When you get deep into the concept of how do you succeed in business, you enter a murky world. However, if you persist in answering the question the answer is very clear. You must love what you do.
To get to this point we must first ask what is success? You must answer this question solidly. How do you know when you've answered this solidly? When you can ask the follow up question of, "then what?" and there is nothing left. When the process equates to success then you have succeeded.
For example I've had the following discussion with a friend about a new business idea.
I asked him what his end goal is. He responded with "To make a lot of money."
To which I responded, "Then what?"
And he said "Then I can do whatever I want."
"Of course!" I clarified, "Like what?"
He continued "I would buy a big ranch and not have any money problems."
I continued, "Then what?"
He was stuck. He didn't really know what he wanted.
Being in business is very hard whether you succeed or fail. If you are not doing well, it's hard. If you are doing well it's hard because you have many obligations. You might as well enjoy what you do.
Or consider another friend of mine. He is a very "successful" attorney who is working very hard--nearly 80 hours a week. I asked him why he was doing it. He said because he wanted to provide a better life for his family.
The irony here is interesting. He is working hard for his family but as a result he spends no time with them.
How many people do you see in psychotherapists complaining that their parents didn't work hard enough? What we complain about is that our parents didn't love us, or love us in the right way. We complain about them not being there.
Let's step back again and suppose that our actual goal is to make money, and to make as much of it as we can. How do we do that? There are infinite possibilities, so money as an end goal is a fruitless one because it does not provide direction.
Let's suppose that we do actually have a great plan to make lots of money. There is a problem with this too, because this has to be implemented. While Mark Zuckerberg may have made Facebook successful in like two days, he is the exception not the norm. Success takes time and energy...lots of it.
What is going to give you the energy to succeed? What is going to get you through difficult challenges of running a business? Motivation. In the long haul, you're only going to pursue it if you really enjoy it. It's about the process not the result. Furthermore, your most creative energy is going to come from the love of what you do, not the effort.
When you connect with your deepest desires and do what you love, you connect with humanity itself. Not only do you connect with yourself, you connect with others. This makes you more likely to succeed. When you do what you like you are most likely to be both happy and successful.
This approach to life of focusing on enjoying the moment and the process is very buddhist. It's very modern western psychology DBT. It's also very Montessori.
Montessori education, which I am a big fan of, is based upon supporting an individuals self-directed behavior. That is, it encourages individuals to do what they love and by so doing they will learn more and be happier at the same time. Rather than teaching a child math for math's sake, we see the child interested in cars and who wants to know how they work. Math then becomes a tool for the child to better understand that which he loves. If you look at your own skills you will notice that many have evolved out of love. You learned because you enjoyed the benefits of that knowledge.
Does this work? 2 of the Fortune 10's most successful business people of 2012 are Montessori students. This includes both Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Larry Page of Google. These are both companies that people generally seem to admire and are successful by almost all standards.
Even for non-Montessori leaders doing what they love is key. This is what Starbucks Howard Schultz and Virgin's Richard Branson both site passion as sources for radically different forms of success. Jim Collins who wrote "From Good to Great" described loving what you do as a key motivator for success.
Doing what you love does not mean that you are going to make a billion dollars. Doing what you love means you are most likely to be happy and most likely to improve your chances of success. Just like walking regularly has been shown to increase your life span by about 20 years it does not mean you will live long. It just means increase your chances. And if you're happy, who cares anyway.
At the end of the day the most valuable thing is happiness, so why not do what you love.
