All too often, I have witnessed sales trainers and business coaches touting their personal passion for a specific product or service they sell, as if it’s some kind of magic bullet for their success. This line of thinking suggests that if you are passionate about beer, you should run to a local brewery and plead your case for being a prime sales rep for their company.
Passion for a product is definitely a prerequisite for representing a product in the marketplace, and is essential for tackling Herculean endeavors like writing a screenplay, running for office, or going back to school to earn a degree.
Passion alone, however, can’t be counted on for keeping you motivated in the long-run—especially when you get bogged down with what seems like a slew of never-ending challenges.
Grit
I’ve had my fair share of shitty work situations, requiring me to put my head down and work my ass off. (I used to sell insurance for a living, and I’ve also had to bootstrap a few of my first companies to get them up and running.) Having grit means maintaining a level of dogged dedication to one’s goals despite hardships. However, my business partner, Will Turner, provides an even better example because he’s endeavoring to do something that requires super human levels of grit. Every 6 days, he wakes himself up out of a pre-dawn slumber and jumps into a lake or pool for a 2.4 mile swim. Then he hops on a bike and hammers out 112 miles. Finally, he runs a grueling 26.2 marathon. Yes, a full Ironman. At the age of 60, he’s been engaged in this level of insanity since January 6 and will continue to do so until December 31 when he will have reached his goal of completing no less than 60 Ironmans in total. His tenacity has carried him far enough to blow past the world record when he recently completed Ironman #45 on Thursday October 4th.
Grit, (or Embracing the Suck as Will refers to it) comes into play when one is faced with a critical decision: to muster the willpower to continue, or to quit. In the case of an Ironman race, it’s the moment your body is overwhelmed with pain, and your brain is pleading with you to stop the madness. Yet, despite the unrelenting physical and mental anguish, you choose to push forward. Furthermore, once you’ve hit this breaking point, you must make the same decision with each additional step. This is extraordinarily stressful to the psyche because there is no immediate reward for your commitment. On the contrary—the misery factor of your situation is guaranteed to increase as you move toward the achievement of your goal. That is to say, the suffering will only cease the moment this lofty endeavor is finally completed.
Many of us assume we’ve got grit on reserve and can tap into whenever life requires us to be a bad-ass, imagining it will be right there—to bolster us at our low points, and supply us with the necessary fortitude to resist throwing in the towel. We imagine ourselves having access to a reservoir of Tony Robbins-flavored motivation that will generate the necessary momentum for carrying us over our personal finish lines.
It rarely works that way. Grit only takes you so far because, like passion, it requires you to constantly draw from your personal stores of willpower, focus, resilience, and enthusiasm. Even for Will Turner, passion and grit are finite in nature, thus it can only carry us but so far in achieving our goals.
Meaningful Impact
When personal stores of emotional resources are exhausted due to a seemingly insurmountable wall of challenges, something more deep-reaching is required to keep us soldiering on, and this often shows up in the form of seeing and hearing how our work, product or service, impacts our clients in a meaningful way. In order to facilitate the full power of this phenomenon, one must witness the impact of one’s work in the people you’ve already served.
Recently, my wife, Amanda, experienced a slew of last minute client cancellations, and this affected her negatively. She’d been winding up to open a second medical exercise practice, and when her business sagged, she began doubting the whole endeavor, questioning the viability of going into a mountain of debt, adding hours to her already exhausting day for an indefinite period of time. A dip in revenue was the last thing in the world she needed right now. Around this same time, we were gifted tickets to attend a ballet in Richmond. During one of the opening acts, I noticed Amanda transfixed on one particular ballerina. It seemed as if she were holding her breath in between each of the dancer’s foot falls, spins, and leaps. I even saw tears welling up in Amanda’s eyes, ever so slightly, and then an inexplicable look of deep satisfaction came over her face.
During intermission, I asked why she was so moved by the one dancer. “It’s someone I’ve been working with for a while. She’s continuously injured herself, and has been so fearful of losing her status as a prima ballerina. Our work together has returned her body back to her. You have no idea how much that means to me. It gives me such a sense of purpose.”
It was just what she needed to re-connect with her motivation for opening a new facility in the following weeks.
I work with dozens of folks every year. Testimonials are great, but to be an eyewitness to the benefits of your efforts—to see how your clients are being served, and are leading better and fuller lives for your having met them and worked with them—is profoundly gratifying. A tangible illustration of the impact you have on others transforms your endeavor from a lofty goal riddled with never-ending challenges to that of a noble cause that must be championed by you.
Passion is important, grit is necessary, and once you see your meaningful impact in action, you will always be blessed with a well spring of motivation. Its power flows from all whose lives you’ve touched.
