however, between celebrating small successes and setting the bar for success too low. As an entrepreneur, you always want to make big goals. How do you reconcile these two ideas? Set big goals, but then break them down into smaller tasks that you can reasonably accomplish and celebrate along the way. By doing so, you won’t get stuck without a plan and you will know that the small things that you do are helping to get to to a major accomplishment.
Of course, it is possible to own a company, even a successful one, that you aren’t passionate about. People go to work everyday to fill jobs that they don’t have passion for. They may be able to advance through the company, even without passion. It is absolutely possible to succeed in business without passion, but is that really the way that you want to work? Would you rather survive in business or thrive in business? By structuring your business so that you can continue to be passionate about it, you’ll find that it often takes less energy to do tasks that you don’t enjoy as much, like dealing with customer complaints, because you feel good about the business that you do as a whole.
Having passion is a great way to get through the obstacles you encounter as an entrepreneur. When you are passionate about your business, you gain energy to accomplish great things.
You may agree with all of this, but how do you become more passionate about your business if you aren’t currently passionate? There are several small things that you can do to redirect your thoughts and your business practices to help you develop passion. The first thing is to take the time to recognize the things that you have already accomplished as an entrepreneur. Business is hard and not everyone is able to start or run a business. Don’t waste time playing the comparison game, thinking about how other people are further along in their business than you are. Instead, think about what they have done well and how you can learn from them.
There may come a time when you realize that you are no longer passionate about your business and can’t bring back the passion that you once had. If so, it may be the time to think about exiting your business. The life of an entrepreneur isn’t for everyone and isn’t for every season of life. Whatever you do, work to do it with passion.
Read more: Bored or Apathetic? How to Rekindle the Passion for Your Business