If passion drives success, what drives passion?

Successful individuals often talk about passion as the secret formula for success. Passion unfortunately is a feeling and so cannot be easily fed as an input to the inner workings of the mind. It is very difficult for somebody to wake up one-day and become passionate about what he/she has been doing years at work. So what it takes to be a passionate person? A few would argue that our purpose in life will define our commitment and thus make us a passionate person. Again the purpose is a difficult composition for the mind as it is the by-product mixture of many small and simple ingredients. So to take the question even deeper, what is that one little seed which can change an individual to a passionate person?

“Constant Search” is the key! It unlocks the passion in us and finds the path to our success. Most of us start with big aspirations in life and ultimately settle for much lesser. The reason is somewhere down the line, we forget our dreams, stop asking questions to ourselves and start settling for things that come naturally to us. We force ourselves to think that happiness is simply about not pushing ourselves and hence stop doing things to achieve the goals we set out to. Life has this unique way of answering to our questions only when we sustain the questions longer than we think we should. When we set out an objective and strongly believe in it, our mind automatically finds patterns to whatever we see and throw the answers we seek. It is similar to a picture puzzle where we arrange the smaller pictures to get to the exact image. The only difference between the picture puzzle and the real life is that in real life we do not have the actual image beforehand and hence setting an objective in life and continuously searching for answers is the only way to lead a passionate life.

Let us now take a detour and find one such pattern from a business angle.  Almost all companies have a vision statement, a carefully prepared line, which reflects the aspirations of the company and more importantly the dream of the owners/founders. It is like reaching the Everest tip for a mountaineer. To take the example of one such successful company – Google – Vision – “to deliver relevant results across all data sources – the Internet, a user’s local computer, and the corporate network” The company which started as a small search engine is now one of the most sought after companies in the world. If we take a closer look, even the products such as Gmail, Android to the recent Glass project, are all in-line with the vision to make the results relevant and customizable for the user. “The perfect search engine would understand exactly what you mean and give back exactly what you want” – Larry Page. The management and the employees continuously search for ways in making their search engine work better. This search for excellence has turned into passion to make innovative products and that drives the engine of Google as envisioned by its founders. Search has become the innovation fuel for not just Google, but to many successful companies and individuals around the world.

Finally, keep searching for your dreams. Together we shall search to make a passionate good community around us.