Posts tagged entrepreneurship

During my last trip to Europe, I’ve read a few books - some were very interesting while others were boring to death. Don’t worry, I won’t tell you about the latter.

Among the great ones was the Losing My Virginity: The Autobiography of Sir Richard Branson. I bought the hard copy version at the airport thinking that it will be a good air traveling book, meaning, funny and with no real reason to activate any gray cells.

Boy, was I wrong.

The book is indeed very funny and smart, but it also brings invaluable insights as of how to do business out of passion and against all of the regular, conservative business assumptions. It’s a book that shows that you can and should bring your own character into your business, and that a hunch is sometimes worth much more than complicated numbers analysis. It also shows you that sometimes you will be wrong and that it is not only ok, but that you can seriously grow out of these mistakes. I won’t be a spoiler so I’ll just write that if you are an entrepreneur, either in practice or at heart, and you seek real-life experience inspiration, which is written from the heart, you must grab a copy of this book now.

In a recent post, Guy Kawasaki did his famous 10 questions, this time with no other than Donald Trump.
Now, one can argue about Trump’s business style (and hair…) but one thing that he said summarizes the core of success, and it shows that he lives up to it (quote from the interview):

Question: TV is TV, real life is real life: What’s the most important real-life advice you can give to an entrepreneur?

Answer: You have to love what you do.
Without passion, great success is hard to come by. An entrepreneur will have tough times if he or she isn’t passionate about what they’re doing. People who love what they’re doing don’t give up. It’s never even a consideration. It’s a pretty simple formula.

When I meet with entrepreneurs, this is one aspect that I’m trying to figure out. How much passion they have for their product? Is it something that is part of their life? 

Passion alone will not get you to success, but lacking it can surely prevent you from it.

I would add that on top of loving what you do, you must be able to pass on your passion into your product, and from there to the users.
The web is full of great examples for that: Pandora is all about music-passion, Flickr is picture sharing passion, and digg is info-passion.

What’s your (product) passion?