Nobody Buys Your Passion On Its Own

“Find your passion and you will be successful.”

Riiiight. If I had a dollar for every time I heard that advice, I’d be writing this from my patio while my cabana boy feeds me bonbons after he finishes cleaning the pool.

The intention is clear – don’t build a business on something you hate doing. I hate laundry. I’m not about to throw hundreds of hours into creating a laundry service.

But the advice is missing an important piece. Find your passion, marry it with something people actually want, and then they will come. The passion may not be the service, it could be the people you serve. Whichever it is, start there and build around that.

I met with a client today who had followed her passions, one after the other, and ended up at a dead end. She was beginning to dislike her passion because of the pressure to make it a business. She’d also unearthed another thing she was good at but wasn’t sure if it could be an offer. When we dug deeper into both, we realized that trying to build a business around either would not make her happy.

As I listened, I heard something else that she mentioned as a side bar. I watched her face light up and she got this trip-over-your-words excitement as she talked about these people that had found her, and how much she loved their niche. It wasn’t just interesting to her, it was deep and guttural adoration.

OK, so that was the nugget we needed to build around – a specific type of customer. The actual services she provided seemed to be of less importance than ensuring she was serving them.

So we dug in to her bag of tricks and looked at all the things she could do for them. Then we looked at the struggles they had. As it turned out, she was the perfect personality and skill set to bridge the very creative and spiritual nature of these clients with the very pragmatic things they needed in order to succeed. We sliced and diced until we had a nicely aligned business model that she could get excited about.

Your passion will differentiate you, but you still need to offer something people want. Find that intersection and you’re off to the races.

Tell me in the comments…

What is your passion? Have you found a way to connect it with something people will buy?