I had the good fortune to work with hardworking and passionate people all my career, but I’ll say this, in a startup, passion is not an optional ingredient. It is in fact, essential to survival.
At IBM, I probably put in just as many late nights and weekends, but somewhere deep down I knew that if I didn’t work one weekend, or went home at 5:00 PM one day, the stock’s wasn’t going to tank. However a startup requires hard work at a level of consistency that is impossible to sustain without passion. Startups are run during the week, but built over weekends. Every weekend not spent building, shows up in lost opportunity the very following week. Such sustained efforts are impossible without passion.
Passion gives you hope, makes work it's own reward, and provides the needed focus. On the other hand, hard work without passion is an affront to intelligence, and will die a quick death. This is especially true when building a company for so many things will grind you down, beat you up, that hard work by itself wont have a chance. A startup will dispense with cold efficiency any effort that is abundant in hard work but lacking in passion. There will be so many pitfalls, setbacks, and missteps that you will lose the will to work hard. As I look back at the almost two years with CallFire, and all the ups and downs, I realize what’s kept me going (and still is) is passion--a passion for technology, for problem solving, and for challenges.
Passion, or loving-what-you-do, is hard to describe and probably the reason why this post might make little sense. Passion is emotional, and emotions are hard to put into words, especially so in the confines of a blog.
This post also concludes the first installment of my startup lessons: ignorance, arrogance, and passion. As I said when I first started on this series, these are just my lessons, and a description of my still on-going journey. They are by no means a prescription. Every journey is unique, I'm just sharing mine.
Quote of the Day
I know the price of success: dedication, hard work, and an unremitting devotion to the things you want to see happen.
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